Category Archives: Books

Another odd coincidence

Immediately after watching Going Clear, I drew a hot bath and cracked open Sean Brijbasi’s amazing act of wordamithing, The Unknowed Things, to the page at which I had last abandoned it. I immediately came across a passage containing the declaration, “The War Is Over!” Frightening callback (in my mind) to the powerful Nazi-esque scene in the film at which Miscavige presides over the victory celebration after the IRS caves on their tax-exempt status. Those exact words are projected in larger-than-life characters on a larger-than-life screen as pyrotechnics are detonated and fists are pumped.

OM: A Tantric Sex Cult Odyssey

goodreadsI’m almost finished reading this book I received from the Goodreads First Reads giveaway, called Om: A Tantric Sex Cult Odyssey by Jeff Nichols. It’s listed on Amazon in the humor/satire category, I have assumed throughout the time I’ve been reading it that it is purely satirical.

After today’s Googling, I’m not quite sure that it’s truly satire. In fact, I’m starting to get the feeling that it’s mostly true. The book is about a guy who gets involved, through a girlfriend, with a group that practices Orgasmic Meditation (OM), which at its core is a large room full of people where the object of the game seems to be to diddle women’s vageeners with a specific finger in a highly specific manner (known as oming) for fifteen minutes at a time.

I googled, and found out that there is such a group, with chapters in most major cities, including a DC Meetup Group with 110 members and a weekly meet-up.

Not going to pass judgement one way or another. If women out there need fiddlin’ and diddlin’ on a purely technical level, with no emotional connection whatever, more power to ’em.

But the book’s pretty damned funny, in terms of characters anyway. It’s a quick read. And if you’re considering joining the meet-up groups to learn to become a diddler or to enjoy being diddled, I really believe this book will serve as a perfect introduction which might lessen the awkward embarrassment of a meet-up.

I don’t think the guys get any reciprocity out of this whatsoever, other than the esteemed title of Advanced Stroker or Master Stroker (according to the book, anyway). Sorry, guys. Maybe you can put that title on your business card, although people might interpret it as something else entirely.

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Notes from Illuminatus!

avatar_14894It has been decades since I read the Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. I’m currently listening to it in audiobook form, read by Ken Campbell and Chris Fairbank. It’s as if I’m consuming an entirely new piece, which technically I am — just like you can’t step on the same piece of water twice, the evolving mind can’t read the same book twice, because what you read is colored by everything else your mind has ever consumed and conjured. Ken Campbell really breathes life into it, as if it wasn’t full of enough life.

As with Cosmic Trigger, RAW’s work inevitably inspires attunement with the forces of coincidence, or whatever you choose to name it. The first notable coincidence came in the first paragraph, where the narrator is describing an event that occurs on April 23. That is today, and that was not planned.

The second coincidence comes later, where several passages refer to the gunning down of John Dillinger by the FBI, specifically the phenomenon of onlookers dipping their handkerchiefs in Dillinger’s blood as a souvenir. This phenomenon was also one of the subplots of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, which I finished listening to three weeks ago.

I’ll try and remember to post more coincidences as I run across them — I know there will be more.

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Some people should read The Art Of Asking

I forgot to write a little bit about Amanda Palmer’s book, The Art of Asking, which I finished a week or two ago. It’s a pretty great and inspiring read. It has already helped to inspire me in my current projects. She’s pretty real.

You might want to read it if —

you’re interested in the dynamics of crowdfunding/Kickstarter
you’re a struggling artist and/or performer
you’re a fan of the DIY aesthetic
you’re ever in doubt about the value of art
you’re ever in doubt about the value of yourself
you want to hear some great stories about connecting with people
you’ve ever yelled “Get a Job” at a street performer
you’re already a fan of Amanda (you haven’t already? why not?)
you’re already a fan of Neil Gaiman (yes, there are some Neil stories in there)
you’ve struggled with the act of “asking” for something… anything… from anyone.

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I won another Goodreads Giveaway!

Ooooh, how exciting! I won another Goodreads giveaway! This time it’s Om: A Tantric Sex Cult Odyssey by Jeff Nichols. From the Amazon description, it is filed under Humor & Satire / General Humor, and is:

a “novella (loosely based on a true story) is about a man in his forties who, by his own admission, is a poor lover, and, like most of us, insecure. He joins a tantric sex organization – which may or may not be a cult – in an attempt to learn how to satisfy women in general, and one in particular. Two friends of his join up with him. Their goal is to immerse themselves in this controversial program and emerge as ‘master strokers,’ experts at getting women not just to climax but to have massive orgasms—by using only their fingertip!”

