Book Review

Son of Sam

by Lawrence D. Klausner

By the end of the 1970s, New York was the most dangerous city in America, if not the whole world. Adding to the climate of fear, violence and crime was a lone serial killer striking out at random times and random places. Police knew every time he struck because the bullets recovered from the scenes all came from the same gun a .44 caliber pistol that was a rare make and model with a powerful kick that could most likely only be handled by an experienced shooter. That man was later revealed to be David Berkozwitz. Lawrence B. Klausner, in Son of Sam, tells the story primarily from the police force’s point of view.

Roughly half the book is dedicated to telling the story of NYPD’s detective task force put together specifically to catch the elusive murderer. Klausner does this for good reason. His intention is to celebrate the heroic manhunt conducted by that crack team of investigators, called Operation Omega, without overly emphasizing the sick details of Berkowitz’s long term killing spree. But this approach only goes so far. A lot of Operation Omega’s work leads to dead ends and faulty conclusions that result in nothing but frustration. Actually it is the Yonkers police who do the most to put the pieces of the puzzle together when they begin noticing the strange behavior of Berkowitz who lives in a Yonker’s apartment building up until his capture. This may be an accurate way to portray police detective work, but you have to consider that most people don’t read this book for information on law enforcement procedures.

Klausner also makes a slight and similar lapse of judgment in his handling of the murder victims and their family’s reactions. He mostly handles this sensitive part of the story well and in good taste. It is obvious where his sympathies lie and he shows us how violent crime does not only effect the people who get shot, but also their families and the surrounding communities too. But Klausner goes a little too far with this. After the shooting of Berkowitz’s last victims, Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante who were out on their first date, the author tracks their families into the hospitals where they are taken. The problem is that this part of the book is overwrought and maudlin, descending into melodrama that over-sensationalizes and over-sentimentalizes the situation to the point where the author subverts his own intentions by trying too hard to show us the distress of the families. He wants us to see the gravity of the crimes, but turns it into a soap opera instead. We can forgive Klausner for this error simply because we know his good intentions, though.

And finally there is the story of David Berkowitz, the .44 Caliber Killer and the Son of Sam himself. Berkowitz is an adopted child who had trouble making and maintaining friendships during his childhood. Shy and awkward, he always fails to fit in even though people think he seems like a good guy, at least on the surface. He makes it through the military, becoming an expert sharpshooter, then returns to New York City, living alone and holding down various jobs. At some point in his life he begins hearing howling dogs that he believes to be the voices of demons telling him to kill so they can drink the victims’ blood. Only Berkowitz’s attempts at murder make the auditory hallucinations stop. And these hallucinations do stop anytime he goes to work. On the days he has off, the howling dogs start to harass him. Unable to sleep, he tucks his gun into his pants and goes out to kill in the outer boroughs of Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn.

Berkowitz writes letter to the police, some of which end up in the newspapers. With prose that sounds like something out of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, he gives details of his crimes and explains his situation. He believes his neighbor in Yonkers, a man named Sam Carr who owns a dog that barks at night, is actually Satan and Berkowitz believes that Sam is commanding him to kill in order to prevent bigger disasters like earthquakes or tornadoes from happening, hence the self-given name of Son of Sam. The letters at first appear to be taunting the police, but in a sense they may be Berkowitz’s way of saying he wants to be caught. After they do arrest him, Berkowitz expresses relief because he doesn’t like the job of killing and feels he has no choice but to obey the voices in his head. It becomes clear early on in the book that David Berkowitz suffers from schizophrenia, but a schizophrenia that is difficult for outsiders to detect because his episodes only happen when he is tormented by loneliness. The degree of his disordered thinking is easy to spot early on when he thinks that his fist murder victim will marry him after she dies. His thoughts become more nonsensical from there.

Son of Sam is an interesting book, even if it is a little clumsy, uneven, and amateurish. The over-emphasis of the police department’s manhunt takes a little too much focus off of David Berkowitz to really make the story work entirely. But the biggest flaw is that a more in-depth psychological profile of the killer is never given. We get the details of his crimes and his mental illness, but the deeper psychology of how Berkowitz’s mind drives him to do what he does and how he came to be a killer when he didn’t want to be is never explored. His mental illness is the most colorful and interesting part of his biography and without a bigger examination of his mental processes, this book ends up being simply just a combination of police thriller and slasher horror story. Still the descriptions and atmospherics are well-done, and we do get enough of a taste of Berkowitz’s psychology to keep the story interesting.

