Book Review

When Pirates Ruled the Waves

by Paul Harris

     If you don’t like what’s on the radio, then start your own radio station. That’s what some pirate broadcasters around the British Isles did and the government was not at all happy about it. Journalist and MI5 agent Paul Harris tells the story in his self-published book When Pirates Ruled the Waves.

It all starts in the early 1960s. The BBC has a monopoly on the airwaves and licenses are never granted to independent broadcasters. Large portions of the U.K. receive no radio signals at all and what is received by a moderate portion of the population does not come in clearly. And to be honest, as Paul Harris puts it, the programming on BBC radio just plain sucks. There is very little music and lots of educational and information broadcasts. Interest levels are low and few people ever listen to it. Even worse, the BBC is payed for with taxes and yet they insist on broadcasting things that tax-paying listeners have no interest in hearing.

Then the Isle of Man, where they are geographically incapable of receiving the BBC, gets permission to open their own radio station. So a few businessmen see a gap in the market and begin operating pirate stations located either on boats or abandoned military forts from World War II that are located in international waters, outside the boundaries of British territory. The radio operators have a plan to eventually go legitimate, thinking that when the government sees how popular they are they will be granted licenses and become legal. The pirate stations’ transmissions catch on like wildfire, not only with teenagers who listened to rock and pop, but also with adults like men driving to and from work and housewives who like having music to play while doing chores. The stations cater to their tastes by playing pop and easy listening music while also broadcasting news, information of local interest, weather reports, and advertising. The advertisers are legitimate businesses, some being big corporations. For a time, everyone is happy except the BBC and the government. Then a fight breaks out between competing pirate stations and one station owner gets killed.

A good half of the book tells the story of the stations themselves. That is the most interesting part. The other half of lesser interest is about the politics surrounding the pirate stations. The Labour party are strictly against legalization and tolerance of the pirate stations while the Tories are silently sympathetic on the other hand. While Labour is at first gunshy about addressing the issue, they eventually take a strong stance and fight with all they can to maintain the BBC monopoly. Eventually British laws are changed and claims to territorial waters are altered to run the pirates out of business. The passages about the government are not entirely uninteresting, but they do get tedious and if you have no especial interest in the bickering of British politicians it might seem like a bit too much.

Thankfully the stories of the two sides in this conflict are effectively intertwined so the dull parts are balanced by the more exciting parts. The exciting passages give details about some of the rowdies and eccentrics who start the pirate radio stations like horror rock singer Screaming Lord Sutch and Roy Bates who eventually turned his radio station on Roughs Tower into the micronation called The Principality of Sealand, although this book does not give any details about that development. The sections on British parliamentary procedures border on absurd humor since, by the author’s account, the Labour MP’s take themselves a little too seriously.

The last chapter could have ruined the book if Paul Harris had taken it too far. He accuses Labour of being part of a communist conspiracy to brainwash British people with BBC broadcasting. What he fails to account for is that such brainwashing would be impossible considering so few people were listening to the BBC at the time. Besides, Labour doesn’t appear to be the Stalinist dictators he claims they are; in this context they are more like a bunch of senile fuddyduddies who are too out of touch with popular opinion to see how wrong they are. The American Republican party did not invent paranoid conspiracy theorists and political cranks; judging by the ranting of Paul Harris, right wing loonies were alive and kicking in Britain during the 1960s too. Fortunately his tirade doesn’t last more than a couple pages and if it had, this book would be less credible than it is.

When Pirates Ruled the Waves is an informative story about an overlooked and forgotten issue from the U.K.’s past. Coming from a journalist, the writing is simple and clear. It offers a glimpse into a lost era in the history of radio that we probably can’t relate to so much today now that we have access to whatever we want to hear on the internet. It is that different perspective and the challenge of understanding it that makes this kind of obscure book valuable. I’m not sure what radio is like in the British Isles these days, but here in America it sucks. That is because all our stations are owned by giant corporations who want to dictate what we listen to. It is a whole different problem now. So much has changed and yet so little is different. 

