Thursday, October 17, 2024

Book Review & Analysis: The Aesthetics of Degradation by Adrian Nathan West


The Aesthetics of Degradation

by Adrian Nathan West

      Back in the 1980s, a radical feminist extremist and gender separatisr named Andrea Dworkin gained notoriety as a prominent anti-pornography activist. Her writings analyzed pornography, a lot of which was literary in the form of the written word, and her interpretations were full of fallacies of composition, appeal to emotion arguments, ad hominem attacks on men as a collective whole, massive cherry picking, conspiracy theories, misattributions, and an extremist hyperbolic tone that made her difficult to take seriously as the social critic she claimed to be. She argued that male sexuality is inherently violent, that the male orgasm is a form of violence, that pornography was invented to oppress women, and that female porn performers are bigger victims than people who died in the Holocaust because, according to her, Holocaust victims didn’t have to be photographed playing with their genitals before being killed. All of these brilliant ideas can be found in her hate-filled rant Pornography: Men Possessing Women. And while that information can easily be found, if anyone can find empirical evidence that death camps for porn stars are real, than I will concede that argument to the she-demon Ms. Dworkin. Even worse, she used her phallic symbol of a bullhorn to protest horror movies and collaborated with the conservative Christian right wing of the Reagan administration calling for a ban on all pornography. But if there was an ounce of truth in anything Andrea Dworkin said, it was that some people get sexual thrills out of seeing women being tortured and humiliated.

There is a cautionary tale here. Andrea Dworkin took her views to such an extreme that she looked like a loudmouthed buffoon. Having such a prominent voice in the feminist movement possibly set the cause back by at least a decade. By turning the volume up to maximum on her anti-pornography crusade, she wasted a lot of people’s time that could have been used to address more prominent issues affecting gender politics. And by setting the impossible task of banning pornography, she almost guaranteed that the sex industry would continue to grow and flourish. The lesson to be learned for activists of all kinds is that taking the wrong approach to your issue can kill your credibility when a more modest approach can yield more results and possibly even keep your pet issues alive in public discourse.

As time has gone on, the availability of pornography has become more widespread, more mainstream, and in some cases more degrading and extreme. Adrian Nathan West addresses this phenomenon of extreme pornography in his short book The Aesthetics of Degradation. While he didn’t make the same exact mistakes that Andrea Dworkin made, he does wind up in a similar space by constructing an ineffective argument.

This extended essay starts off describing some porn the author has watched. I’ll spare you the stomach-churning details here but I will say that what he describes is gross. For some reason, West feels compelled to explain why it is disgusting and degrading as if the audience couldn’t figure that out for themselves. But in case you couldn’t, he offers a semi-Freudian interpretation of why anal sex makes him feel sick. Then he goes online and finds an interview with a female performer in which she brags about her ability to do extreme sex acts while being filmed. What was he expecting? Besides he doesn’t consider the possibility that what she said in the interview could be part of a marketing strategy. He also doesn’t consider the possibility that her interview could have been written by someone in a porn studio’s advertising department. Porn is a business after all. Is this even important? Well maybe because I feel like West missed some opportunities to further examine his subject matter and the strange space that pornography occupies in the way that it combines performance and authenticity presented through the filters of editing and marketing.

But in any case, this leads the author to ask the ever mystifying question of: why some women choose to do this. He finds his answer in the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. I’ll give West some credit here. He makes a key idea, common to both philosophers, comprehensible which isn’t easy considering the arcane style of writing they both have. West explains that chronological time is the basis for building an individual’s identity since memory is a building block we use to make us into ourselves. Chronological memory is a resource we use to navigate our way through life. In the case of female porn stars, this personal chronology has been disrupted at some point, through trauma like neglect or abuse, that compromises their ability to make effective decisions. This appears to make sense, but my objection to this claim is epistemic, He writes as if this claim is absolutely true and yet I don’t see how he can claim it as such without accessing the subjectivity of a representative sample of all female porn stars. It’s an easy over-generalization. It certainly is plausible, but without enough data I can’t accept it as anything other than speculation. I’m also wary of his concept of decision making; just because a woman doesn’t make the choice he thinks she should make, it doesn’t mean that she made a wrong choice or even an ineffective choice. West never takes the broader picture into consideration here.

A lot of the rest of the book is a mishmash of odds and ends, abruptly switching from one subject to another without any clear transitions. West alternates between descriptions of pornography that get more violent and disgusting as the essay progresses, testimony from female porn stars, philosophical musing, and commentary from the serial killer Ed Kemper who describes his feelings of lust and violence toward his victims. The Ed Kemper quotes are problematic since, not only are they non sequiturs, but it amounts to a false analogy considering West doesn’t include any quotes from male porn stars or directors who express the same sentiments. This is a dirty rhetorical trick because we are supposed to associate the feelings of a serial killer with pornographers and porn consumers without any clear connection between them. As far as I know, there haven’t been any male members of the porn community who have been serial killers and actually the number of them who have murdered people has been too small to be statistically significant. A guilt by association argument is especially bad when there is no grounds for association to begin with. As for porn consumers, articles on the Psychology Today website show only a weak correlation between pornography consumption and acts of violence. An article I found on NPR stated that violent pornography is somewhat popular with women consumers, particularly if they are suffering from PTSD. So again, I don’t feel that West has taken the full range of possibilities into consideration when writing this essay. Even worse, his style of writing is disorganized and disorienting. I can’t tell if this is meant to be some kind of deliberate postmodern derailment or if it’s just bad writing, but it doesn’t work for me.

Then the author goes from bad to worse. He goes from vilifying pornographers for using money to exploit women of lower financial status to vilifying them for exploiting stupid women. He really does classify female porn performers as literally stupid after comparing them to retarded people. He really does use the word retarded too. His argument is that retarded people need to be protected from predatory and exploitative adults and stupid people are only one step above retarded people in intelligence levels. Therefore stupid people need to be protected from those who exploit them too. Stupid people are incapable of making effective choices for themselves and therefore end up allowing pornographers to make choices for them. The solution to this problem is for intelligent people with good intentions to make choices for stupid people so they don’t get exploited. I’ll concede that some female porn stars probably are stupid, but when your defense of them involves their humiliation and degradation with terms like “retarded” and “stupid”, I think you might want to re-evaluate how you go about approaching this problem and what your true intentions really are. Spitting on the people you claim to be defending is kind of a low blow.

The remainder of the book involves the author hanging out with a Catalan performance artists who reenacts scenarios from violent pornographic films as an art project. This guy doesn’t get around to saying much and most of these passages serve no useful purpose in the essay. But what he does do is make an argument of determinism to say that female porn stars do degrading porn because they have no choice; they are only responding to stimuli in the environment and this is a symptom of capitalism. He doesn’t explain this concept beyond merely making the claim. But anyhow, I suppose that means that people producing violent porn also have no choice other than to obey capitalist stimuli and porn consumers have no choice either. I guess nobody anywhere, no matter what they do or who they are, have any choice other than to obey whatever environmental stimuli come into their empirical range and goddamnit if we just got rid of the capitalist system than that could never happen again. Yeah right.