Son of Sam is worth reading if you simply want the story of David Berkowitz’s crimes. In the end you may even feel an ounce of sympathy for the man who struggles with uncontrolled mental illness that drives him to commit crimes he doesn’t want to commit. Mind you, an ounce of sympathy is not a large amount and it is obvious that the victims deserves infinitely more sympathy than he does. Klausner does an adequate job of making this obvious fact clear enough.

Since he pleaded guilty and got sentenced to life imprisonment, Berkowitz has become a model prisoner and, every time he goes up for parole, he says he doesn’t deserve to be released because his crimes were so terrible. The story of his redemption is not covered in this book, but it is almost as provocative as the story of his serial killing spree. Is Son of Sam the American version of Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment? That will be for future generations to decide. But there is no doubt, were Doestoevsky alive today, he would find David Berkowitz to be a fascinating character he could relate to.

 

Book Review

Anthology of Black Humor

edited by Andre Breton

Surrealism was an art movement founded between the two world wars by its figurehead Andre Breton. The theory behind it was that Western rationality had built up modern society by suppressing humanity’s emotions, dreams, passions, and desires. In Freudian terms, this meant the id was imprisoned in the unconscious by the superego, or the collective society, that demanded obedience from the individual’s ego. The result was not only the misery of industrialization with its ugly factories and pollution, the repression of individual happiness, and a disconnection from nature, but also the insanity of two world wars. Hyper-rationality was killing the human spirit. So the Surrealists set out to set the unconscious free from its prison by embracing irrationality. Their art utilized intuition and chance to explore dream imagery, altered stated of consciousness, occult practice like automatic writing and fortune telling, and so-called primitive art from Africa, the Americas, and the South Pacific. In the end, they became one of the most ambitious, intriguing, and influential of the 20th century’s avant-garde art movements.

However, Andre Breton himself turned out to be a bit of a tyrant. Sooner or later, ever member of the Surrealist group got shown the exit by Breton for not being sufficiently Surrealist in the ways he wanted them to be. For a guy who claimed to embrace the intuitive and the irrational, you can’t say this was out of character. But another side of his bellicosity may have been the result of some of the other Surrealists finding more fame and commercial success than Breton. Ultimately, the Surrealists did make some incredible art, at least when taking the visual arts and film into account. Surrealist literature never reached the heights that other Surrealist mediums did. In any case, Breton put together his Anthology of Black Humor to showcase literary passages that capture and exemplify the spirit of Surrealism. As you may predict, it isn’t as engaging as the rest of the Surrealist project.

The book starts off with a good explanatory essay by Andre Breton. The purpose of black humor, in the sense of Surrealism, is to revolt against the repressive nature of society. He writes about humor that is cruel, violent, subversive, and allowed to run free with laughter being an outpouring of emotion that strikes a blow against the crushing weight of society’s superego. It is a volcanic outburst that liberates the individual from restraint, allowing an eruption of psychic energy and vitality that liberates each person so that their desires and creativity can flow freely. This humor has to be violent because its purpose is to break down all resistance to human freedom. One of Breton’s famous quotes is “beauty will be convulsive or it will be nothing at all.” What could be more convulsive than a burst of laughter at a sick and offensive joke, an explosive laughter so titanic in strength that it causes a disruption in the dreary orderliness of society? Humor has to be cruel and dark enough to be so disruptive. That is a tall demand to live up to.

Alas, most of the passages in this book do not reach those heights. At its best, this collection has some familiar names that go far in reaching the intention. It contains excerpts from Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”, Sade’s Juliette, and Lewis Carroll’s “The Lobster Quadrille.” There are a few other lesser known works by famous authors like Charles Baudelaire’s story about deliberately ruining the day of a street vendor selling glassware, the drunken Edgar Allan Poe having a conversation with a hallucinated man made out of wine bottles, J.K. Huysmans explains the need to harvest ptomaine from corpses to be used for perfume bases and flavorings for food to be eaten by the deceased’s family, and finally Leonora Carrington convinces a hyena at the zoo to attend a ball disguised as her and eat all the food because she prefers to stay home. These morbid passages are the funniest, the most disturbing, and the most most memorable ones in the anthology.

