Book Review

The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's:

A Secret History of Jewish Punk

by Steven Lee Beeber

Manhattan’s Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century housed a large population of Jewish immigrants, most of them living in tenements. By the 1970s, the Lower East Side, due to low rents and high crime, became a haven for artists and musicians. The streets there were rough and the music that grew out of that atmosphere came to be known as punk rock. The center of this scene was a biker bar named CBGB, owned by a Jewish man named Hilly Kristal. Few historians or journalists have drawn a direct connection between the old Jewish slums and the first wave of punk so Steven Lee Beeber does just that in The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk.

From the beginning, Beeber, a Jewish writer himself, defines what he considers to be the essence of Jewishness and then proceeds to demonstrate how this cultural trait had a direct influence on the rise of punk and the form it took. He starts by naming comedian Lenny Bruce as the patron saint of Jewish punk. Bruce embodies this essence which Beeber describes as being coarse in mannerism, ironic, transgressive, socially progressive, culturally hybrid, and humorous with an eye towards sharp social observation and critique. Lenny Bruce was all about pushing the boundaries of convention in order to hold a mirror up to society regardless of how uncomfortable that could be. This got him into a lot of trouble. According to Beeber, this attitudinal stance is characteristic of Jewish Americans and he proceeds to examine the ways in which this essence manifested in the punk scene of the 1970s.

Before getting to the musicians, the author covers the influence of Jews behind the scenes in the likes of rock journalists, business owners, band managers, song writers, and record producers. Managing culture from the wings and in the background is another characteristic that Beeber brings up as a trait of American Jewishness. It is the kind of thing that idiot conspiracy theorists will cite as evidence that sinister Jews run the world and the author does not examine this at all. It is safe to say that the Jewish author of this book isn’t suggesting anything of the sort though.

The chapter on Lou Reed, lead member of the massively influential Velvet Underground, establishes another aspect of Jewish-American identity, that of the outsider, a trait that fueled the energies of punk in a potent way. Lou Reed himself was a chronic outsider, being unable to relate to his Jewish family as well as the larger American society. His struggles with being bisexual made his outsider status that much more prominent and painful too since his parents made him get shock therapy to cure him of his possible homosexual tendencies which were considered a mental illness in the 1960s. Reed was young at the time and actually not entirely sure if he really was gay, making it all that much worse. While in The Velvet Underground, he felt he had found some acceptance as a member of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, but the other people there belittled him for being Jewish. It’s no surprise that Lou Reed earned a reputation for being prickly and stand-offish in the 1970s. And here a sub-theme to this book gets introduced since anti-Semistism and Jewishness ran along parallel lines as punk developed into a full-blown genre of rock.

Other early chapters bring the Jewish traits of punk out into the open as Beeber writes about synth-punk pioneers Suicide with their intimidating and confrontational musical stance, Boston’s Jonathan Richman who also brought a heavy element of anxiety into his outsider brand of rock, and Lenny Kaye who worked as a journalist and guitar player for Patti Smith. But the theme of the book really comes out in its full strength in the chapters on The Dictators and The Ramones.

The almost all-Jewish Dictators, fronted by Handsome Dick Manitoba, began as a joke band. The lyrics on their first album were full of self-effacing humor and macho posturing that was calculated to both celebrate and overcome the stereotype of Jewish men being nerdy intellectuals by embracing lowbrow culture and hyper-aggressive street gang toughness. They wanted to prove they were more like Meyer Lansky and less like Woody Allen without letting anyone forget that underneath it all, they were a bunch of Jewish comedians anyhow. Outside of the punk scene in New York though, no one seemed to get the joke.

The Ramones did something similar. Drummer Tommy Ramone, the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, formed a band with Johnny and Joey Ramone. The latter was the older brother of Johnny’s high school friend. Joey was Jewish himself, overly tall and skinny due to a congenital bone disease that made him both awkward and intimidating. He also suffered from mental illness, making him the ultimate example of punk in the Jewish sense as Beeber describes it. But there was a strange contradiction at the heart of The Ramones; while Tommy and Joey were both Jewish, Johnny and Dee Dee were political conservatives who collected Nazi memorabilia. The connection between punk’s Jewishness and its parallel tendency towards anti-Semitism and Nazi fetishism is taken up in a later chapter. Beeber comes up with some plausible, if underdeveloped, explanations for why Jewish punks and Nazi fetishists could ironically exist in the same space while holding the punk scene together. He sees The Ramones as emblematic of this condition even though he never examines it from the other side, making no commentary on why the punks who wore swastikas saw no problem in socializing in a music scene with such a heavy Jewish presence.

After that, this book begins to fall apart. The chapter on Richard Hell is weak. After Beeber contacted Hell and asked him for his input, Hell told him that even though he had a Jewish father, he didn’t identify as Jewish since he was raised in a secular family without any emphasis on his ethnic background. Beeber can’t accept this as he sets out to prove that there is some kind of Jewishness present in Hell’s music. It feels like Beeber wrote the whole chapter to berate Hell for not honoring his ancestry. Hell himself doesn’t deny being Jewish or even feeling ashamed of it; he just isn’t interested in it and can’t relate to it. Beeber can’t just let him be what he is and delves into Hell’s artistic archive in search of something Jewish to prove that Hell really does have a Jewish essence. At this point, Beeber’s concept of Jewishness becomes arbitrary and petty.

The chapters on Chris Stein of Blondie and Jewish women in punk are even worse. Chris Stein is an interesting case because he is Jewish but also collects Nazi memorabilia. Beeber mentions this briefly but spends most of the chapter writing about his wife Debbie Harry who he insists on calling a shiksa. Without any in-depth explanation as to why Stein’s marriage to a non-Jewish woman is of any importance to this narrative, the chapter doesn’t amount to much.