In the end, I wondered why West bothered to write this essay. He doesn’t actually argue for or against anything. What is he trying to prove? That violent, degrading, disgusting pornography is...violent, degrading, and disgusting? Why not argue that the sun is hot or that ice is cold? He makes no demands on the reader or society either. He proposes no solution to what he describes as media created with the intent to humiliate and degrade women. He sounds to me like a guy who spent a lot of time watching this crap until it made him sick to his stomach and he wrote this as therapy, complete with some philosophical concepts and postmodernist name dropping to make it look academically legitimate. (See what Alan Sokal and Noam Chomsky say about that in their criticisms of postmodernist pseudo-intellectualism) I might actually be inclined to agree with West if I could actually pinpoint what it is he is arguing for. He presents no thesis to defend, just a collage of information all related to one subject.

As for extreme pornography, here is what I think is going on. Being the kind of business it is, it is going to attract some unsavory people. Some men want to abuse and humiliate women so they get into the pornography business. With enough money to produce films and hire lawyers, they get female performers to sign legal contracts and forms of consent, some of which are vaguely worded and don’t specifically say what the performers will do. Since the films are made as works of art produced for commercial purposes, these abusers have found a loophole in the First Amendment and their films are protected as freedom of speech.

Pornography involving the use of minors is illegal, as it should be, because the need to protect children overrides the luxuries of the First Amendment. In most cases I am opposed to censorship and pornography won’t, can’t, and shouldn’t be banned. Andrea Dworkin went on a fool’s errand when she tried to have pornography censored. Besides, most pornography is neither violent nor extreme. If you can’t see a difference between depictions of consensual vanilla sex and the things described by West, you might be a bit of an extremist yourself. But I do think more regulation is necessary. People involved in the production of pornography should be held to the same OSHA standards as people working in factories or any other occupation. If sex workers are truly workers, they have the same rights to health and safety standards as anybody else. Part of that means drawing a strict line of demarcation between “consent” and “informed consent” because the two are not the same. Porn producers need to be held legally responsible to prove that their performers know what they are getting into and they need to prove that consent is no given under coercion, intimidation, manipulation, or any other form of duress.

In the end, I might be inclined to agree that the kinds of violent pornography described by Adrian Nathan West is disgusting and is a sign that we live in a sick society. The problem with The Aesthetics of Degradation is that his writing is so poorly executed, depending on appeals to emotion, disorganized writing, and failing to make a definite point about anything, that I don’t feel he sufficiently made his case, whatever that was meant to be. It’s hard to agree with somebody when you aren’t sure as to what you are agreeing on. He makes the Andrea Dworkin mistake of over-emphasizing his case to the point where it becomes trivialized and rendered ineffective. I can’t say this book is of much use unless you just want to read about something that disgusts you. If you are that kind of masochist then there are better places to get what you want. 


 

Tuesday, October 15, 2024

Book Review & Analysis: A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews


A Feast of Snakes

by Harry Crews

      Ophiophobic readers beware. Harry Crews’ A Feast of Snakes is not for you, or at least not if you plan on sleeping anytime soon. Herpetologists probably won’t get much out of this either because there is nothing scientific going on in this novel. If you love snakes, this one probably isn’t for you either since most snakes in the book come to a bitter end. But if you’re into grit lit, transgressive fiction, or Southern Gothic, this short and dark novel might have something going for it. This book is permeated with rattlesnakes who slide into every plot line, every characters, and even into people’s stomachs in a scene where the slithery critters get deep fried and eaten for dinner.

As the novel begins, the remote town of Mystic, Georgia is gearing up for their annual rattlesnake hunt, a night of festivities at the high school followed by a day when the snakes are forced out of their underground hiding places and captured. It is an event that draws people from all over the region.

Joe Lon is the central character. He once was the star of the high school football team, but his life went nowhere after that. His girlfriend Berenice goes off to college while Joe Lon stays behind with a wife and two kids he doesn’t want. He beats her and verbally abuses her, leaving her with the kids while he runs around with his best friend, the thoroughly unlikable Willard who has replaced him as the star of the football team. The two of them drink gallons of whiskey and have a series of misadventures that later include Deeter Duffy, a lawyer from Florida who has nothing but bad intentions. Joe Lon also works in a shack that sells liquor. The night before the festival, Joe Lon visits his father who is training a pit bull for a dog fight on the eve of the rattlesnake hunt. Joe Lon’s sister lives with the father, but she is insane, refusing to leave her room and does nothing but stay in bed watching TV with the volume turned up to maximum. It is a bleak and unhappy life.

Joe Lon’s living situation is so similar to that of Harry Angstrom’s in Rabbit Run by John Updike that it is hard to imagine that Joe Lon isn’t based on Updike’s most famous character. Both were star athletes in high school who ended up in miserable jobs and living in an unhappy marriage with the unwanted responsibility of raising children. Both are looking for a means of escape and make all the wrong choices up until the end.

A major turning point comes when Berenice returns to Mystic to introduce Joe Lon to her fiance. Joe Lon’s friends agree to get his wife out of their home so he can have a tryst with Berenice. But the seduction is less than romantic; in fact it is downright gross and degrading and from there, all the events of the novel continue on a downward trajectory, getting darker and more destructive as the pages go on until the big blowout during the rattlesnake hunt.

A subplot involving the town’s sheriff, Buddy Matlow, is possibly the most interesting part of the story. Buddy is a Vietnam vet with a wooden leg and a few screws loose in his head. He imprisons a young African American girl and gives her a choice between sleeping with him or being bit by a rattlesnake he keeps in a bucket near her cell. Out of fear, she gives in to him and then he releases her from jail. Even though Buddy is a rapist, he has some strange delusion that she loves him and they are in a relationship together. Later he picks her up in his car, takes her to a place in the woods and Lottie Mae gets her revenge by killing his snake with a razor blade. Go read the book to find our what I mean. What Buddy does with his snake afterwards is one of the most hilarious episodes of gallows humor I have read in a very long time.

Overall the presence of snakes in this narrative is unique and effectively done. The rattlesnake is the high school mascot. They are playthings for the backwoods hicks in Mystic. They show up in people’s dreams. They get eaten for dinner. They serves as artistic inspiration. The snakes figure literally as elements in the plot and metaphorically as symbols of anxiety, pride, masculinity, immorality, sleaziness, and evil. This is a novel packed with unique ideas and the presence of snakes is one that really ties everything together.

The least satisfying part of the novel is with the character of Joe Lon himself. He is a wounded and miserable young man with no direction in life and no idea what to do about it. He drinks liquor compulsively and does little more than cause trouble. He isn’t entirely unsympathetic though. We learn that his mother’s death is the source of his problems and, although he is a racist, he does stand up for the African American characters when no one else will. That much makes him a somewhat well-rounded character. Where he falls short in his development is that he is so unemotional. The narrative and his actions tell us that he is not happy, but he never expresses the kind of despair we are supposed to attach to him. If Crews had delved deeper into his inner emotional turmoil, he would have been stronger as an unsympathetic protagonist with some sympathetic character traits.

A Feast of Snakes is a mean and ugly book about mean and ugly people. This is disturbing literature on a number of levels. The characters are unforgettable and that may not necessarily be a good thing depending on your tolerance for the darker side of humanity. But their unforgettable nature is one of the greatest things about the writing of Harry Crews. They don’t just stick in your head because they are so terrible; they stay there because Harry Crews is such a talented writer. If this work of fiction doesn’t bother you enough, just remember that there are places off the beaten path in rural America that aren’t so different from what we have in this novel. 