There are other recognizable names included like Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Salvador Dali, Arthur Rimbaud, and Comte de Lautreamont. Aside from the name recognition, these chapters don’t do much to keep the book interesting. Breton has a funny way of selecting some obscure writings by these authors that don’t come across as hilarious or even lend much to the book overall. There is also some poetry and a few passages by unrecognizable authors as well. It’s probable that the French sense of humor does not translate well into English and Surrealist humor, which is intended to be irrational, makes it all that much more opaque and incomprehensible.

Anthology of Black Humor is, overall, an underwhelming collection of writing. There are very few laugh-out-loud moments and even the funniest parts aren’t the kind of humor that will make you laugh until you break out in tears. Also, too many of the chapters are simply beyond comprehension; a lot of them read like smug inside jokes that most of us will never be privileged enough to understand. This collection fails to reach the earth shattering intentions that Andre Breton lays out in the introduction. Yet again, this is one of those books that I love the idea of, but don’t feel satisfied with its realization. And if you really are still wondering what black humor is all about, just remember the cannibal who bit into the arm of a clown. With a look of disgust on his face, the cannibal said, “This tastes funny” and spit the clown meat out.

 

Book Review

 

The Mudd Club

by Richard Boch

Back in the 1970s, there were three nightclubs in Manhattan keeping the underground music and art scene alive. One was Max’s Kansas City, a hangout for Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd, CBGB’s where punk rock grew and thrived, and then there was the less famous but equally important Mudd Club. That was a venue where the punk, new wave, no wave, and post punk music scenes grew alongside the works of underground filmmakers, painters, sculptors, fashion designers, spoken word and performance artists and others, finding the right balance between being exclusive and inclusive while maintaining an ever-changing atmosphere of innovation and excitement. Richard Boch, author of The Mudd Club, worked as a doorman there for about two years in 1979 and 1980. This book is his memoirs about that job and the lifestyle that went along with it.

As might be expected, Boch is an artist. He indulges in promiscuous sex and drugs. He loves rock and roll, brushing shoulders with celebrities, and the sense of power he gets from deciding who can and can’t enter the club. He is also a bit insecure. Boch starts off the whole book describing his anxieties and his desire to fit in, often worrying about whether he is right for the job of doorman to begin with. His self-consciousness is understandable at first, but after he keeps bringing it up throughout the course of the book, he starts to sound a little shallow and neurotic. He often worries about whether the clothes he wears are fashionable and when winter comes, he starts wearing a long tweed overcoat, something he is proud of and empowered by. It becomes a small nagging obsession as if wearing the coat is symbolic of his ability to fit in as a bona fide member of the underground music scene. This book will never be remembered as a quality bildungsroman.

Then again, it wasn’t intended to be. The writing is primarily about the people in The Mudd Club itself. It was originally the brainchild of Anya Phillips, artist and girlfriend of James Chance, filmmaker Diego Cortez, and Peter Mass. That latter man envisioned the club as a place with an anything goes ethic, the more outrageous the better. Such an ethic clashed with the practice of crowd control and that is where Richard Bloch comes in. As doorman, he has to use a variable, ambiguous, and ever changing metric of subjectivity to keep the crowd lively, exciting, and creative. Some nights it is a matter of how people are dressed or how they cut their hair, other nights it matters who you know or don’t know, then sometimes it matters if you have or haven’t been there previously. Sometimes tourists and visitors from the outer boroughs of New York City are welcome, some nights they aren’t. Celebrities are almost always allowed in, but not always. Meat Loaf gets turned away for being overweight and sweaty, Paul Simon gets rejected for acting like a jerk, and The Knack are considered unwelcome because Boch hates their hit single “My Sharona”. You can imagine the thrill the riff raff gets when being allowed entrance after seeing some big-name celebrity being rejected. It must also be a thrill when someone spends a few nights trying and failing to get in and then one night Boch clears the way and lets them through. That is the doorman’s art, making the club look exclusive even though eventually everybody gets a chance to be inside.