The chapter on women is spotty too. He writes about Genya Ravan whose band wasn’t connected to the punk scene. Her only real contribution to punk involved her producing the first Dead Boys album. When they showed up to the studio wearing swastikas, Ravan, a survivor of the Holocaust, lectured them about how offensive that was and those nasty boys obediently took them off before they started recording their album Young Loud and Snotty. He also writes about Helen Wheels who was a minor player in the CBGB scene. Then Beeber brings Madonna into the discussion even though she was neither punk nor Jewish, but he applauds her because she did become fascinated with the kabbalah in her later years. Then the Riot Grrl movement gets a few paragraphs , even though none of those musicians were Jewish. He says they were honorary Jews because of their punk attitude though. And this is a problem I have with political correctness. The author feels he is obligated to include a chapter on women just because that is expected of authors these days, but Jewish women didn’t play a prominent role in the early days of punk so we get a sloppy chapter that doesn’t mean much of anything as a result. It would have been better, and more honest, to just accept that early punk women weren’t Jews and leave the useless chapter out.

Then there is a passage about punk in England. The Jewish band manager Malcolm McLaren and influential fashion designer Vivienne Westwood get good write ups. Sid Vicious’s Jewish girlfriends Nancy Spungeon also gets her story told right up until the murder.

So is The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s a glass that is half empty or half full? I’d prefer to say it is both at the same time. Half of the chapters are well-written and half aren’t. I think Steven Lee Beeber made a mistake in his approach by trying to state a thesis and then following up by defending it. The result is an attempt to twist information to make it suit his argument which doesn’t always work. Things get pretty messy when he writes about Jewish punks that don’t quite fit into his theory. Also he doesn’t comprehend that non-Jews and members of other ethnic groups might share the same qualities of Jewishness that he outlines. I can accept that Jewish attitudes had a lot to do with the directions that punk went in, especially in regards to the outsider status, sense of humor, and social commentary. Beeber obviously wrote this out of a sense of pride in his heritage and he is entitled to that, but the result is some valuable insights alongside a lot of dreck. More importantly, it provides a new angle on understanding Jewish cultural history as much as it does a new angle on punk, particularly in the greater New York City area. I think the book works better as an homage to the oversize presence of Jews in rock and roll and American counter-cultures though.

 

Book Review

The Mekong:

Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future

by Milton Osborne

The first time I ever saw the Mekong River was in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. After visiting the National Palace, I stood on its banks, looking across to the other side. A couple days later, while taking a bus to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, I went across the Mekong by ferry. After traveling up the east coast of Vietnam to Hue, I crossed over into Laos and again stood on the bank of the Mekong in Savannakhet. My travels took me up to Vientiane where I ate river fish and som tam on the north shore and then took another bus north to Luang Prabang. One evening, I climbed down into the river valley after dinner. As the sun set on the Mekong there, the whole valley filled with an intensely golden light which was like no sunset I had ever seen before. It was the golden color of those stupas all over Southeast Asia, but brighter and more vibrant. I later went back down south and crossed the Friendship Bridge spanning the Mekong, arriving in Nong Khai, Thailand. Over the years, I would have more encounters with this legendary river.

Milton Osborne’s The Mekong: Turbulent Past Uncertain Future is significantly less exciting than any travel adventures I have had in that region. The history presented here is interesting enough, but it gets a light treatment without too many details.

The Mekong begins in the mountains of Tibet, flows south through Yunnan Province in China, cuts through a corner of Myanmar, drops further south through Laos, forming the border along the northern and eastern edges of Thailand. From there it turns inland again into Laos, enters Cambodia, and flows towards the delta in Vietnam where it merges into the South China Sea. Osborne’s historical narrative begins with the Khmer Angkor Kingdom, mostly known now for its iconic Angkor Wat. Portuguese explorers arrived and the Spanish followed. Those colonial powers did not conquer the Khmers or the Annamese, but they did have a significant impact on their affairs. The colonialists left for a long time and the Siamese conquered the Khmers and Laos while the Chinese invaded Vietnam. When the French colonialists showed up, they were welcomes as liberators since they freed those people from the tyranny of the Siamese and the Chinese. The honeymoon period didn’t last though and the French colonialists turned out to be just as severe. Even worse, they exploited the land for raw materials in far more damaging ways than the other Asian conquerors had.

In the heart of this colonial atrocity, there is an interesting adventure story. A group of explorers had a vision of using the Mekong for transport with the intention of moving commercial goods between China and the Mekong Delta where ships could transport them over to Europe. Their intentions may have been less than noble, but they were the first people to map the Mekong River and the story of their explorations is an adventure that rivals the best travel narratives. This really is the best part of the book.

From there, Osborne writes about the French – Indochina War and the end of colonial rule, the American invasion of Vietnam, and the future of the river. This last section deals mostly with environmental concerns largely in relation to China’s ambition to build dams on the Mekong. This has caused controversy with the countries further downstream.

The writing in this book is simple and clear. The first half covering the pre-modern and colonial periods are the best. Osborne does not give highly detailed accounts of events and it is all too obvious that a lot more could have been written. Osborne acknowledges that colonialism was a gross injustice, but he doesn’t dwell on the atrocities to any great extent. He isn’t dismissing this ugly side of Southeast Asian history so much as minimizing it for the sake of brevity and accessibility. This might bother some readers. Another major omission from this book is that almost nothing is said about the kingdom of Siam or the modern nation of Thailand, a significant portion of which is on the southern and western shores of the Mekong. A lot of what is included also happens in the Cambodian areas adjacent to the Mekong, mostly the plain of Angkor and the Tonle Sap tributary river which not directly on the titular body of water.

The Mekong is an interesting read, but it has its limitations. It is, so far, the only book that I know of that treats the entire river as a subject of history. It’s the kind of book that makes good casual reading if you stumble across a copy somewhere, but it isn’t something I would recommend hunting down. Most of what Milton Osborne writes about can be found in other sources that go further in depth. The target audience for this book is probably the handful of intelligent travelers and expats who are interested in more than beach parties and prostitutes. But if you’ve been to the Mekong, it might be a good book to enhance the memories you have. Personally, I have no desire to remember the persistently annoying mosquitoes, but I am more than happy to remember eating those fish that can be bought in the restaurants along the shore. The Laos and Isan Thai people stuff those freshwater fish full of lemongrass and garlic, pack them in salt for a week, then grill them. You eat it with green chili seafood sauce, sticky rice, and papaya salad. Wash it down with a Beer Chang and have a great night with the Asian friends you will inevitably make while in this most gregarious part of the world.

 

Book Review

The Demon

by Hubert Selby Jr.