 

Book Review

Fear of Flying

by Erica Jong

     She’s beautiful. She’s sexual. She’s highly intelligent. She’s loud, brash, and egocentric. She’s Isadora Wing and she’s thoroughly confused. Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying takes us into the life and mind of a woman during an existential crisis. She has most of the things that a woman is supposed to have for happiness, but the story begs the question of whose standards are being used to judge what a woman wants or needs.

As the novel starts, Isadora is attending a Freudian psychoanalytic conference in Vienna with her Chinese-American husband Bennett. On the first day, she gets groped by an attendee named Adrian Goodlove.

Isadora is pursuing her fantasy of getting a “zipless fuck”, quick and easy sex with maximum satisfaction and no strings attached. Her husband Bennett is a therapist, cold and distant and a little bit dull. Isadora loves him but feels unfulfilled. Ironically, he is good in bed and yet she seeks out sexual trysts to fill the emptiness that permeates her life. While Bennett is loyal to mainstream Freudian thought, Adrian is hooked on the wilder theories of the anarchist psychology of R.D. Laing. Isadora is in the middle of a battle between Apollo and Dionysus and for the time being she’s taking sides with Dionysus.

Adrian doesn’t turn out to be a zipless fuck though. He probes her mind, getting into the recesses of her memories and emotions. He’s bad in bed, possibly even a closet homosexual, and he patronizes, sometimes possibly abuses Isadora psychologically. As terrible as he is at fucking her body, he has a certain knack for fucking with Isadora’s head. Without understanding why, she submits to him completely and they run off on a car trip around Europe, leaving her husband Bennett behind. Along the way, she recounts the story of her life and Adrian looks for patterns. In the end, Adrian abandons Isadora. She hits rock bottom and that is when her great epiphany comes, pushing her towards the growth and personal freedom that she has always needed.

Before reaching the end of the novel, the narrative appears sloppy and formless. By the end of the book, everything clicks into place and the scheme of the story makes sense. The story is bracketed by two “zipless fuck” sequences, one in which Isadora remembers a movie scene in which a random soldier on a train seduces and abandons a widow in mourning. At the other end, Isadora almost gets raped on a train by a conducter, making her wake up to the fact that a zipless fuck is not what she truly wants. Sexual promiscuity is, for her, a way of hiding from what she truly wants. Her personal story builds as she relays her autobiography with details about her childhood and family, her sexual liaisons, and her relationships with men. In three sequential chapters, she tells about her first husband, who becomes schizophrenic, her next lover, who is a socially awkward musician failing in his career, and her sister’s creepy husband who tries to seduce her while she visits the family in Lebanon. This sequence involving three men is important because it shows how her refusal to sleep with her sister’s husband is the first time when she refuses to submit to the desires of a man. Other parts of the story that feed into this theme of submission involve the useless therapy sessions with male analysts and their generic, textbook answers to her problems that solve nothing, and a scene where she tells her college professor in her Master’s English literature program that she wants to quit college. He reprimands her sharply and that is why she earns her living by teaching college English while working on a Ph.D. in literary criticism even though she hates it. By the end, the pattern becomes obvious: Isadora feels unfulfilled because she never decides for herself what she wants; she only pursues what men tell her is best for her. Once you see this pattern, it is easy to predict where Isadora will end up. The formlessness of the writing suddenly becomes a revealed form. And Adrian turns out to be more than a sexually impotent jerk. He fulfills the same narrative function that the talking animals in Grimm’s fairy tales fulfill; he tells her what she needs to hear and leads her towards her destiny. Like the children in Grimm’s fairy tales, she realizes full maturity when she takes control over her situation by herself without the help of anyone else.

What Jong does with the narrative almost doesn’t work. The narrative shifts between past and present can be frustrating and often seem like random splotches of unrelated information. The pacing is jerky, alternating between slow drips and smooth flows. Three-quarters of the way through the book I wondered if this random jumble of stuff would add up to anything. But in the end, everything falls into place and it all makes sense. Life is sloppy and you could say that this is reflected in Jong’s prose. You could also say it is amateurish writing. I prefer the former, not the latter, but I do not lean strongly in that direction.