There is no shortage of name dropping in these pages. Big stars like Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Debbie Harry, Talking Heads, John McEnroe (who went there to snort cocaine), and the cast of Saturday Night Live are frequent guests. Even Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis shows up one night with a friend, has one drink, and then leaves. That is interesting enough, but the highlights of this book, for me at least, are the passages about some of the more underground bands that rarely, if ever, get written about in other places. Bands like 8 Eyed Spy, Bush Tetras, and The Brides of Funkenstein get written up so we get an idea of what their few shows were like. There is even one passage about Nico giving a performance on her harmonium while singing in her droning, dour voice while a disoriented audience looks on not knowing what to make of her. There are also some interesting art shows and theme nights that are politically incorrect. One of them is a dead rock star tribute that has a shrine to Janis Joplin with a mannequin lying face down with a bunch of hypodermic needles stuck in its arm. The shrine to Mama Cass is covered with ham sandwiches and the one for Jim Morrison is a pair of leather pants with a four foot rubber snake coming out of its unzipped fly. Unfortunately, most of these events are described with very little detail and are a bit disappointing.

Richard Boch himself takes so many drugs that his life turns into turmoil and results in an existential meltdown. This crisis makes him question the direction of his life and he ends up quitting The Mudd Club even though it has become a prominent part of his identity.

But this book is not always a thrilling read. Aside from the afore mentioned shortcomings in description, a lot of what happens is simply about who the author allows to enter and who he rejects. There aren’t a lot of great stories about the celebrities who show up, or anyone else, and most of what takes place in the club is simply drugs, sex, drinking, and dancing. Richard Boch does equal amounts of Quaaludes and cocaine and I would say if one of those drugs is dominant in influencing his writing, it is the Quaaludes as the tone tends to be downbeat and slow. Without getting too technical about grammar, I will say that Boch’s sentence structures don’t vary enough to make the prose anything other than repetitive. Reading this feels like running up a hill with a bad of bricks slung over your shoulder.

So The Mudd Club isn’t a great work of literature. But for those fascinated with Manhattan’s downtown underground scene in the 1970s, this may be the best account of this celebrated nightclub that exists. The Mudd Club frequently gets mentioned in other books and interviews. It even shows up in some films, but nothing as complete as Richard Boch’s work exists anywhere else as far as I know. So if you’re interested, be willing to take the bad with the good in this book and go with it. People from that scene are getting old, losing their memories, and dying off so we probably won’t get a better Mudd Club chronicle than this.

Book Review

Dark Archives:

A Librarian's Investigation Into the Science and History of

Books Bound in Human Skin

by Megan Rosenbloom

Does it matter what happens to your body after you die? Religious people might be inclined to answer in the affirmative, the rest of us maybe not so much. I tend to think that what happens to your corpse should be decided, when possible, by you before you die. After all, despite what you may or may not own while you live, your body is ultimately the part of you that you have had throughout the short span of your existence from the chemical concoction that is a zygote to the inanimate, rigor mortis infested stiff that you become the moment you croak. But after that final moment, your body becomes nothing but an object and whatever happens to it is beyond your comprehension. Would it matter if someone sliced off a layer of your skin, tanned it like leather, and used it to bind a book? Being the bibliophile that I am, I kind of like the idea, but others may not be so comfortable with it. I floated the idea with my wife and she said she would definitely not allow me to have that done. She’s mostly afraid of what my in-laws might think though.

The medical librarian and archivist Megan Rosenbloom’s Dark Archives delves into the subject of anthropodermic bibliopegy, the art and practice of binding books in human skin. When confronted with the reality that this really has been done in the past, a lot of questions immediately rise to mind such as who would want one of these, whose skin was used, or is it legal to make or own one? The author addresses all of these questions and then some.

The subtext of this book is the pursuit of knowledge. Books bound in human skin are not terribly interesting in and of themselves; they mostly look like ordinary leather bound books. Therefore the concept of “provenance” ,as they call it in the rare and antiquarian book trade, is central to the meaning of the work. The idea of provenance is that the history of the book is what gives it value. Previous ownership, the manufacturing process, the historical context, its current location, its authenticity, and its commonality all contribute to the value of the cultural artifact. In some cases, this provenance determines its financial value when it goes up for auction. In other cases the value is determined by what scholars and historians can learn from the volume’s history. It is the latter of these two values that concerns Megan Rosenbloom.