 

Sunday, October 6, 2024

Book Review & Analysis: Black and White and Blue by Dave Thompson

 


Black and White and Blue:

Adult Cinema From the Victorian Age To the VCR

by Dave Thompson

      People these days take pornography for granted. Anybody with an internet connection and enough literary prowess to type the word “porn” into a browser can find more of the stuff than they could ever hope or want to see. And it’s all free of charge. But looking back at the development of this lowest of lowbrow art forms will show that it hasn’t always been that easy. Rock biographer Dave Thompson’s Black and White and Blue traces the origins of pornographic film back to the end of the 18th century up until the 1970s when its legalization in America pushed it out of the underground and into the mainstream.

Pornography certainly didn’t begin in the era of the Industrial Revolution as some might think. Anybody who has studied art history will know very well that the ancients had a fascination for sexually explicit imagery in their visual arts. It wasn’t limited to Western countries either. Plenty of medieval Japanese art leaves nothing to the imagination as far as bodily pleasures go. Hindu art has a long tradition of erotic imagery. Even some prehistoric cave paintings have been found that portray female genitalia in ways that might bring to mind the kinds of things you see on men’s public restroom stalls. If you’ve ever wondered who draws that variety of graffiti while sitting on a restaurant shitter, just find the most cavemannish looking dude in the diner and draw your own conclusions. Then the invention of the printing press brought a flood of erotic literature with it as literacy rates grew rapidly. In fact, one response to major technological changes tends to be sexual in nature. The invention of the daguerreotype was no exception.

The difference with the advent of film is that, for the first time in history, real humans instead of artistically rendered representations could be used as subjects for erotic art. The controversy over the exploitation of human subjects has been with us ever since the first nude photographs were produced. But film and sex have been engaged in a figurative type of intercourse from the start. Eadweard Muybridge, Thomas Edison, and the Lumiere brothers all used nudes and burlesque dancers in their earliest experiments with the medium of the moving image. Flip card films in nickelodeon arcades showing dancing women and strippers began appearing around the turn of the 20th century. As the silent film era revved up and camera equipment became more readily available to those with enough money, the cultural phenomenon of ten minute stag films displaying people indulging in the pleasures of the human reproductive system emerged.

A large portion of this book is about the actual films, primarily in the stag film era that lasted roughly up until the 1960s, while the main side issues explored are the technological changes that influenced pornography production and the culture and business practices that surrounded the viewing of these films. The subject of still photography is left almost untouched.

Antique technology buffs who are interested in the history of film making equipment might find this book interesting simply because it says so much about the progression of movie cameras, darkroom development, and how those changes influenced the techniques of movie making in general. Today we take things like zoom lenses or film splicing for granted, but when these changes were introduced, they profoundly altered the way things are done. The introduction of 35mm film and remote film processing laboratories were significant too. Thompson doesn’t get too technical about these matters, but he does show how important film making gadgetry is in the medium’s history. A lot of these changes applied to non-erotic films just as much as they did to the stags, with the exception of color film and sound. Stag films got stuck in the black and white silent film era, complete with inter-title cards for dialogue, until the time of the sexual revolution, mostly due to budget restraints, but also because patrons of the underground cinema were solely interested in the visual portrayal of physical intimacy more than how it sounded.

There is another reason why the sound might not matter. Stag movies were shown to groups of men in secretive locations. Usually they were drunk, raucous, and constantly shouting and whistling at the screen. They smoked a lot too, so much that a slang term for stag films was “smokies”. This gets into the culture surrounding the exhibition of these films. One of the ways they were shown was by traveling salesmen who brought them into town, quietly announced to patrons of bars that they had stag films to show, and then led their customers to some place like a field outside city limits or a remote parking lot. There they set up a tent and played their reels. Other times, stags were rented and shown in the halls of fraternal orders like the Elks, Odd Fellows, or Moose Lodges. If you’ve ever wondered what secret the Freemasons are guarding so carefully, you might have found your answer here. There is no telling what these brothers were doing while watching these films and maybe it’s best left to the imagination. But seriously folks, a lot of these men watched the stags because there was no such thing as sex education in those days. They simply didn’t know much about how to do it. It was a time when condoms were illegal and oral sex was not a part of anybody’s marriage. Even the vice squads that chased after pornographers were in the dark when it came to stag cinema; one officer issued an arrest warrant for Dick Hard and Lotta Cum because those were the performers’ names listed in the credits of a movie they seized. Forensic science was still in its infancy then, I guess.

The author has spent far more time watching and analyzing stag films than I would ever care to. Porno movies aren’t exactly high concept works of art and there is only so much you can do with the ins and outs of the subject matter. Large portions of this book describe the contents of stag films and Thompson comes close to over-indulging in it, but at least he had the decency to alter his critical evaluations with other peripheral information like anecdotes about the performers and viewers, the technology, and the cultural context. The forays into rarer forms of stag films break up the monotony too; while most stag films showed ordinary vanilla sex, a small number catered to fetishes like BDSM, lesbianism, group sex, and interracial love making. Although Mexican or Cuban produced bestiality films showed up on occasion, other subjects that are illegal now were rare and violet porn almost non-existent. In fact, riots sometimes broke out at screenings when the men in the audience though the female performers were being treated too disrespectfully. Gay stag films were almost non-existent until the 1950s.

The final chapters dealing with the Sexual Revolution shows how the booming post war economy and rapid technological development contributed to changes in the viewing of pornography. Peep shows came back and privately viewed 8mm film loops became popular as well as super 8 movie projectors that made home viewing possible. Handheld cameras came on the market for private film making too. The combination of changing attitudes towards sex and the legalization of porn in the 1960s resulted in everybody letting it all hang out for the world to see. For the first time, talk of a porn industry became common as it virtually exploded, first in Europe, mostly in Scandinavia, and then in New York City and San Francisco, both epicenters of the hippy counter culture scene. Then along came Deep Throat and that is about where Dave Thompson’s story ends.

What the author gets right is in the blending of the production and content of stag films with the culture surrounding them. He shows how the wider society influenced stag films and they reflected the progressive changes in society along the way. The style and content of these movies marked cultural and technological shifts in ways that other mediums do not. This really is not a sociological study though. It is a work of film history put into a sociological context so that we don’t get bored to death with endless descriptions of people doing the horizontal hokey pokey in front of a camera thereby allowing us to draw conclusions about the nature of human societies during the 20th century.

In conclusion, Black and White and Blue is a good book providing you are interested in the subject matter. It has always been a curiosity to me that so many people like watching others having sex on film, and yet porn is universally popular and the industry never ceases to thrive. The social and psychological reasons for that deserve to be taken up in other studies, but I do have a theory that relates directly to medium itself. Film was invented for the visual depiction of motion. The two most important forms of motion for human survival, sex and violence, are probably the most common and fascinating selements in film. Violence is exciting to us because of our fight or flight instincts that we are genetically programmed with to save our lives, while sex is important for the continuation of the species. As mammals, sex is also a way of forming communal bonds and fulfilling needs for acceptance. When these activities are portrayed in film, it arouses emotions associated with our deepest, most fundamental primal instincts. As Sigmund Freud would say, we need to repress these instincts in order to function in a civilized society which leads to them being sublimated or disconnected from ourselves. With the advancement of technology and the changes it has brought about, it is probably impossible to return all the contents to Pandora’s Box. Reverse orgasms are impossible. Once that ejaculatory spasm has happened, the sperm can not go back to its origin. Like it or not, despite what Andrea Dworkin thought, pornography is here to stay.