Fear of Flying is probably of more historic importance than literary merit. It came out in a time when women did not have the independence or freedom that they take for granted now. It brought Second Wave feminism into the mainstream. A lot of housewives and working women wanted more from life but were too afraid to say so for fear of backlash from society. Erica Jong gave them a voice and helped them take the next step in social evolution. As important as all this is, I would still argue that it does have literary merit. It is insightful and introspective, and Isadora’s mind is exposed on full display for analysis like few other female literary characters that came previously. Where Simon de Beauvois dissected all aspects of the female sex like a cold study of an animal species, Erica Jong humanized these ideas by putting them into the life of a literary character. If you are patient and willing to look outside the confines of your present existence, this is a work of quality. 

 

Book Review

Honey From a Weed:

Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia

by Patience Gray

     When it comes to food, Europeans have great traditions. In America, on the other hand, we make ourselves an easy target of ridicule. For example, think of drive-through windows at restaurants. Not only is fast food crappy tasting and terrible for your health, but eating a meal in your car is just downright gross. No class, no style, no elegance, no taste. People turn their vehicles into motorized garbage cans this way. I realize not every meal can be gourmet, but with a minimal amount of effort you can be a little less trashy. And its nice that we have a much broader range of ethnic options than we used to, but so many of these restaurants Americanize their food to the point where they no longer resemble the authentic dishes you get in their nations of origin. I’ve had Thai curries that were so sweet they tasted like desserts and larb without fish sauce. Ask for something spicy and they dump a ton of salt in it. Burritos, nachos, and fajitas aren’t eaten in Mexico. Hummous and falafels aren’t Greek, having their origins in Palestine. Greek people eat massive amounts of seafood but you never see fish on a Greek menu in America. The vomit they serve at The Olive Garden bears little resemblance to real Italian food. Don’t get me going on how fake our Chinese food is. Our fruits and vegetables taste like plastic, unlike the produce in other countries. Obviously not all food in America sucks, but more than half of it does. At least we have better food than British people do. What hell is marmite? Industrial sludge on bread?Axle grease in a jar? It tastes like cigarette ashes with shoe polish.

Mediterranean people, on the other hand, know all about food. So when I heard about Patience Gray’s Honey From a Weed, I knew I had to read it. The author spent time living in rural Mediterranean countries during the 1960s and 1970s with her husband, an artists she calls The Sculptor rather than using his real name. She witnessed the farming lifestyle of people in Catalonia, Tuscany, the Greek island of Naxos, and Apulia, the part of Italy shaped like the heel of the boot, a place where the local language is a mixture of Italian and Greek. As she wrote down her collection of recipes, she decided to put them into context with passages about how the cooking materials were collected or harvested, and detailed all this with short passages about the culture of the people she encountered. What results is a cookbook you can read as part ethnography, part memoir, part travelogue, and part philosophical discourse examining what it means to live a good life.

The recipes cover a wide range of ingredients with chapters on farmed vegetables, wild herbs, mushrooms, seafood, and game. If you’ve ever wondered how to cook a fox, a horse, or a sea urchin you need look no further. If you want to cook everyday items like chicken, mussels, or zucchini you can find that here too. A lot of the recipes are redundant, being variations of food fried in olive oil with garlic and diverse seasonings, occasionally with anchovies or tomatoes thrown in. But here is the catch: the types of tomatoes, or other vegetables used, depends on the season since different kinds of produce naturally ripen at different times of the year depending on the season and climate. These people did not have supermarkets that have the same industrially-grown, genetically altered produce all year long the way we do in the 21^st century. European farmers lived so close to nature that the seasons dictated what kind of game you had, what fruits you could pick, or what kind of wine you could drink. It may have been a harder life, but the food was of much higher quality. In the 1970s, Patience Gray realized these cultures were vanishing so she wrote all her observations down for posterity.

The author, rightly so, must have thought that not many people would be interested in a cookbook full of recipes that most people probably wouldn’t use or even couldn’t use considering that some of these food items no longer exist. Some of the cooking utensils are rare or obsolete. In my favorite chapter of all, she gives a detailed analysis of how cooking over open flames with different varieties of wood complement the flavors of all kinds of dishes. With this in mind, you begin to see why these traditions couldn’t survive. Most of us don’t have the time or the resources to find twenty different kinds of wood to cook twenty different meals.