It’s the American Dream, Hubert Selby Jr. style. The Demon tells the story of Harry White, a corporate executive and sex addict from Brooklyn who simultaneously rises to the top and plummets to the bottom. It’s a Selby novel so you know from the start it’s not going to be pretty.

On the surface, Harry White seems like a good enough guy. He loves his family, especially his grandmother, and has potential as a businessman. We learn a lot about him when he plays softball on a team of regulars from the bar where he hangs out. During one game, a married woman pushes her infant past the diamond in a stroller. While playing in the outfield, he strikes up a conversation with her and abandons the game to go have sex with her while her husband is away. That happens after he scores the only run in the game. His team wins 1 – 0. This scene sets up the tone for the rest of the novel in two ways: one is that it that it shows how smooth he is at seducing women, and the other is that it sets him apart from his peers, proving that he is one step ahead of them. It also shows how quickly he can move from being a responsible team player to a man who can impulsively leave his responsibilities behind to pursue his own selfish interests. The psychology of his inner mental world comes out as the novel moves along.

The more Harry chases tail, the sloppier he gets at his job. His office manager Wentworth reprimands him for always coming back from lunch late, pushes him to be more professional, and start a family. Wentworth turns out to be a strong mentor for Harry, helping him tame his impulses, and sublimate them into superior work for the benefit of the corporation. One day, during an office party at a country club, Harry meets Linda, the woman he falls in love with, marries, and has children with. She is a bit more than a trophy wife as she nurtures his better side and brings out his finer tendencies. Aside from his deep commitment to her, he discovers he has a talent for growing plants, virtually turning their house into a wild jungle of trees, flowers, and hanging plants.

Up until this point, we know that Harry has a darker side. This is as much a story of his inner torment as it is a story of his rise to success. Selby describes this as a nervous and irritating itch in his inner mind that Harry tries to silence. At first, he can only silence it by seducing married women, but since this habit drives him towards irresponsibility, he decides to clean up his life and distract himself from his psychological pain by working extra hard. He temporarily cures his sex addiction by becoming a workaholic. This appears to be good since he grows wealthier, becomes a top executive helping to drive his company to greater business deals, and his marriage grows stronger. The problem is that all of his success does not cure his neurosis. Hard work and family life are only a medium-range fix and the urge to sleep around again grows stronger and stronger until he goes back to picking up women in bars. This up-again-down-again cycle of bipolarity continues through to the end of the book with the highs and lows getting more extreme. Harry’s entire motivation is to silence the nagging uneasiness that underlies everything he does. Eventually we see that this is his real problem; the sex addiction and climb up the corporate ladder don’t make it go away. After a brilliant passage in the book where Harry goes into therapy with a psychoanalyst that fails to see what the real problem is, he transfers his neurosis into other darker activities, namely shoplifting, burglary, and finally murder.

The contrasts embodied in Harry White are what make this book so successful. Harry is in the middle, between a happy marriage and a destructive impulse towards adultery. Harry is not sociopathic feeling guilty because he loves his wife and children. He knows what he does is wrong, but he is unable to control his behavior. He leads a double life because his secrecy stems out of a deep sense of shame. This is even more poignant because his wife is intensely devoted to him and worries about his mental health constantly. We see that Harry could have a more satisfying life if only he learned how to tame his inner demons. We also see that his mental discomfort motivates him to do both good and bad in equal proportions, making a cure for his neurosis an impossibility. Harry White is a tragic figure, not an evil figure.

The story is not terribly original. Harry White is the man who is unhappy even though he has everything. That obviously isn’t the strongest part of the novel. What is great about it all is that Selby, does what he does best: charting an inner landscape of one man’s misery and expressing it in a way that makes the writing almost more like poetry than ordinary fiction.

While Selby describes the psychological turmoil of Harry, one element is persistently absent. Selby never clearly spells out what the source of Harry’s neurosis is. At a certain level this works because it draws us closer to Harry’s mind, dragging us deeper into his mental confusion. And actually Harry knows that he is motivated by a desire to silence his mental pain, but he never gets to the deeper root of his problem. I do think Selby provides us with an ambiguous clue though. Near the end, before Harry’s final act of violence, he fantasizes about being a great softball player. This relays the narrative back to the beginning when Harry, being the most effective player on the team, abandons the game for a tryst. One way to interpret this is that Harry’s anxiety and proneness to addiction result from an unfulfilled desire to be a great baseball player. That’s every American kid’s dream, right? And yet the only thing that ever prevented him from reaching that goal was a misplacement of his priorities; he pursued a fleeting, short-term pleasure rather than working hard to gradually reach a long-term goal. Is Selby diagnosing an American illness, one that grows out of a quick-fix society where convenience and instant gratification override any desire for quality or deep satisfaction? Or maybe the softball fantasy is simply another manifestation of Harry’s neurosis, a Freudian cigar that is really just a cigar. The lack of a final answer just makes this novel more effective as an engine of discomfort.

In the end, Harry White is an archetype of the American Dream, though it is not ultimately clear if Hubert Selby Jr.’s The Demon is meant to make a statement about capitalism in America the way Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho does. Selby tends to write more about existential crises more than moral dilemmas, but he does so in a way that prods the reader towards uncomfortable moral questions. Harry White is just as disgusting as he is sympathetic and how you choose to judge him in the end says a lot about where you stand as a moral person in a morally flawed society, a sick society like America that could be healthy if only it learned to contain and control its evil, a society embodied in the character of Harry White, bent on destruction despite its unlimited potential for greatness.

 

Book Reviews

An Eye For the Dragon:

Southeast Asia Observed 1954-1970

by Dennis Bloodworth

A book like Dennis Bloodworth’s An Eye For the Dragon would never come to print by a big name publishing house in today’s cultural climate. I’m no supporter of censorship, but I do believe there is such a thing as common courtesy. That is something Bloodworth lacks in writing about Southeast Asia from the end of World War II to 1970.

The book immediately gets off to a bad start in the introduction. The author’s stated intention is to explain what Southeast Asia is really like for people who have never been there. Maybe I am not the best audience for his writing since I have lived in both Indonesia and Thailand and also taught at the University of Wuhan in China. (Yes, it is THAT Wuhan, the one that brought coronavirus into the world in 2020.) I do have some knowledge of the region. But Bloodworth starts out by launching into an explanation of what durian is as if no other writer has ever done so before. OK, I get that not everyone has been to Asia so despite the patronizing tone, I move on to the first chapter. It all goes downhill from there to the middle of the book.