I’ve read a bit about tantric sex, and of course I’ve seen those frightening HBO Real Sex episodes where cameras intrude on group tantrix sex escapades, which I could never reall tell were real or staged. This sounds like a fun spin on the topic. I’m looking forward to it.

With my first Goodreads giveaway win being the book about UFOs, and my second about tantric sex, I’m starting to wonder what logic is being applied by Goodreads in choosing the winners of the giveaways. And since I just today sent out five copies of my own book to giveaway winners, it gives me a little bit of hope that the five winners might actually find something interesting about a collection of 20+ year old zines.

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An Evening with Amanda Fucking Palmer

Love her.  Love her husband. Love imagining the combination baking inside her.

Love the fact that she’s playing with Morrissey for one date this summer.  Kinda wish I could go. Love that she did a cover of his (Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want).

Love the fact that she did a highly relevant Kimya Dawson cover (All I Could Do).

Love the fact that pretty much the first words she said to us were calling us godless for coming out to see her on Easter. Then rambled about a King Missile song about Jesus that she sorta knows (Jesus Was Way Cool – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSfa56tjBQo), then used that to segue into Missed Me, saying, “this is not about Jesus. At All. But what if it was?”

Love that she did old Dresden Dolls stuff. Love that she took requests. Love that she brought highly enthusiastic young helpers from the audience onstage to hold an iphone with lyrics for one she didn’t remember exactly (Dirty Business I think). Loved that one of them kinda got lost dancing to it and had to be reminded to come back and hold the phone.

Love that she did Have to Drive and told the story behind it, how it evolved from the guilt of seeing a dead dog in the road. Personal synchronicity significance there.

Love that she did Runs in the Family and closed with the Ukulele Anthem.

Mostly I loved how much Sophie got into it. You know how teenagers are, it’s so hard to turn them on to anything new, even quality interesting shit, because they’re so into doing their own thing. By the end of the second song, she leaned over to me with a big grin. “I LOVE HER!”

Thanks Amanda, for a wonderful night in Richmond.

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The Disgusting English Candy Drill

gravitysrainbowAnother excerpt from Gravity’s Rainbow. This one had me laughing so hard I almost had to pull over (audiobook, not reading while driving). And all I could think of was Durian candy. Believe me, if you read at all, it’s worth the read.

——————

One day, just as he’s entering a narrow street all ancient brick walls and lined with costermongers, he hears his name called—and hubba hubba what’s this then, here she comes all right, blonde hair flying in telltales, white wedgies clattering on the cobblestones, an adorable tomato in a nurse uniform, and her name’s, uh, well, oh—Darlene. Golly it’s Darlene. She works at St. Veronica’s hospital, lives nearby at the home of a Mrs. Quoad, a lady widowed long ago and since suffering a series of antiquated diseases—greensickness, tetter, kibes, purples, imposthumes and almonds in the ears, most recently a touch of scurvy. So, out in search of limes for her landlady, the fruit beginning to jog and spill from her straw basket and roll yellowgreen back down the street, young Darlene comes running in her nurse’s cap, her breasts soft fenders for this meeting on the gray city sea.

“You came back! Ah Tyrone, you’re back,” a tear or two, both of them down picking up citrus, the starch khaki dress rattling, even the odd sniffle from Slothrop’s not unsentimental nose.

“It’s me love…”

Tire tracks in the slush have turned to pearl, mellow pearl. Gulls cruise slowly against the high windowless brick walls of the district.

Mrs. Quoad’s is up three dark flights, with the dome of faraway St. Paul’s out its kitchen window visible in the smoke of certain afternoons, and the lady herself tiny in a rose plush chair in the sitting-room by the wireless, listening to Primo Scala’s Accordion Band. She looks healthy enough. On the table, though, is her crumpled chiffon handkerchief: feathered blots of blood in and out the convolutions like a Horal pattern.