But to get back to the main point, she made this book readable by adding in passages about the different places she lived in. There are descriptions of villages, architecture, farms, kitchens, and landscapes. She makes mention of some of the rural people and their customs along with musings on their religious and political beliefs. With a healthy contempt for the fascism of Mussolini, she points out that these rural people were mostly anarchists or communists. In our day you can criticize these ideologies all you want, but with hindsight you have to realize that when industrial capitalism is the dominant economic system and your community is famished and living at the edge of death, all those “isms” looked like desirable alternatives.

Finally, Gray iterates her own philosophy, simply put, that lacking something is what makes it pleasurable when you get it. Tomatoes taste like ecstasy when they are harvested because the farmers can’t have them for three-quarters of the year. It’s like saying Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas if you have it every day. This might be a cause of such widespred psychological dissatisfaction in our times. At least that’s what The Unabomber Ted Kaczynski said. In our age of abundance and mass conformity this might not be so clear, yet we may still know it by unconscious instinct. It is why a rare book might sell for $500 while a mass-produced Harry Potter novel will get a book dealer little more than fifty cents. The problem is that Patience Gray states her philosophical position but never explores it in depth.

In fact, she doesn’t explore many ideas at all in depth. Her writing just isn’t that good. It’s interesting that she created a cookbook you can read, but the things to be read are not always clear or even interesting. The recipes get redundant and a bit of a chore to read and some of the rest of it is just weak in its execution. I am in love with the idea of this book, but not the final product.

Patience Gray’s Honey From a Weed is not one of the most memorable books I have come across, but I don’t regret reading it. Having traveled and studied a lot, I can’t say I’m lacking in alternate perspectives on the world and the current state of our society, but I did enjoy imagining myself being in the Mediterranean places she described. It also gave me renewed inspiration for cooking; I learned the best way to cook radicchio and was reminded that I haven’t had any scungilli in a really long time. Once was enough though and I probably won’t be re-reading it this the future. 

 

Book Review

The Feminists

by Parley J. Cooper

     Lots of readers will reject this novel without ever bothering to learn what it’s all about. I’ll start by saying what Parley J. Cooper’s The Feminists is not. It is not incel manosphere drivel written so some scared alt-right creep will have something to stroke himself to while fantasizing about dominance and power. It isn’t a red pill book. It really isn’t even misogynistic. It certainly isn’t some garbage extremist manifesto like The Turner Diaries. If you’re a loony Republican MAGA-type, it will probably disappoint you. If you’re a knee-jerk, overly-sensitive radical feminist prone to fits of rage at the patriarchy over the tiniest provocations, you probably won’t like it much either. But if you are level-headed and prefer to see things through to their proper conclusion before passing judgment, you will actually see this novel as an argument for sexual equality, power-sharing between the genders, and the saner elements of Second Wave Feminism.

The story takes place in Manhattan, 1992. America has just gone through a period of transformation where women and men have equal representation in government. But a small group of high-handed radical feminists are dissatisfied with this arrangement and seize control of the state apparatus, turning the country into a dictatorship with gender segregation, men forcibly placed into the most menial positions of the labor force, and sexual relationships between men and women are illegal without prior written consent from the inefficient matriarchal bureaucracy. This is where Keith Montalvo gets into trouble. After a dangerous liaison with a willing, nubile young lady, the radical feminist storm troopers chase him through the streets of New York after curfew. He escapes underground in the now-defunct subway system and meets up with a gang of urban guerrillas preparing to overthrow the female government with acts of terrorism, sabotage, assassination, and armed insurgency. And this group is not made up entirely of men. They have plenty of women who are just as dedicated to the cause. One of them is a sweet and saucy young woman named Angela who falls in love with Keith.

The villain of the story is the Thatcher-like Mayor Fredericks who runs New York City from her private mansion. As far as being a mayor goes, Ms. Fredericks is doing a terrible job. Food has to be rationed, curfews are in place, transportation is limited to public buses due to fuel shortages, the buses are segregated by sex, and the streets are patrolled by bully feminist soldiers who don’t like men. New York City has become a dystopia because the feminists in power are more concerned with their power trip than they are with managing the services needed to keep a society functioning. The American feminist president is not any better at leadership and the entire country is in shambles. The radical feminists prove to be incapable of effective leadership.