Friday, October 4, 2024

Book Review & Analysis: The Almighty Black P Stone Nation by Natalie Y. Moore & Lance Williams


The Almighty Black P Stone Nation:

The Rise, Fall, and Resurgence Of an American Gang

      By the 1990s, hip hop had grown to be one of the most prominent musical genres, if not the MOST prominent genre in America. Possibly it became the most prominent musical style in the world. I’ve never been to a country where you didn’t hear it playing in stores, on the radio, in restaurants, or blasting out of car windows. This is true even in Luxembourg which I would consider to be the least hip hop-like place I’ve ever been. A lot of journalistic writing has been dedicated to uncovering the roots of hip hop in the likes of James Brown, The Last Poets, and various other obscure funk, jazz, and soul bands from the 1960s and 1970s. I’ve encountered less journalism or historical studies that have examined the social origins and influences that fed into later hip hop culture. There is one group of African-Americans who may not have directly influenced the genre in the beginning, but they certainly embodied a lot of the themes that had become prominent in the music by the 1990s. Natalie Y. Moore and Lance Williams’ The Almighty Black P Stone Nation does not examine this cultural connection, but it does lay a groundwork for a cultural historian to see how the hip hop movement and some of what it stands for did not emerge out of a void.

This history begins in the south side of Chicago with its heavy concentration of African-American people, many of which were there because they or their ancestors migrated from the South to escape the racism and poverty, to the booming city of Chicago where the steel industry and others needed manual, unskilled laborers. That is where two young teenagers, Jeff Fort and Eugene “Bull” Hairston dropped out of school at a young age and formed a gang called the Blackstone Rangers. Part of their motivation was strength in numbers when facing off against their rivals, the Disciples, who preyed on kids from other neighborhoods who had to pass through their turf to get to school. The Blackstone Rangers soon got involved in all the crime that gang membership entailed including drug dealing, prostitution, gambling, extortion, protection rackets, and street violence. But the Rangers took a slightly different turn from the Disciples and other gangs.

Fort and Hairston established a strange alliance when the ministers at a Presbyterian church took them under their wing and allowed the teenagers to use their property as headquarters. It was a symbiotic relationship since the church received federal aid money for a job creation program because they worked directly with troubled teenagers who had some social capital in their neighborhood. The Blackstone Rangers also benefited because they had a legitimate looking place to go, keeping themselves off the streets and out of the eyes of the police. They also participated in the job creation program, directing unemployed youth towards occupations that benefited them and their families. But the Rangers also stole money from the church and some critics even say the ministers allowed this to happen in order to stay on the good side of the gang. Whatever the case may be, the Blackstone Rangers grew in stature and reputation all over Chicago. They chartered other gangs from all over the city, renamed the organization the Almighty Black P Stone Nation, and Fort and Hairston set up a ruling council of twenty one leaders to oversee the whole corporation. They got even bigger when they began doing business with La Cosa Nostra. When Bull Hairston got sent up the river for a very long paid vacation in the penitentiary, Fort took over the leadership position and ruled the Nation until he died. Even when he himself got sent to prison, he commanded the gang from behind bars.

But something else happened to Jeff Fort while he did his time. Like so many African-American people who end up in jail, he found religion and like so many of those others, the religion he found was Islam. Fort had joined up with Noble Drew Ali’s cult the Moorish Science Temple and when released, he announced that he was changing the Black P Stone Nation into an unorthodox Muslim sect he called El Rukn based on Noble Drew Ali’s teachings. This temple was run out of a building called The Fort. But El Rukn was not entirely pure and holy; while there was an element of sincerity in Fort’s newly designed religion, it was also used as a cover for the same old gangbanging that the Black P Stone Nation had been involved in all along. El Rukn also began embracing militant Black Nationalism and started stockpiling heavy artillery including machine guns and explosives. One member even got busted in a sting operation when buying a rocket launcher from undercover FBI agents. The feds also wiretapped El Rukn when they sent a delegation to Libya to meet with Moammar Gaddafi.

The writers of this book are not upfront about how they feel in regards to this gang. They point out some of the positive things they were responsible for like helping teenagers find jobs, working with Martin Luther King when he visited Chicago, embracing Black Power, embracing Islam as a means of community building, running youth groups through El Rukn, and sometimes preventing inter-gang violence rather than promoting it. Yet they also point out how their gangster stance was detrimental to the African-American community. By selling heroin and crack on inner city street corners, by running prostitution rings that pimped out young black girls, and extorting money from Black business owners they were hypocritically harming the community they claimed to be supporting. The strange irony is that Jeff Fort and his followers couldn’t see the schizophrenic nature of what they were doing and in fact appeared to genuinely believe in all its contradictory facets both good and evil. The authors do point out the gang’s strange ideological orientation to society, but they are also strangely dismissive of their later stances regarding revolutionary violence. They write about their potential for terrorist activities as if it is just an eccentricity, downplaying it as a threat. Their unwillingness to thoroughly engage with the potential for destruction that the Black P Stone Nation had in their collection of weaponry is a weakness in the writing.

The other huge flaw in this book is the writing itself. The subject matter is examined from a distance without any insiders’ points of view. It reads like a listing of events as if the gang was never really made up of individual people. It is the type of bird’s eye view prose you get when reading a 20th century author’s accounts of ancient Roman history. You just can’t see the world through the eyes of the people being written about. The writing is also stiff and stilted, lacking in flow due to there being too many short sentences that make it an uphill battle to read. This book is a good example of how amateurish writing can make a fascinating subject matter look bland and uninspired.

The Almighty Black P Stone Nation is not a great piece of writing, but it does serve as a good introduction to this contradictory and influential African-American social organization. It covers the territories of gang culture, street culture, youth culture, prison, social conditions, political ideology, revolution, outlawry, Black theology and religion, inner city violence, and it even touches on fashion. All these themes show up in rap lyrics and the Black P Stone Nation had an unusual way of bringing all these elements together as if the whole gang where the atom that split and exploded into the subculture we now know as hip hop. All of this happened under the tutelage of the visionary Jeff Fort. But his vision was distorted and he might have been just a little more crazy than not. He certainly could see farther than he could reach. This book is marred by too much reporting and not enough analysis. That analysis will hopefully come later because there is a lot to unpack here. The ability the Black P Stone Nation has for holding together over such a long period of time despite all its contortions and contradictions may say something important about the nature of human societies. Those secret forces may be malignant or they may be benign, but we won’t know what they are until this subject matter gets taken up by a more analytical scholar.


 

Saturday, September 28, 2024

Book Review: Micronations by Mohammad Bahareth


Micronations 

by Mohammad Bahareth

      It’s not widely known that Ernest Hemingway’s brother Les once built a bamboo raft off the coast of Jamaica and declared it a nation called New Atlantis. Actually only half the raft was New Atlantis because the other half, he believed, was a territory of the United States, Under the raft was a sandbar which Les Hemingway thought to have bat guano on it. Based on an obscure American law from the 19th century, any uninhabited island in international waters with bat guano could be claimed as American property. If that law isn’t batshit crazy than Les Hemingway certainly was for coming up with this scheme in the first place. It’s a good thing he didn’t try to liberate the American half in a war of independence because I don’t think that would have gone in his favor. He didn’t need to do that anyways because his raft and the nation of New Atalntis got blown away in a hurricane and ceased to exist.