The first half is a long list of everything the author doesn’t like about Southeast Asia. He starts off by complaining about the corruption, the politics, the low education levels, the lack of intellect, the dishonesty, and a whole bunch of other things that are inherently negative. The most insulting thing he says is, and I paraphrase, that America wasn’t being sensible for trying to promote democracy in Vietnam because there aren’t any adequate materials to work with. In other words, he thinks Vietnamese people aren’t intelligent enough. Judging by the current state of American politics, I’m not so sure American or Brits are intelligent enough for democracy either, but that’s another matter. This comes from a chapter in which he visits a small village in the north of Malaysia on the island of Borneo where the Dyaks are being instructed to stuff ballot boxes in an election. He comments that they don’t even know what country they live in. Alright, I know that it sometimes isn’t fair to judge people in times past by today’s standards, but this kind of comment is racist and insensitive even by the lower standards of the 1970s. And the fact that these problems certainly do exist in Southeast Asia is undercut by his haughty attitude and inability or unwillingness to address any of these issues in depth.

The writing style is not too impressive either. Bloodworth addresses the reader the way an adult might speak to a five year old. Each of the earlier chapters addresses some issue like crime or education that Bloodworth doesn’t approve of. He starts off writing about one country, say the Philippines and then transitions into sentences about other countries like Cambodia, Vietnam, Burma, and so on. Sometimes he brings cities or regions into the writing without even saying what country they are in. Even paragraphs can begin in one place and end in another for no good literary reason. If you’re going to author a book that is full of insults to people of other countries, the least you can do is learn how to write properly first. If you want to put people down for being stupid and you can’t even write effectively than you only make yourself look like the idiot. Besides, there is a difference between listing and writing and Dennis Bloodworth doesn’t write.

The tone starts to change about halfway through in the chapter about Southeast Asian women. At first he complements them for being smart, practical, shrewd, and even the intellectual equals of Asian men. Given that the author spent the first half of the book making derogatory comments about Asian men, I’m not sure how seriously to take his claims. But then he really blows it when writing about going to do some interviews and being given the services of prostitutes as gifts by the people who take escort him. At that point I almost gave up reading this piece of crap.

But the second half of the book is a big improvement. Bloodworth takes a less insulting approach to writing about politics and the writing is actually a lot better too. In one chapter he writes about King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia. He doesn’t say much about Sihanouk, but at least it reads like a slightly more serious attempt at actually writing about something rather than complaining. Some of the more interesting parts give details of the awkward visits made by Khrushchev and other Soviets to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. This is of interest because I have never found an account like this in any other history book. He also makes the valid point, one that other authors have made as well, that the North Vietnamese were more concerned with nationalism than with communism and that many nationalists joined the North Vietnamese Communist Party because they wanted self-determination more than anything else. The communists were just a convenient tool for them. He also makes a good point by saying that America was pushing the Vietnamese people into the arms of the communists by supporting the unpopular South Vietnamese dictator Ngo Dinh Diem and the other thugs and tyrants who took over after his assassination.

By far the best part of this book comes at the end when Bloodworth does a fair analysis of the politics of Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore. He gives some good character sketches of Tengku Abdel Rahman, Sukarno, and Lee Kwan Yew. Tengku Abdel Rahman seies the provinces of Sarawak and Sabah on Borneo then expells Singapore from Malaysia to prevent a Chinese majority in his racist, Islamic-centric nation. Meanwhile, Sukarno tries to launch an invasion of Sarawak and Sabah, claiming them to be Indonesian territories and Lee Kwan Yew becomes the autocratic leader of Singapore.

By the end of the book, Bloodworth presents himself in a slightly more respectable manner. And then he has to go and blow it again. It all ends on a rotten note as he writes about how terrible Southeast Asian people sound when they speak English. He even sinks low enough to make fun of his Chinese wife’s pronunciation.

I hesitate to say that An Eye For the Dragon might be worth reading. The second half is an accessible account of the politics of the 1960s. Other than that, this is a crude and condescending work of yellow journalism written by a pompous asshole who thinks he shits ice cream. By “yellow journalism” I don’t mean the now pejorative label of “yellow” as a descriptor for Asian people; I mean “yellow” in the sense of the kind of journalism popularized by the Hearst corporation that is sensational and written with the intent of insulting the subjects of the writing without any attempt at neutrality. Southeast Asia has its share of problems. A lot of them are the direct results of colonialism. In the time I spent in Asia I encountered a lot of people who live the best lives they can given their circumstances and many of them are making an effort to improve their societies along the way. They don’t deserve to be beaten down by snooty British writers like Dennis Bloodworth who still see the world through the eyes of British colonialists. The sun set on the British Empire a long time ago so get over it and grow up. Bloodworth also never lives up to his stated intention of explaining what life is like in Southeast Asia. Most of what he writes about is related to politicians and what he does say about ordinary Asian people is mostly offensive. He fails to realize his intention of writing this book. Unless you want to study how post-colonial British journalists write about people they see as inferior to them, this book isn’t good for much. There are far better ways to learn about this part of the world.

 

Book Review

The Room

by Hubert Selby Jr.

In pre-modern times before prisons became institutionalized, criminals were punished by shunning or exile; they were either ignored by other members of society or they were sent out of their villages to fend for themselves in the wilderness. Since prisons were invented, criminals have been contained and segregated from the general population and sometimes even segregated from the prison population when put into solitary confinement. Humans are mammals, specifically primates, and so social bonds and community are necessary for survival. Isolated primates become mentally sick. A notorious scientific experiment was once conducted on rhesus monkeys where one monkey was separated from his peer group by a glass wall. He could see them but could not associate with them. He became depressed and angry and when the lab technicians released him back into the rhesus monkey population, he became hostile, aggressive, and violent towards the other monkeys. Solitude had made him insane and so he had to be permanently removed. The main character of Hubert Selby Jr.’s The Room is a lot like that rhesus monkey.

That main character, who I will call the Prisoner because he is unnamed in the narrative, remains isolated in his jail cell, waiting for his trial, throughout most of the novel. Unable to leave, save for meal times, his only escape is inwards into his own mind where he indulges in either memories of his childhood or fantasies involving either his pursuit of justice or indulgences in the torture of the policemen who arrested him.