As the author travels around America and Europe in search of these books, she explains the scientific process of determining their authenticity. A lot of books that are believed by their owners to be bound in human skin turn out to be fake, most often bound in tanned pig hide. Think of that the next time you eat a taco de chicharron. At the very least, Rosenbloom is doing a service to the book world by identifying forgeries that are floating around in the possession if book collectors and authenticating the real ones. Pursuing knowledge of forged human skin books opens up some interesting lines of enquiry. For example, every book that was believed to be bound in the skin of non-white people has turned out to be fraudulent, making you wonder why someone would first off want such a book and also begging the question of why these forgeries were sold in the first place (I’ll give you a hint: it has something to do with making money). Also, books bound in the skin of Holocaust victims are probably all fakes too.

Aside from the biology of the matter, there is also the psychology behind it all. Some of the subject matters of these human skin books might tell us a bit about it. Many of them are medical and anatomical treatises written from a scientific point of view. Some of them are historical narratives or records kept that are of historical importance. One title was bound in the skin of a Scottish criminal and that book is on display in a museum with other mummified body parts taken from the same man. There are other books on the occult, mostly proven to be fakes, and one that even contains a poem about sado-masochism. Absolutely none of these are Harry Potter novels.

Inevitably, a book such as this could not be taken seriously without an ethical examination of using human remains for creating works of art. Rosenbloom doesn’t make light of the subject and actually condemns the practice as being inhumane and barbaric. But she does treat these antiquarian book as artifacts and the value of artifacts lie in what they can tell us about the past. Most importantly, the knowledge gained from researching the provenance of these books tells us something about how people viewed other humans in distant history. The fact that a lot of these books were commissioned by medical doctors and the tanned-leather skin that was used came from poor people who often died in hospitals or insane asylums says a lot about power relations and the predatory nature of class conflict. Rosenbloom uses the philosophy of Michel Foucault as an analytical tool to confront this issue. In criticism, I would say that she does not depend too heavily on Foucault to draw conclusions and is much more convincing when she follows her own ideas. In the end, she uses her subject matter as a reference point for understanding the current ethical climate of the medical profession and ends by calling for healthcare professionals to be more compassionate towards their patients while maintaining the necessary professional distance.

Now all of this is very interesting, but this book doesn’t always flow the way it should. Narrative transitions are poorly managed. In any typical chapter, Rosenbloom gives vivid details of an item’s provenance and its historical context and then abruptly shifts without warning to some statement about something else, usually something to do with our current times. It often seems like she doesn’t complete her intended task, but on closer reading she actually does; the problem is that her writing lacks the signaling and bridging that indicates conclusion and transition to some other related subject matter. This signaling might be a mere formality of style, but it makes the reading smoother and less confusing. The author should have found a better proofreader.

In terms of thought provoking content, Dark Archives is jam-packed with things to consider. The chapter on the legal grey areas of possessing human remains has enough to keep your head reeling for days. The book is also brief and accessible, even if it is sometimes poorly written and lacking in direction. It ultimately raises the question of how the living relate to the dead seen through the issue of what we are allowed to do with human remains. And maybe binding a book in human skin is less gruesome then we think. After all, cathedrals in Europe house relics from dead saints and kings, catacombs and charnel houses stockpile hundreds of thousands of bones and skulls all on view for gawking tourists, English people in Victorian England used to keep locks of the deceased’s hair in jewelry, Buddhist temples in Asia have mummified monks on display in glass cases that are believed to have magical powers, Tibetans have traditionally made ritual objects and musical instruments from human bones, human body parts were formerly built into the walls and foundations of buildings, mummies are on display in museums all across the world and so are mummified body parts, 18th century painters used to use paints made from ground up mummies, and people of that same time period used to have mummy unwrapping parties in their homes. People keep the cremains of their loved ones in urns stored in their houses. And the dead have never had any idea that any of this was going on. Books bound in human skin don’t sound so unusual now, do they? The practice is illegal now, as it should be, but the study of those artifacts for scientific and historical reasons is entirely legitimate. That is the whole point of this book.

Now I’m reconsidering what I want done with my body when I die. It has to be something that won’t upset my wife. I’ll probably stick with my original plan even though Dark Archives really did make me reconsider this and a lot of other things as well.