Now if Les Hemingway was anything like his more famous brother, he might have been a lush. This is significant because I’ve nursed enough pints of Guiness in to know that if you hang around enough bars over the years, you will inevitably meet dozens of drunks on benders who will tell you what could be done to fix the country if only the right people would listen to them. Stoners aren’t any different only they’re more likely to lay around listening to Grateful Dead tapes while watching nature shows on TV with the sound turned down while they tell you what they’d do differently if they had their own country to run. Usually the legalization of drugs is the first and only idea they have If you’re getting doing bong hits with them, you probably aren’t listening anyway. What I’m really getting around to saying here is that every so often one of these guys gets up enough gumption to literally try to start their own micronation. Sometimes they succeed. Most of them fail. These days they mostly just end up on the internet. Mohammed Bahareth’s Micronations chronicles some of these attempts.

Like any good book of this sort, the author starts out by defining the concept of a micronation. There are people who declare themselves to be the king or leader of their own mini-state. Up until recently, many of them have laid claim to small pieces of land, empty islands, abandoned military towers, or boats anchored in international waters. Some of them don’t exist anywhere except in people’s heads or on websites. Some issue currencies, stamps, or passports and even go so far as composing their own national anthems, writing constitutions, and inventing their own languages. Most of them seek international recognition from other countries or the United Nations. It’s probably safe to say that most, if not all of them, are run by people who are completely nuts. The author would likely not agree with that last charge since he appears to be interested in founding his own micronation, although he doesn’t give any specific details in this book,

After Bahareth explains what micronations are, he explains what micronations are. Again. Nobody would argue that he isn’t an amateurish author. Then he proceeds to list and describe real micronations. Reading this is a trial at first since some of the entries at the beginning have nothing but geographical facts which were probably copied from Wikipedia. But the book gets more engaging in later chapters when he gives information about the history and ideologies that some micronations were founded on. The organization of the chapters is a little weird. One is about the strangest micronations and the following chapter is about the most famous micronations. But the two most famous micronations, The Principality of Sealand and The Republic of Minerva, are in the former chapter and I’ve never heard of the ones listed in the latter chapter so maybe the titles are out of order. I’ll give credit where it’s due though, because my favorite micronation of all, The Kingdom of Elgaland-Vargaland, gets one paragraph. Those guys claim their country exists in your mind and you enter their kingdom every time you fall asleep and dream. Now that’s some real psychedelia for you. I’d love to see how their parliament works.

While the beginning of the book is all about the shrimp sized sovereignties that exist, did exist, or tried to exist usually somewhere in the three dimensions of our physical universes, the ending of the book covers the tiny countries, bringing new meaning to the term “petit bourgeoisie”, that own no land and exist only as ideas or internet pages. This is where the meat of the matter really enters your mouth. I have no idea what that last sentence is supposed to mean, but I thought I’d throw it in there anyways. You see, a lot of these new micronations want to become officially recognized states. Some have claimed territories on Mars or distant comets, a few have laid claim to territories on Antarctica. Some want to build massive platforms on the ocean surfaces for seasteading ventures. Some wish to inhabit places where nobody in their right mind would want to live like New Jersey for instance. Also somebody has put together a United Nations for micronations and many of them seek recognition there as a first step to petitioning the real UN for acceptance. They even send mini-diplomats to micronation conventions. The next one is being held in 2025. For some of these people, this is all a big joke or an art project (same thing), but some take it quite seriously. At least, I think they take it as seriously as an internet role playing game can be taken and that’s what I think this latter grouping of tiny intentional communities mostly is. It seems like a hobby for those at the geekiest end of the nerd spectrum. On a more down to earth level, even if none of these people ever succeed in starting their own countries, I can see how this type of role playing game might inspire a political science scholar to come up with a plan or theory for improving the practice of governance in the real world. They say that when young children play house or cops and robbers they are actually preparing themselves for roles they might play when they get older (the kids who pretended to be robbers will probably go on to be businessmen and the kids who played doctor probably became perverts) and this micronation trip might just be a more sophisticated version of that.

This is not a well-written book. It’s published by a vanity press which is usually a good enough excuse to avoid reading something, but I am an aficionado of all things odd and obscure so I thought I’d give it a chance. The writing can be redundant to say the least. Sometimes one paragraph is repeated word for word following its first iteration. The layout is confusing and the organization of information doesn’t always make sense. It’s full of typos, misspellings, and bad grammar. But the author’s first language isn’t English and, according to his online biography, he is also dyslexic so I’ll cut him as much slack here as I possibly can. Besides he obviously has a passion for his subject matter and that enthusiasm shines through. If this isn’t a great book, at least it is unique and interesting. It may be best as a work of bathroom literature, but many people have to admit that they have some of their most philosophical inner dialogues while sitting solitary, taking a dump in the porcelain Republican party cranium (otherwise known as the toilet).

Mohammed Bahareth’s Micronations isn’t a widely read book and it isn’t destined to be. That’s why I’m happy to have read it and why it has a prominent place on my bookshelf which gets more crowded by the week. And to all you barflies, boozehounds, lounge lizards, saloon swillers, and barroom political scientists whose livers are pickled in gin and tonics who have had a few and start spilling out over the sides to whatever schmuck in unlucky enough to be occupying the stool next to you, if your topic of conversation is how great it would be if you could run your own country, or even just be king for a day, I propose a toast in your honor. Let’s all do a shot of hooch and a round of rotgut for everyone chased with a bottle of mad dog. You’re all invited when I take the oath of office as the first president of The People’s Republic of Mike Hunt, population of one.


 

Wednesday, September 25, 2024

Book Review and Literary Analysis: Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany


Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

      “I don’t know where I fit in in this world. I’ve been wandering for years, finding no place to settle. My memories are incomplete. I can’t even remember my own name. Am I hallucinating? Am I going crazy? I’ve heard about a place somewhere in the Midwest where people like me have found a home. I think I’ll go there and see what happens. And, by the way, who wrote these words anyway? Me?” At some point the central character of Samuel R. Delany’s monumental novel Dhalgren must have thought things like these. But don’t expect any clear answers to his questions. You have to figure the answers out for yourself. But then, how do you even know you’ve come to the right conclusions?

Part of the confusion is that this novel doesn’t necessarily start at the beginning. The beginning may be somewhere in the middle or near the end, but then again, maybe the beginning really is at the beginning. You can never really know. The protagonist can’t remember his own name or who he is, but he goes by the name Kid, Kidd, or sometimes the Kid. This name was given to him by Tak, a gay leather BDSM guy who acts as the local welcome wagon when Kid and others enter the city. Tak is a strangely matriarchal figure, not just because he is a man, but he also brings the nameless main character into the city of Bellona like a midwife bringing an infant into the world and, like a mother, giving him a name: Kid, something we call a child. When they have sex, Tak insists Kid sit on his lap and bite his nipple until he draws blood, an inversion of Christian iconography of the Christ child on the lap of Santa Maria, and a sado-masochistic inversion of breast feeding in which blood stands in for a mother’s milk. Tak introduces Kid to the world and the people of Bellona, sometimes acting as a teacher and sometimes a nurturing matron in leather and spikes, providing food, shelter, and healing when Kid needs it most. Early on in the book, you become aware that Delany has a talent for character building and word building too. There is nothing shallow in the way he writes Kid and Tak into the narrative, and this is true of many others along the way, even those who are of minor importance.