The first thing to notice in The Room is Selby’s writing style, a continuation of how he wrote his previous novel Last Exit to Brooklyn. The punctuation is minimal and follows Selby’s own invented rules. This makes his prose rush along at a rapid pace. It also demands a lot from the reader in a way that benefits his style; it is difficult to be a passive recipient of information when reading Selby since the writing demands you pay careful attention to what is happening, when people are speaking since there are no quotation marks. The narrative also shifts between first and third person which is something else to watch out for. This benefits the narrative because it shows you who the Prisoner is from an inner and outer perspective. The shifts from third to first person also draws you into his inner world in a way that might not be possible using a different writing technique.

Needless to say, the Prisoner’s childhood memories are not pleasant. Two persistent themes are his relations with the police and a snowballing sense of shame. From a young age, he plays solitary games where he pretends to be having shootouts with the police. Otherwise, his real life interactions with them are not so bad. In one scene, a policeman helps him when he gets bit by a dog. Another policeman helps him when he gets injured. But then there is a suspicious incident where the Prisoner is in a park and a cop hiding behind a bush jumps out and smashes his hand with a billy club then runs away. It’s an improbable story and one that marks the Prisoner out as an unreliable narrator. This is the story he tells his mother when he returns home with an injury. It sounds like the kind of a story a twelve year old would make up if he were doing something he shouldn’t have been doing and was too ashamed to say what really happened.

The theme of shame and dishonesty persist throughout the Prisoner’s childhood memories. Most of these revolve around sex as his thoughts keep coming back to stains on his pants from either urine or semen. Some of the incidents that lead to these stainings are narrated more than once with differences in details each time therefore reinforcing the status of the unreliable narrator. For example, one story he tells his mother is that the urine stain on his pants was the result of an incident with a girl. He says he urinated on her and she got him back by urinating on him; somehow she had good enough aim so that her urine stream landed precisely right on his crotch. Again it sounds like a story a child would make up out of shame for what really happened like losing control and pissing in his pants.

Another stain he gets on his pants is the result of the Prisoner and a girl fondling each other in a movie theater. He has to walk home and performs an excessive cleansing of himself in the bathroom so no one can see the stain left by the semen. And so the theme of shame and the attending cover ups through actions and lies persist. You might also notice the way the Prisoner lies to himself in his jail cell inner monologues to justify his mistakes as if his self-deceptions are the only thread of hope he has to cling on to. His thoughts are just as much of a prison as his cell is.

As he lies in bed, the Prisoner’s mind becomes a stage for the acting out of his fantasies. One involves himself writing an imaginary letter to the press which sparks a government investigation into injustice and police brutality. You might notice that the letter is neither detailed nor persuasive, but in his fantasies it is. This launches into a grandiose story of the Prisoner being lauded as a hero for standing up for justice and speaking out to the media and in the courts. He also daydreams about representing himself as a defendant in court. His cross-examinations of the cops who arrested him are deranged, unrealistic, and absurd. They serve the purpose of confusing the witnesses more than cross-examining them though that really doesn’t matter because the Prisoner’s objective is to humiliate them more than anything. These grandiosities are silly and pathetic, but they reveal a lot about the Prisoner. He is a man with a mediocre mind fantasizing about being a genius, but since he lacks intelligence, his idea of “genius” just looks stupid. It also tells you something else about who he is. People fantasize about what they don’t have. So what kind of man would have grandiose fantasies about being a hero and an intellectual giant? A nobody, that’s who. Also notice that the Prisoner never writes, let alone sends, the aforementioned letter. He only dreams about it because he is a coward and could never bring himself to do such a thing. Indulging in self-pity suits his self-destructive purposes more than being assertive ever would.

Then there are the torture and rape fantasies. In two scenes, the Prisoner imagines himself kidnapping the two policemen who arrested him, taking them to a dungeon, which he calls the kennel, and training them to be dogs in ways that are sadistic and homo-erotic. They read like gay BDSM sessions that have gone horribly wrong. In another scene, he fantasizes about the two cops kidnapping and raping a woman in the woods. If this passage isn’t disturbing enough, then you have to understand that there is a whole other dimension to it. This fantasy is about not just the rape but how the two cops get away with with their it so the Prisoner can use it against them as evidence during the cross-examination during the imaginary trial. Tom Waits once sang “you’re innocent when you dream.” The Prisoner really puts this idea to its ultimate test.

These fantasies make the Prisoner look absolutely repulsive. And yet they are only fantasies and they come from the mind of a chronically lonely man, suffering from inadequacy and shame to the point of despair. He wallows in an inescapable pit of depression and his sadism is an attempt to make himself feel superior to someone else. At some level, these fantasies are also a means of torturing himself. In one part, he imagines cutting off the cops’ eyelids and shining bright lights at them while using eye drops to moisten their eyes. He controls when they are allowed to get the drops in a combination of the psychology of water torture and physical sadism. This transitions into the Prisoner lying on his bed and holding his eyes open for as long as he can while staring at the lights and then closing them to form tears. Those tears are just as emotional as they are for physical relief. He also uses similar language to describe the way the police restrained the woman during her rape and how they restrained him during his arrest while pushing him into the back of the police car. By associating himself with his imaginary victims, we get a sense that his own thoughts are a means of hurting himself.

When the Prisoner emerges from his memories and daydreams, he is alone with his thoughts in his cell and nothing else. He gets obsessed with a pimple on his cheek. Every time he prods at it, the painful thoughts of the police start up again. To him, the pimple is disproportionately painful to what it actually is. To most people, such a blemish would be a minor discomfort but for him it is an excruciating reminder, like the semen and urine stains on his pants, of how worthless he feels. While suffering in his shame and isolation, such a trivial thing becomes magnified to a point of incomprehensible pain.Then while in his bed, his pants get stained again and he has to go to the mess hall trying to hide it from the other prisoners. He begins feeling nauseous and finally admits that nausea has been the only friend he has ever had. You can’t get anymore sick with loneliness than that. There is no way out of his cell, there is no way out of his isolation, and there is no way out of his mind. All three are his inescapable prison.