“You were here when I had that horrid quotidian ague,” she recalls Slothrop, “the day we brewed the wormwood tea,” sure enough, the very taste now, rising through his shoe-soles, taking him along. They’re reassembling… it must be outside his memory… cool clean interior, girl and woman, independent of his shorthand of stars… so many fading-faced girls, windy canalsides, bed-sitters, bus-stop good-bys, how can he be expected to remember? but this room has gone on clarifying: part of whoever he was inside it has kindly remained, stored quiescent these months outside of his head, distributed through the grainy shadows, the grease-hazy jars of herbs, candies, spices, all the Compton Mackenzie novels on the shelf, glassy ambrotypes of her late husband Austin night-dusted inside gilded frames up on the mantel where last tune Michaelmas daisies greeted and razzled from a little Sevres vase she and Austin found together one Saturday long ago in a Wardour Street shop…

“He was my good health,” she often says. “Since he passed away I’ve had to become all but an outright witch, in pure self-defense.” From the kitchen comes the smell of limes freshly cut and squeezed. Darlene’s in and out of the room, looking for different botanicals, asking where the cheesecloth’s got to, “Tyrone help me just reach down that—no next to it, the tall jar, thank you love”—back into the kitchen in a creak of starch, a flash of pink. “I’m the only one with a memory around here,” Mrs. Quoad sighs. “We help each other, you see.” She brings out from behind its cretonne camouflage a great bowl of candies. “Now,” beaming at Slothrop. “Here: wine jellies. They’re prewar.”

“Now I remember you—the one with the graft at the Ministry of Supply!” but he knows, from last time, that no gallantry can help him now. After that visit he wrote home to Nalline: “The English are kind of weird when it comes to the way things taste, Mom. They aren’t like us. It might be the climate. They go for things we would never dream of. Sometimes it is enough to turn your stomach, boy. The other day I had had one of these things they call ‘wine jellies.’ That’s their idea of candy, Mom! Figure out a way to feed some to that Hitler ‘n’ I betcha the war’d be over tomorrow!” Now once again he finds himself checking out these ruddy gelatin objects, nodding, he hopes amiably, at Mrs. Quoad. They have the names of different wines written on them in bas-relief.

“Just a touch of menthol too,” Mrs. Quoad popping one into her mouth. “Delicious.”

Slothrop finally chooses one that says Lafitte Rothschild and stuffs it on into his kisser. “Oh yeah. Yeah. Mmm. It’s great.”

“If you really want something peculiar try the Bernkastler Doktor. Oh! Aren’t you the one who brought me those lovely American slimy elm things, maple-tasting with a touch of sassafras—”

“Slippery elm. Jeepers I’m sorry, I ran out yesterday.”

Darlene comes in with a steaming pot and three cups on a tray. “What’s that?” Slothrop a little quickly, here.

“You don’t really want to know, Tyrone.”

“Quite right,” after the first sip, wishing she’d used more lime juice or something to kill the basic taste, which is ghastly-bitter. These people are really insane. No sugar, natch. He reaches in the candy bowl, comes up with a black, ribbed licorice drop. It looks safe. But just as he’s biting in, Darlene gives him, and it, a peculiar look, great timing this girl, sez, “Oh, I thought we got rid of all those—” a blithe, Gilbert & Sullivan ingenue’s thewse—“years ago,” at which point Slothrop is encountering this dribbling liquid center, which tastes like mayonnaise and orange peels.

“You’ve taken the last of my Marmalade Surprises!” cries Mrs. Quoad, having now with conjuror’s speed produced an egg-shaped confection of pastel green, studded all over with lavender nonpareils. “Just for that I shan’t let you have any of these marvelous rhubarb creams.” Into her mouth it goes, the whole thing.