Now here’s a real problem. If I analyze everything, even limiting myself to the most important themes and elements, I will end up with a book review that is twice as long as this 900 page novel and I don’t want to do that.

But the setting is important. Bellona is a post-apocalyptic city where something bad, we’re not sure what, has left it mostly abandoned with a smoke-filled sky even though it appears there are no big fires anywhere. It is completely cut off from the rest of America where life continues on as normal. The remaining inhabitants are four main groups. The two most prominent are African-American people and various remnants of the 1960s counter cultures, namely bikers, hippies, and beneficiaries of the sexual revolution. The counter culturalists and African-Americans interact the most freely. The other two categories of people are a small band of middle class families and a small group of upper class intelligentsia including an order of monks in an isolated monastery. These upper and lower classes mingle less often. All these groups of people are outsiders in some way.

Tak introduces Kid to a hippie commune dedicated to distributing food they lift from abandoned stores. He doesn’t quite fit in with them, but hooks up with another peripheral friend of theirs named Lanya who becomes his girlfriend. She is multi-talented, highly intelligent, free spirited, plays the harmonica, and likes to be naked, a fully realized embodiment of the female hippy who is too individualistic to actually be a part of any one group.

As the story progresses, Kid become the leader of a gang called the scorpions. Their name is never capitalized suggesting that it isn’t actually their name, but rather a subcultural designation like “thugs” or “gangbangers”. These scorpions resemble the Hells Angels only they are interracial, in fact most of them are Black, and they only have one Harley Davidson which they can’t ride because there is no gasoline in Bellona. They squat communally in abandoned houses they call “nests” and spend most of their time eating, getting drunk, and having sex. Sometimes they go out on runs which usually involve nothing more than looting and vandalizing abandoned stores. When Kid joins the scorpions he meets his other lover, a teenage boy named Denny who becomes a third partner in the relationship with Lanya.

Kid is a richly detailed character. He is half Native American Indian and a former inmate of a psychiatric hospital. His two outward emblems of identity are a chain with various jewels, lenses, and stones wrapped around his body and an orchid, a type of weapon he wears strapped to wrist and holding five razor sharp blades which he uses in fights. He acquires these two objects the way a character might come across a magic ring and enchanted sword before setting out on a Grimm’s fairy tale style quest. Aside from recovering his memory and name, Kid’s two main ambitions are becoming the leader of the scorpions and becoming a poet. He accomplishes both. He becomes the gang leader, taking over from a guy named Nightmare, by proving his courage in a run on a department store, but he becomes a poet for a reason he doesn’t choose. The mayor of Bellona is looking for a poet laureate to represent Bellona and Kid is the writer he finds through a scout. Since he is the only writer around, and a charismatic individual who actually writes about Bellona, his poems get published even though they are probably not great writing. This novel, as it touches on the craft of writing, is in part a self-referential work of literary criticism, a use of the novel to philosophize about the writing process.

In regards to the writing process, Delany presents us with a puzzle in the form of a notebook which Kid finds when he is with Lanya. It is a ragged spiral bound notebook which has writing only on the right side pages (for bibliophilic nerds who actually know anatomical terms concerning books, the right hand side of the page is called the “recto”). The author of these writings is never revealed, but we do know they contain extensive commentaries on literary criticism and, by a possible interpretation, they are also pages from the novel Dhalgren itself. Something else in these pages written by the unknown author is a list of names, some of which bear close but not exact resemblance to the names of other characters in the book. One of these names is Dhalgren, which may or may not be the name of a journalist that Kid meets at a party given in his honor. Are the contents of this notebook the writings of Kid, being part of the memories that he lost? There are clues that suggest Kid’s real last name is Dhalgren and that the journalist is actually himself and the author of the entire novel. Does that make Kid a literary persona of Samuel R. Delany? But wait a minute, aren’t all the characters personae of Delany? Is that true of all authors? Can an author write characters that are actually not a part of their own mind? Before I expand on this meta-meta narrative framework, let me just point out that the blank pages on the left hand sides (called the “verso” in book nerd language) are where Kid writes the poems that will later be published by the mayor.

One key to understanding this book might be the chain that Kid wears wrapped around his body. Several characters wear these chains and Kid learns early on that it is considered impolite to ask anybody what they mean. These people are all symbolically connected through these chains. What the lenses, stones, and beads attached to them actually do is distort visual imagery when looked through, refracting light, fracturing appearances, and redirecting eyesight during the act of looking. If these objects are different occurrences strung together in the narrative of the novel, then it is an indication that what we read is a distorted and fractured view of what actually happenes. We use language and memory to interpret the world and neither can be entirely accurate since they approximate and distort the world the way the stones distort visual imagery. This distortion can be seen in several ways, one of which is the shifting of narrative voices. In the earlier chapters, there are points where the narrative changes without warning from third person singular to first person with the first person being the voice of Kid. The final chapter of the book switches over entirely to first person narration which tells us that Kid is the author of Dhalgren, especially because the last section is made of fragments relating back to other parts of the story complete with meta-critical commentaries, reworkings of passages, corrections of spelling errors and typos, and other editorial notations, all of which are presumably written by Kid. This suggests that the final section contains contents from the right side pages of the notebook he writes his poetry in. This narrative chaos forces the reader to think in terms of narrative distortion, shifting planes of reference, and redirecting of attention which can be compared to the way the objects on the necklace distort visual perception when held in front of the eye. This alteration of narrative lines also indicates another theme in the novel: the questioning of Kid’s sanity.

As Kid wanders through the novel, he constantly frets about whether he is insane or not. We know that he was once diagnosed with a mental illness and forgetting your own name isn’t exactly healthy or normal. If that isn’t insanity, it certainly indicated an identity crisis at the very least. Kid’s mind also appears to play tricks on him. Streets and buildings seem to move to different locations when he isn’t looking, for example, and then there are a series of fortean anomalies. A woman he has sex with turns into a tree, two moons appear at the same time, one day passes for him whereas one week passes for everyone else, and then the smoke in the sky clears as a giant red sun appears over Bellona then goes away. These can’t be simply attributed to insanity and hallucination because, at least with the moons and the sun, everybody else in Bellona sees them too.

My contention is that these anomalies are merely literary devices, especially because they occur at major turning points in the development of Kid as a character. For instance, one morning Kid and Lanya go off on their own. Kid takes a bus to a department store where the scorpions are preparing for a run that involves breaking into the skyscraper which is guarded like a fortress from the top floors by members of the middle class. Kid joins the scorpions and, through his actions, sets himself apart from the others in terms of courage, intelligence, and fighting ability. During the span of this day, Lanya is out searching for Kid, but for her this span of one day lasts an entire week that ends when they meet up in the evening. Previous to this time warping, the two had spent most of their days together having sex. This shift in time perspective happens when they reach a crossroads in their relationship and go their separate ways for a bit which is further enhanced by the fact that Lanya is against the idea of joining the scorpions. The time distortion represents a major turning point in how Kid and Lanya see each other,

The most memorable anomaly is the appearance of the giant red sun, the most mind altering, entrancing, and emotionally intense passage of the novel. My interpretation here is that this event symbolizes another major turning point in the story of Kid’s life. As the sun begins to rise, Kid leads the scorpions to the balcony of a house so they can watch. The sun is so intense that it scares everybody, some to the point of dread and tears, and yet Kid, feeling fear the same as the other, remains calm simply knowing that if it is an indication of impending doom, there is nothing he can do about it. But what really happens is that this coincides with Kid’s ascension to the leadership of the scorpions, taking over the mantle from Nightmare. The sun appears when he reaches his goals of becoming a famous poet and becoming the leader of his gang. At the same time as the sun’s appearance, one scorpion also kills somebody and a sniper begins firing from a rooftop at African American people on the street.