The subject of this book is a loser. He is a whiner, a complainer, a coward, a weakling, and a failure. His isolation is a double-bind since it causes him to be miserable while his misery drives other people away. Can you blame those other people for ignoring him? You have to admit that you probably wouldn’t want to be around him yourself. He’s just one of those problematic people you’d be better off avoiding. It is a discomforting thought that we might be complicit in this man’s loneliness and despair. On the other hand, by reading this book we get up close and personal with him. At some level, we relate to him. Is anyone happy all the time? Hasn’t everyone felt alone in the world at some point? We may not be as miserable as he is, but we have all been miserable at least once and the Prisoner reminds us of that. It is another discomforting thought that we might have something in common with such an unappealing person.

As unique and provocative as this novel is, there is one major flaw in the prose. There are at least three passages where Selby just goes on for too long. The most memorable one is the scene where the main character and a girl fondle each other in the movie theater. It goes on for a good fifteen pages and, honestly, that isn’t necessary. Once you know what they are doing, it doesn’t need to be excessively explained over and over again. We all know what a hand job feels like and don’t need it to be explained. There are a couple other passages where Selby just plain overshoots his mark. It is also a little too obvious at times that this novel was inspired by Jean Genet’s Our Lady Of the Flowers which, I have to say, is actually a much better work of art.

I can’t say The Room is for everybody. Then again, Hubert Selby Jr. generally isn’t for everybody either. It takes a certain amount of courage and dedication to finish a novel like this. The kind of courage it takes is motivated by the desire to understand someone who is not like we are, someone we would rather not know about, the kind of person most people would ignore. Then it also takes a certain kind of honesty to admit that we might have some common ground with such a person. It gives you a different perspective on life, but maybe one that is tragically important for understanding the human condition.

 

Book Review

The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia

by Alfred McCoy

with Catherine B. Read & Leonard P. Adams II

     In the 1970s, Gene Hackman starred in a movie called The French Connection. It tells the story of how undercover American narcotics agents intercept a massive shipment of heroin being smuggled into the U.S. inside a sports car. I can’t remember if the movie ever says exactly where the drugs came from , but it’s likely they originated in Asia’s Golden Triangle and got shipped to New York City via Marseilles, France. The movie was based on a true story and I’m sure the film’s producer was aware of Alfred McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. It shows how there is an impossibly complex history of corruption, politics, greed, and Western intervention that has always facilitated the drug trade and probably alwayw will.

This book combines historical research with muckraking investigative journalism contemporary to the time of its publication in the early 1970s. Of course, that was a time when the drug culture and the Vietnam War were in full swing so it shouldn’t surprise anybody that the two are linked. It starts with a crash course in the history of poppy cultivation, the opium trade, the invention of morphine and heroin, their legal medicinal use in the Western world, and how all of this relates to Asia. Then we get to World Warr II when the OSS, the prototype of the CIA, collaborated with the Mafia to ensure Mussolini didn’t gain power in Sicily. The American government turned a blind eye to the heroin trade in the name of fighting fascism. As the Sicilian gangsters declined in power, the Corsican Mafia stepped in and partially took over. This overlapped with the French-Indochina Wars in the 11950s when Vietnam tried to decolonize and kick the French out. The Corsican Mafia remained in Vietnam though and continued doing business as the Americans took over where France left off. Meanwhile the Viet Minh, who later became the Comunist party, funded their war of anti-colonialism by selling poppies grown by Meo hill tribe farmers in North Vietnam and Laos. At this point you can guess that the story has nowhere to go but down.

There is also a detailed analysis of the Golden Triangle, a region of Southeast Asia including northeast Myanmar, Western Laos, and northeast Thailand. This is where poppy cultivation flourished and heroin manufacturing did too, especially because heroin at every level of production, distribution, and use was 100 percent legal in Laos. And why wouldn’t it be? Every political party and branch of the military had a hand in the narcotics trade. Like in North Vietnam, poppies were being farmed and sold to support the separatist revolutionaries of the Shan state in Myanmar, the anti-communist militias of the Chinese Kuomintang, and intelligence gathering agents of the CIA all in the same region. Drugs coming from the Golden Triangle were smuggled, with help from the Thai military and police, to Bangkok, Hong Kong, and, most importantly, Saigon. These were the major distribution points for the rest of the world.

What’s really interesting about this book is that it accounts for the context of the heroin trade in great detail. To understand how and why it flourished at that time, you need to understand the political and military structures of the countries involved. The two countries that get the most detailed analyses are South Vietnam and Laos. Both countries had trouble establishing democratic rule because politicians and military officials work with supporters and constituents that function more like tribes. Among the supporters are religious sects and criminal gangs along with varieties of other individuals, most of which are corrupt and greedy. These factions work by competing with each other. The conflicts often escalate to territorial disputes, violence, and assassinations so when America was supporting the government of South Vietnam in an effort to cleans the country of communists and nationalists, stability could never be established. Democracy could never function in a place where gangsterism overrode consensus as a method of governing. The result was that America got defeated because they were supporting a government that lacked competency and will, caring about nothing but accumulating riches while thinking of the American military as nothing but a national guard doing their duty of protecting them from the North Vietnamese. The author makes a good point by stating that the blockheads in the America were blinded to the reality of the heroin trade because they single-mindedly fought against the communists rather than taking the whole picture into account. Even worse, they had no understanding of the culture they were trying to dominate. In the end, most of the drugs produced in the Golden Triangle wound up in either US military bases or being shipped overseas to America and Europe while the US allies and enemies in Southeast Asia laughed all the way to the bank. Rampant heroin addicted among US soldiers in Vietnam became a problem and the tribal poppy farmers were stuck in a cycle of impoverishment because other forms of agriculture did not yield enough profits for them to survive. Also, the drug cartels often used Meo tribal people as pawns in proxy wars to fight for different drug running factions managed by politicians and military leaders. As usual, the CIA and American government turned a blind eye to all this just so long as the these drug merchants didn’t support the communists. But then again, some of those merchants did clandestinely support the communists because dealing with them in the drug trade brought them profits and profits meant more than principles. Don’t even try to imagine that much has really changed since the 1970s.