So far you might be wondering why I say this novel is not misogynistic. For one, the characters who are written with the most depth are two women, Angela and Mayor Fredericks. Angela is the daughter of a prominent radical feminist and, while her feelings about her mother are confusing and contradictory, she loves her all the same as can be seen near the end during the assassination attempt in the theater. Angela opposes the matriarchal government, but she doesn’t oppose sexual equality throughout all of society. Compared to her lover Keith, she is portrayed with far more depth and leadership responsibility in the rebel group than he is. Keith is little more than an ordinary action hero with a couple small twists, one being the revelation of his identity at the end of the story. The other twist being that when the police catch him, he becomes the damsel-in-distress of the story, the maiden waiting to be saved by the noble knight in a gender-role reversal whose freedom depends on the heroics of Angela and her gang.

Mayor Fredericks is also well-drawn with a fair amount of depth even though she is a character who lacks empathy and a sense of fairness, having the sociopathic traits that probably propelled her into political power in the first place. She becomes morally conflicted when she learns who the captive Keith really is. Without giving away the ending, I will say that her actions at the end redeem her and humanize her after all the evil things she did up until that point.

Speaking of redemption, the other character who redeems herself in the end is the feminist president of the United States. Although her role is minor in the story, a statement is made when she resigns, handing her power over to someone who is better qualified to run the country. What makes her sympathetic is that she puts the needs of her country before herself and sacrifices her powerful position for the greater good of society. She admits that she wasn’t a good leader. Unlike a certain bloviating idiot who just so happened to be the 45^th president of our country, she is smart enough to know when to quit. So while this novel attacks a fictitious matriarchy, it doesn’t indulge in misogyny, it isn’t full of male chauvinism, and it largely refrains from even making ad hominem attacks on the adversarial characters.

Another reason this novel is more feminist-friendly than you might at first imagine is that the absolute worst character in the story is a man. Rinehart is a male who takes Keith on a mission to blow up the armory where feminist troops are sleeping. During the attempt, Rinehart tries to kill Keith. Fortunately he fails but he later abducts Claire, a spy for the guerillas who works in Mayor Fredericks’ office. What he plans to do with Claire can only be guessed at, but his speech to her proves him to be an incel type, a man who hates women because he feels he can’t get the sex he feels entitled to. Rinehart is violent and cruel and rhe author includes him the story to show us what a man is not supposed to be. Claire survives and goes on to be active in the planning and execution of the gang’s plots of terrorism and sabotage, another of the story’s strong female characters.

Most of the book is action-driven. It is written in the style of Hollywood movie from 1970s with wild and unpredictable plot twists, overblown combat sequences, gunfights, and a few good explosions all spiced up with a little family drama, a romantic subplot involving the two main characters, and a happy ending. It is essentially a gritty, action-packed thriller framed as a political statement about the need for sexual equality. If you are a fan of classic psychotronic cult films like The Warriors or Escape from New York, then this one is right up your alley.

I don’t think Leftist politically minded people have anything to fear from The Feminists. Certain radicals and extremists will be offended by anything that critiques the idea of a matriarchy, but more rational people will at least be sensible enough to detach themselves from the worst elements of the book like its being slightly dated in its method and meaning. And if you are still deeply offended by this book’s portrayal of feminism as you clutch your matriarchal pearls tightly enough to crush them, I say this to you: I have heard a lot of people say that the world would be more perfect if we had a matriarchy in charge. It is a dogmatic assertion and I don’t know if it is true or false. What I do know is that I have never heard any activists or theorists produce a realistic plan for establishing a matriarchy, running it, and defending it from the inevitable opponents who will try to tear it down. I have never heard a detailed description of what a matriarchy would look like. If you are not capable of providing these types of utopian details, then the opponents of your dreams will step in and take control; their version of your matriarchy will be one of dystopian nightmare. When that happens then you have already lost before you’ve begun. If your naivete and shortsightedness prevent you from reaching your goals, don’t blame it one anyone but yourselves. Sorry for my mansplaining, but sometimes outsiders can see groups of people more clearly than they see themselves. If that offends you, then so be it.