Now take a step back for a second and look at this from another angle: if Kid is the writer of this novel, than these anomalies and the people who say them might be creations of his imagination. Or maybe these things really did happen. But if he is the writer, editor, and narrator of his own story should we take these anomalies at face value as hallucinations, or did the writer write the witnessing of these events into the story to prove that other people saw them in order to ward off accusations of insanity, a possible defense mechanism protecting his own ego from dissolution. By forcing us to think on different levels about the possible reality, hallucination, or symbolism of these anomalies, Delany draws our attention to the fact that we edit our own personal narratives, adding details and leaving out others, in a way that a writer makes choices when writing a novel. It is human nature to embellish stories so where is the dividing line between truth and fiction? Is the line between sanity and insanity really all that clear? The shifting narrative planes make you see the story from Kid’s point of view in a way that make you think like a person who might be insane while wondering if this is really insanity or just human nature. Or just a bunch of literary devices. Anyways, the reason I think these anomalies are nothing more than literary stylization is because of the chain that Kid wears wrapped around his body.

As said before, the chains with their ornaments are worn by many people in Bellona and it is considered impolite to talk about them. Kid believes the people who wear them are special in some unexplained way. This gets reinforced when the psychiatrist Madame Brown offers him a job moving furniture for her friends, the Richards family. She tells him she is doing him a favor because he wears his chain. She later reveals that that is not the truth; she only told him that to conceal the real reason she offered him the job. She tells him that the chains actually mean nothing. This is also reinforced when Tak brings Kid to a warehouse where massive amounts of these chains are being stored. Anyone who knows where this warehouse is can get an ornamented chain to wear. They are nothing but cheap trinkets. It is possible the reason no one who wears them wants to talk about them is that there isn’t anything special about them and they just don’t want to admit that. So if the chains are a metaphor for the novel itself and the objects attached to it have no value other than the purpose of distorting the viewer’s vision, then we can conclude that the anomalies and some other details in this novel have no intrinsic meaning other than ornamentation. The anomalies dazzle the mind, but if the reader looks too deeply into their meaning, they get sidetracked from the more important elements in the story.

This brings us to the passage where the two moons appear in the night sky. There is a backstory and a subplot related to this. During a riot in the African American neighborhoods, a Black man named George Harrison gets photographed having sex with a white teenage girl named June Richards in an alley. The photograph is printed in Bellona’s newspaper which describes it as a rape. But the situation is complicated because it may not have been a rape considering that June wanted to have sex with George Harrison. His name is interesting considering he has nothing to do with the now deceased guitarist for The Beatles. Maybe the author chose that name as an element of distraction, a symbolic dead end. There is one night when George Harrison is hanging out in a bar and June is outside because she is stalking him for the purpose of having another sexual encounter, negating the accusation that she was raped. When Lanya confronts George Harrison about this, the Black man himself, who has the status of a celebrity in the community partly because nude posters of him are being circulated by the female minister of a church, explains that the controversy isn’t that he raped her. The controversy is that American society has anxieties and fears regarding Black sexuality and, just as much, there are fears and anxieties surrounding women’s sexuality. So when a Black man and a white woman are exposed for having consensual interracial sex, the society reacts with accusations of rape. So what happens when June comes close to catching up with George Harrison at the bar is that two moons appear, one a nearly full with a sliver of shadow over its left side, the other gibbous with its two horns pointing right. This is an anomaly because the Earth’s shadow would project onto the same sides of the two moons but they don’t. This is because June and George Harrison are going off in two different directions without meeting even though they are in close proximity to each other. The people in Bellona immediately assign the name “George Harrison” to the new moon to emphasize this point. The symbolism is so obvious that you have to second guess your interpretation to check if it makes sense or not.

The character of June Richards links into another of the novel’s many subplots. June lives with with her parents and her brother in an apartment building. Kid gets hired to move their furniture from their apartment into another one because the people downstairs make too much noise. The people downstairs are actually a nest of scorpions. While helping to move a sofa, the son falls down an empty elevator shaft and dies. After the scorpions help Kid pull the corpse out of the shaft, he begins to get closer to them. And we find out that all is not right with the Richards. The scorpions say they hear strange noises coming from their apartment, suggesting the possibility of domestic violence or incest. Mrs. Richards is a nervous woman who talks endlessly but cautiously when Kid comes to work for her. Her goal in life is to be a great housewife and a socialite who entertains friends at dinner parties. She is also agoraphobic and never leaves the apartment. Mr. Richards leaves every day to go to work, but he lives in Bellona where there is no work and probably does nothing more than wander around alone, a perfect portrait of a middle aged man who feels lost in the world and tired of his life. They also have an older son named Eddie who he kicked out of the house. We later find out that Eddie joined the scorpions. The Richards are a perfect portrait of a middle class American family. They hold together by never talking about their problems and never directly confronting reality. Beneath the surface, they seem like people who are about to explode. When their son dies, they cope by leaving his body to rot in another apartment and pretending he never existed. Strangely, their friend Madame Brown insists that they are a perfectly well-adjusted family.

Madame Brown is a minor character, but by the end you begin to realize she is not a reliable source of information. That is why you might not believe her when she tells Kid that he is mentally ill because her own judgments and perceptions are always lacking.

The Richards are a middle-of-the-road American nuclear family and Kid realizes they are not his people. Mrs. Richards serves spam on wonderbread for dinner, acting as though they are elegant despite the moldy corners she has to cut off to make them edible. The way she cuts off the mold is like the way the family acts willfully ignorant in order to maintain the illusion that they are happy. They may be typical of Americans outside Bellona, but inside Bellona they are outsiders because the city is populated with outcasts. The Richards represent what the counter cultures of the 1960s were rebelling against and Bellona is an enclave of the refugees from those counter cultures.

Bellona’s post-apocalyotic atmosphere demarcates it as cut off from the mainstream outside world where everything functions as normal. Yet all is not bad there and it seems to hover between utopia and dystopia as a kind of purgatory. The 60s counter cultures valued individual freedom yet also valued communal relations. They believed in free love and the right to have non-traditional sexual relations. Some dreamed of a society without money or police. They wanted to party and do drugs without having to work at meaningless jobs. All of these are aspects of Bellona. But then when murders or riots happen, there is nothing that can be done about it. Material possessions have no value because everything is free. Nothing gets accomplished because society has no purpose. Scorpions commit acts of violence and vandalism simply because they have nothing better to do. Illnesses and injuries can not be properly treated because there are no doctors or medicine. Bellona represents what a society would look like if the counter cultures finally had their way. It is up to you to decide if Bellona is a success or not.

Delany’s prose is entrancing. It is the type of writing that glides along smoothly with alliteration used to give it a subtle rhythmic continuum of language. It moves along steadily and slowly and once you get into its groove you never really get out of it until the end. It reminds me of what Stanley Kubrick said about the slow pacing in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon; they move at the pace of life. If Delany had written this with a faster pace, I fear all the complex layering of meaning, themes, details, and interconnections would end up being nothing but a jumbled mess. There are a small number of passages that suffer in their execution though. Mostly these are the passages with excessive descriptions of sex. The first night that Kid and Lanya spend together is long, but it isn’t that bad. This is partly because Lanya is totally hot and I’d be chasing her tail myself if it wasn’t for two factors, one being that I am happily married and wouldn’t cheat on my wife, the other being that Lanya is a fictional character in a novel which renders the first factor null and void anyhow. The other sex scenes, and one where Lanya and Denny throw pieces of a board game at each other, just go on for too damn long.