McCoy’s account of the heroin business is a real accomplishment. The details and intricacies are thoroughly explained in a way that makes a challenging read, but is consistently comprehensible if you make the effort to keep track of small details. He doesn’t just focus on the corruption of the authorities and organized crime syndicates either; this book contains a sympathetic understanding of how the poppy farmers are impoverished and trapped by their crops and how devastating opium and heroin are to people who are unfortunate enough to get sucked into the black hole of addiction. This is no work of journalistic entertainment. The complexities of the writing and subject matter make it almost forbidding reading. It is a great work of writing though and also a real eye-opener for anyone who wants to know about the darker side of Southeast Asia, U.S. involvement in the region, and how our government is enabling the drug problems they claim to be legislating against.

In conclusion, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia is probably more valuable as a historical document since a few things have changed since America’s disastrous and foolhardy invasion of Vietnam in the 1960s. Those changes have probably been minor ones though. Poppy cultivation has since moved to Afghanistan and the pipeline of drugs coming from South and Central America up through Mexico and into the U.S. continues to flow unchecked. It just makes you wonder what the CIA is doing these days to keep the supply coming whether its by accident or not. Otherwise, I have spent some time in Southeast Asia and the three countries of the Golden Triangle so I need to say that it has a gorgeous landscape populated by beautiful and kindhearted people with a rich culture; don’t let a book like this ruin your perceptions of this truly amazing part of the world. And finally, don’t EVER try heroin. I’ve seen it wreck people’s lives. Don’t be stupid enough to think you can use it for a weekend recreational high. You can’t. I’ve known several people who have died, one of which was a talented code writer working for Google who overdosed two months after he got married to a woman he fell madly in love with. Please don’t make that same mistake. Do whatever you want with your own body, but don’t ever shoot up junk. 

 

Book Review

Last Exit to Brooklyn

by Hubert Selby Jr.

     This neighborhood in Brooklyn is a vision of Hell that could torment Dante Alighieri. It’s just as poetic too. Hubert Selby Jr.’s notorious Last Exit to Brooklyn takes its readers to rock bottom levels of social depravity. This isn’t a book that utilizes shock value solely for the sake of controversy though. It is animated by an unspoken compassion and righteous anger that would ruin the book’s impact if it were stated explicitly.

Last Exit to Brooklyn isn’t a novel in the conventional sense. It is actually written like the past-together pulp science-fiction novels of the 1950s and done so for the same purpose. It is a series of short stories with overlapping characters and themes, some of which appeared in literary publications before being strung along as a continuous narrative here in novel form. This might cause some confusion to the reader who doesn’t know this beforehand. Once you realize it is constructed like a symphony or a work of modal jazz, it is easier to understand. Maybe that is one good reason to read it twice.

The first thing you might notice from the start is Selby’s unconventional style of writing. He uses Jack Kerouac’s style of spontaneous prose as a springboard and launches into paragraphs with minimal punctuation that follows the author’s own rules. Selby wrote this way so his typing fingers could keep up with his rushing mind since the language traveled at speeds too fast for his body to keep up with. The result is a fast-paced flood of language that resembles the delirium of Arthur Rimbaud’s Symbolist poetry only it is without so much symbolism and maintains a vivid clarity all the way the way through. It makes you feel like you’ve just stolen a car and as you accelerate and drive away at high-octane, speed you suddenly realize that the brakes don’t work and it’s too late to do anything about it. You can risk jumping out, you can keep driving until the gas tank is empty, or you can continue on until you crash and burn, living in the fleeting thrill of the wildest ride in your life.

The first chapter opens by introducing a blue-collar neighborhood in Brooklyn. There are no main characters in the novel; you could actually say the neighborhood itself is the main character. Populated by a gang of hoodlums, drag queens, cops, soldiers, working class men, and anybody else unlucky enough to wander into this rough side of town, it also houses a Greek diner, a dive bar, a labor union headquarters, a factory, and a military base. Nearby is a housing project which enters the narrative in the last chapter.

This first chapter introduces a young thug named Vinnie and his friends. They get their kicks by committing petty crimes, mostly shoplifting and mugging soldiers from the military base who are out on leave. When these kids aren’t beating someone up, they take turns beating each other up. That’s just the kind of world they live in and they live in it with confidence and comfort. The character of Vinnie returns after the next section which simply describes a working-class family party celebrating a shotgun wedding and the birth of a child with the subplot of a guy whose only ambition in life is to buy a motorcycle. In the third chapter, Vinnie is the object of Georgette’s desire. Georgette is a drag queen who turns tricks uptown for money so she can buy drugs and liquor and live the life she wants. In a brutal twist of symbolism, Cupid’s arrow hitting a smitten lover’s heart becomes a weapon of senseless cruelty, Vinnie and his friend torment Georgette by throwing a knife at her over and over again in front the the Greek diner. The fun ends when the knife gets stuck in her leg. Georgette goes home where her brother assaults her for being gay rather than helping her with her wound. Georgette gets through her trauma by desiring sex with Vinnie. A couple days later, she goes to a party with several other drag queens and prostitutes and Vinnie shows up with his friends. They stay up all night eating benzedrine tabs like popcorn and getting drunk. When dawn approaches, it turns into an orgy. Georgette gets what she wants from Vinnie, but is disappointed since it doesn’t turn out the way she wants it to. The end is a spiral into self-destruction that is a precursor for the way the following stories end.

This whole section is beautifully written, almost more like a work of poetry. It is a lot like a literary rendering of The Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray”, though maybe a bit darker. And on a Velvet Underground record, you get seedy lyrics along with rough, sometimes poorly executed music recorded on lo-fi technology, yet the passion of the music is what matters and it stimulates strong emotions. That is how Hubert Selby Jr. writes and it reflects the kinds of people he writes about. It’s no wonder that Selby had such a big influence on punk rock.

Next up is the story of “Tralala”. The titular character is a prostitute whose johns tend to be soldiers from the nearby military base. When an officer on leave takes her to an upscale bar on Times Square, she goes on a rampage selling sex for money and rolling passed out drunks, but mostly just selling her body. After getting kicked out of that bar, she starts heading downtown, frequenting lower class places rapidly descending downmarket towards sleazier and dirtier drinking holes until she ends up back in Brooklyn. Tralalala does little thinking and any thoughts that enter her head are subservient to her intuition. Her intuition doesn’t do her much good as her purpose in life ends up being nothing but screwing losers for money without even knowing why she does so. Tralalal crashes hard in the end when she consents to pull a train in a parking lot next to a junked, abandoned car. It doesn’t stop there. She pulls every train that passes through Brooklyn and then some until she is abandoned as nothing but a piece of rancid meat in a pile of garbage.

Does this make you uncomfortable? It should and not for the obvious reason. Tralala does everything she can to get herself into such a wretched fix so it is difficult to sympathize with her. This is what is clever about the story: it pushes you to the limits of your empathy and makes you confront the possibility that you may not be as kind-hearted as you think you are. It’s like having an angel on your shoulder saying “Don’t worry about her. She’s a trashy girl who got herself into that mess” while Hubert Selby Jr. wearing a devil’s costume, sits on your other shoulder saying with a lower-class Brooklyn accent, , “Of course you should pity her, you asshole. She’s a human being just like you are.” (Now it’s time to take a break and re-read William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell.”)

By this point you might see a pattern emerge. Selby writes about people who are trapped in a nightmare world they didn’t create. With limited psychological, social, or economic resources, they don’t have the means to escape so they take whatever path they think is open to them. Just because they make the mistake of choosing the wrong paths doesn’t mean they aren’t striving to be something better. Saint Selby mercilessly challenges you to sympathize with the least desirable people in American society.

So Georgette seeks liberation in romance with a thug who doesn’t respect her and Tralala pursues transcendence by immolating herself in the self-destructive life of prostitution. Now Harry enters the novel in “Strike”, the longest and most developed passage in the book.

Harry is an odd character. From the opening paragraph, we learn that he is more sexually attacted to his infant son than he is to his wife. Nonetheless, every night he has sex with her and then sleeps fitfully while being tormented by nightmares that symbolize his feelings of entrapment. In the daytime, he works as a lathe operator in a metal working factory. He is also the union’s shop steward. As an apathetic worker, he does the bare minimum of labor and spends the rest of his time either doing nothing or stirring up trouble over union rules. The union leaders know he is a fool, but they keep him on as shop steward because he is such a thorn in the side to the factory managers.

When the union contract comes to an end, a strike is called. Harry is put in charge of “managing” the strike although his duties are little more than sitting in the headquarters, stamping the striker’s union books, and getting drunk while listening to the radio. The union leaders give him carte blanche with an expense account and most of the money he spends is on beer and junk food for the strikers. Really, he is being set up as a fall guy in case the union gets into any trouble, legal or otherwise.

The strike grinds on for a long time. While the strikers morale sinks lower and lower, Harry’s sense of self-importance grows. Being the nominal boss of the strike makes him feel like a big shot even though he contributes nothing of any value to the cause. Then he befriends Vinnie and his gang of hoods. They take advantage of him, drinking up all the beer Harry pays for with the expense account, but Harry naively thinks they are his friends. They mark a turning point in the story when the union president hires them on the sly to blow up the trucks of a shipping company that broke the picket line at the factory. More importantly, they introduce Harry to a drag queen who he later pursues in a gay bar. Harry comes out and begins leading a double life that involves gay relationships. You can almost feel happy for him since his nightmares end and begins feeling good for the first time in his life. But this is undercut because at the same time he begins beating his wife who has no knowledge of his alter-ego. Harry thinks he has found his true self and then the strike ends; he goes back to being a mediocre lathe operator while all the elation he felt while being the boss of the strike wears off like a magic spell that has run its course. For Harry, it all ends in tears. Those tears are bloody tears too.

What makes this story so great is hard to explain, not because an explanation is beyond description, but because the story really speaks for itself. Harry runs the course from being an unsympathetic character to someone you can begin to cheer for and then falls back into being a sad and lonely loser in the end. At the peak of the story, you hope that his liberation will help him work out all the anger that makes him violent and irresponsible if he is just given enough time. Harry gains your sympathy and understanding, then while some of that lingers his life descends back into a nightmare existence. He isn’t a great person but that is the whole point. Hubert Selby Jr. isn’t concerned with portraying heroes. He is concerned with portraying the kinds of troubled people we don’t like and asking us to re-evaluate them in terms of the rotten situations they live in.

Finally, the last chapter is not so much of a story as a weaving of narrative threads and vignettes all taking place across the span of a day in a low-income housing project. As all its inhabitants cross paths, we get a picture of a concrete hive in Brooklyn like the inner circle of Dante’s Hell. It’s filled with fighting couples, domestic violence, adulterers, neglected children, alcoholics, delinquent teenagers, snobs, bums, alcoholics, and all around inconsiderate people. To top it all off there is an elderly Jewish woman, living a life of quiet despair in her loneliness, running on the fumes memories she has of her dead husband and a son who got killed in the war. She anchors the narrative by showing us how alone in the world all of us really are and how painful that loneliness is. Under the worst circumstances, we could all end up being just like her. Reading this passage is like listening to some melancholy musical suite in its execution. It brings you into a world that you would rather not be in. Doesn’t that just re-enforce the point that none of these characters want to be where they are anyways? You, the reader, can always close the book and refuse to finish reading. Like the guilty being punished in Dante’s Inferno, these characters don’t have the luxury of escaping. For you, this is the last exit TO Brooklyn; for them there is no exit FROM Brooklyn or at least, they don’t have what it takes to find an way out.. You may not like these people but the least you can do is have some understanding of what they are struggling with. After all, they might be better people if they were thrown into a kinder world.

Last Exit to Brooklyn is crude in its content, style, and execution and that is the point. There are times when it makes you feel like you’re being punched in the head while throwing up and having diarrhea at the same time. Hubert Selby Jr. has commented that he wrote this novel to portray a world without love. He actually said that he wrote about each character out of love. Selby wasn’t a mean-spirited or a sadistic man; in actuality, he was a gentle soul who felt a lot of anger over the human condition. A lot of this resulted from the absence of his irresponsible and alcoholic father and this can be seen in the consistent theme of terrible fathers in this novel. This novel is a picture of city life that he holds up in our faces as if to shout at us about how our society has taken a wrong turn. Along the way he dares us to find it in our hearts to have compassion for those we think of as irrelevant, unimportant, uninteresting, or worthy of our scorn. As repulsive as this novel is, it was written out of courage and we as readers need to be courageous enough to read it.