Dhalgren is a deep and difficult novel for a lot of people. I would argue that following what is happening is not what makes it difficult, but interpreting it is what makes it daunting for some. It is maximalist in its contents. It is full of ambiguity and symbols that may not symbolize anything at all. The beginning and end overlap in a way that I haven’t even touched on here. It forces you to question your own sanity as you see Bellona from the point of view of a man who might be insane even though he oten makes sense. You might go insane yourself if you try to interpret every lead this novel offers so you have to decide what themes to pursue. Delany doesn’t offer any final answers and its open-endedness may be one of its greatest strengths. If somebody were to ask what this whole novel is about, I would answer that it isn’t about one thing; it is about a whole lot of things and you have to choose what it means to you. This might bother a lot of readers who want definite answers from what they read, but that is better for the small number of us who get deeply absored in it while pursuing a unique literary experience. Dhalgren isn’t for everybody. It’s only for a few.



 

Thursday, September 19, 2024

Book Review and Analysis: How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer


How Soccer Explains the World:

An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

by Franklin Foer

     Can sports explain the world? Let’s take an indirect approach at answering that question. In the Middle Ages, Europe’s landed aristocracy settled disputes by building up mercenary armies of peasants, giving them weapons, and directing them in battle like pieces on a chessboard. Military commanders were lazy rich people who bought their ranks rather than earning them based on skill or prowess (does this sound familiar today regarding big corporate business?). Other members of the idle rich class sat on the sidelines of these petty wars, cheering on their allied battalions while the unfortunate peasant soldiers, who would probably prefer to be at home relaxing, slaughtered each other in the mud, all for the benefit of the land-owning barons and dukes who profited from these skirmishes. This style of warfare was a part of the political system known as feudalism, though there was a lot more to it than that. But the theory here is that these pointless and brutal wars eventually looked like petty sadism that wasn’t too popular with the peasantry who grew the food that was leeched from them by the aristocrats, so the practice was sublimated into games and what we now call team sports. So can contemporary soccer explain how we got from feudal warfare to the most popular worldwide pastime? You would need a certain amount of education and cultural literacy to be able to make that connection, so the answer would have to be a reluctant no, at least not for most people. Therefore, the title of Franklin Foer’s book How Soccer Explains the World should be ignored if you plan on getting anything out of this.

We don’t hear much about globalization these days. In fact contemporary right wing faux populism could well be a reaction against it. But twenty years ago, when this book came out, globalization was a big topic of discussion especially because 9/11 was still fresh in everybody’s minds. So Foer approaches his subject matter with that world view in mind. After all, aside from the Olympics, soccer is the most global sport. This is a very loose framework for this collection of essays, not a thesis to build an argument around.

Foer starts with discussions on hooliganism. We all know that soccer teams attract gangs that fight like boneheads with other gangs who support rival teams and sometimes the violence spills out into the streets where anybody or anything unlucky enough to be in their way could get smashed. Some of these gangs have ties to organized crime mafias or nationalist political movements. The first essay is about Serbian war criminal Arkan (may you never rest in peace) and how he brought all these elements together. The author, while embedded in the hooligan culture, also shows how Catholic and Protestant rivalries in Glasgow manifest in sectarian gang violence. These chapters leave some unanswered questions, like whether soccer makes ethnic or tribal conflicts worse or if it functions by containing them in localized conflicts rather than allowing them to flood out into the wider societies. The author doesn’t actually pose this question and doesn’t go deep enough to help you draw your own conclusions either. These essays are simply sketches based on interviews done with people he sought out.

There are a couple essays dealing with racism in soccer that stand out as the best in this collection. One is a historical piece about a Jewish soccer team in Austria before the Holocaust. Their motivation was to overcome the stereotype of Jewish people being physically weak and non-athletic. Another essay examines the life of a Nigerian footballer who dreamed of making it big by being hired to play in Europe, only to be slimed into playing for a team in Ukraine where he wasn’t welcomes with open arms. Thus, Foer addresses the issue of the internationalization of soccer to the point where teams are made up of players hired from other countries while local athletes get little or no representation in their home countries. The dream of globalization bringing the whole world together hasn’t worked out the way we all hoped it would.

Then we get some chapters on Brazilian soccer and the endemic corruption involved in its management. One sleazy team owner worked his way into politics and ran his team into the ground through graft and financial mismanagement. And of course no proper book about soccer in the 20th century would be complete without at least mentioning Pele. The world’s greatest footballer raised himself out of poverty by being the cleanest and most entertaining player. After making his fortune in America, he returned to Brazil and entered politics in an attempt to eliminate corruption from sports. The system got the better of him and he ended up falling into corruption like the rest of them.

This makes a transition into the subject of management and team ownership. The subject of soccer transitioning from a working class spectator sport to an upper class one complete with clubs being flush with money from investors and advertisers. This all has a deleterious effect on the relationship between the teams and their fans, many of which can no longer afford to attend matches. This all ends with a chapter on the promise of soccer as an instigator of political change in Iran where the Iranian Revolutionary Guard have been unable to steer women away from attendance at games.

Franklin Foer is an investigative journalist and these essays read like what this book really is: a collection of magazine articles, quick and easy to digest, accessible, ephemeral, entertaining, and not too deep. It’s like iceberg lettuce, cheap and filling but not loaded with nutrients. It would be safe to say that each essay portrays an aspect of society that is an outgrowth or an intersection with the culture surrounding the sport; it wouldn’t be accurate to say that Foer uses soccer to explain much of anything happening outside this culture. One thing is certainly conclusive though: soccer and the dark side of the human psyche are intimately connected. How you feel abut this book in the end might have a lot to do with how you react to the disconnection between the title and its contents. I, personally, was a little disappointed. I’m not interested in watching soccer since it looks to me like a bunch of guys kicking a ball back and forth for an hour or two and I’d much rather be doing something fun like having sex, so I was hoping for something a little more introspective and it didn’t deliver on that point.

How Soccer Explains the World is light reading. It’s conceivable that soccer can explain the world, but that doesn’t happen in this book. It provides some snapshots of the culture of the sport, but as a reader you will be left to sort out the information and what it means on your own. It’s interesting for what it is and I can’t say it’s bad writing, but it isn’t literature to be taken too seriously. Maybe it’s something to be read on a long bus ride, in an airport terminal, in the waiting room at the DMV, or if you have some obnoxious friend who insists on making you listen to Jordan Peterson lectures. Maybe its something to keep your mind busy when your proctologist insists on not using general anesthesia during a colonoscopy. Anyhow, I’d rather read about why most Americans don’t know who David Beckham is or why they get lost if you talk about Manchester United, Arsenal, or Juventus. I’d also like to know why Brits gets so red-in-the-face angry when Americans use the word “soccer” instead of “football” considering that “soccer” is a word of British origin that was used by them until they switched to “football” in the 1980s. Can soccer explain why people like to fight over such petty trivialities? It must be the narcissism of small differences. I’d like to read a book that explains that. 


 

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