“Serves me right,” Slothrop, wondering just what he means by this, sipping herb tea to remove the taste of the mayonnaise candy—oops but that’s a mistake, right, here’s his mouth filling once again with horrible alkaloid desolation, all the way back to the soft palate where it digs in. Darlene, pure Nightingale compassion, is handing him a hard red candy, molded like a stylized raspberry… mm, which oddly enough even tastes like a raspberry, though it can’t begin to take away that bitterness. Impatiently, he bites into it, and in the act knows, fucking idiot, he’s been had once more, there comes pouring out onto his tongue the most godawful crystalline concentration of Jeez it must be pure nitric acid, “Oh mercy that’s really sour,” hardly able to get the words out he’s so puckered up, exactly the sort of thing Hop Harrigan used to pull to get Tank Tinker to quit playing his ocarina, a shabby trick then and twice as reprehensible coming from an old lady who’s supposed to be one of our Allies, shit he can’t even see it’s up his nose and whatever it is won’t dissolve, just goes on torturing his shriveling tongue and crunches like ground glass among his molars. Mrs. Quoad is meantime busy savoring, bite by dainty bite, a cherry-quinine petit four. She beams at the young people across the candy bowl. Slothrop, forgetting, reaches again for his tea. There is no graceful way out of this now. Darlene has brought a couple-three more candy jars down off of the shelf, and now he goes plunging, like a journey to the center of some small, hostile planet, into an enormous bonbon chomp through the mantle of chocolate to a strongly eucalyptus-flavored fondant, finally into a core of some very tough grape gum arabic. He fingernails a piece of this out from between his teeth and stares at it for a while. It is purple in color.

“Now you’re getting the idea!” Mrs. Quoad waving at him a marbled conglomerate of ginger root, butterscotch, and aniseed, “you see, you also have to enjoy the way it looks. Why are Americans so impulsive?”

“Well,” mumbling, “usually we don’t get any more complicated than Hershey bars, see….”

“Oh, try this,” hollers Darlene, clutching her throat and swaying against him.

“Gosh, it must really be something,” doubtfully taking this nastylooking brownish novelty, an exact quarter-scale replica of a Mills-type hand grenade, lever, pin and everything, one of a series of patriotic candies put out before sugar was quite so scarce, also including, he notices, peering into the jar, a .455 Webley cartridge of green and pink striped taffy, a six-ton earthquake bomb of some silver-flecked blue gelatin, and a licorice bazooka.

“Go on then,” Darlene actually taking his hand with the candy in it and trying to shove it into his mouth.

“Was just, you know, looking at it, the way Mrs. Quoad suggested.”

“And no fair squeezing it, Tyrone.”

Under its tamarind glaze, the Mills bomb turns out to be luscious pepsin-flavored nougat, chock-full of tangy candied cubeb berries, and a chewy camphor-gum center. It is unspeakably awful. Slothrop’s head begins to reel with camphor fumes, his eyes are running, his tongue’s a hopeless holocaust. Cubeb? He used to smoke that stuff. “Poisoned…” he is able to croak.

“Show a little backbone,” advises Mrs. Quoad.

“Yes,” Darlene through tongue-softened sheets of caramel, “don’t you know there’s a war on? Here now love, open your mouth.”

Through the tears he can’t see it too well, but he can hear Mrs. Quoad across the table going “Yum, yum, yum,” and Darlene giggling. It is enormous and soft, like a marshmallow, but somehow—unless something is now going seriously wrong with his brain—it tastes like: gin. “Wha’s ‘is,” he inquires thickly.

“A gin marshmallow,” sez Mrs. Quoad.

“Awww…”

“Oh that’s nothing, have one of these—” his teeth, in some perverse reflex, crunching now through a hard sour gooseberry shell into a wet spurting unpleasantness of, he hopes it’s tapioca, little glutinous chunks of something all saturated with powdered cloves.

“More tea?” Darlene suggests. Slothrop is coughing violently, having inhaled some of that clove filling.

“Nasty cough,” Mrs. Quoad offering a tin of that least believable of English coughdrops, the Meggezone. “Darlene, the tea is lovely, I can feel my scurvy going away, really I can.”

The Meggezone is like being belted in the head with a Swiss Alp. Menthol icicles immediately begin to grow from the roof of Slothrop’s mouth. Polar bears seek toenail-holds up the freezing frosty-grape alveolar clusters in his lungs. It hurts his teeth too much to breathe, even through his nose, even, necktie loosened, with his nose down inside the neck of his olive-drab T-shirt. Benzoin vapors seep into his brain. His head floats in a halo of ice.

Even an hour later, the Meggezone still lingers, a mint ghost in the air. Slothrop lies with Darlene, the Disgusting English Candy Drill a thing of the past, his groin now against her warm bottom. The one candy he did not get to taste—one Mrs. Quoad withheld—was the Fire of Paradise, that famous confection of high price and protean taste—“salted plum” to one, “artificial cherry” to another… “sugared violets”… “Worcestershire sauce”… “spiced treacle”… any number of like descriptions, positive, terse—never exceeding two words in length—resembling the descriptions of poison and debilitating gases found in training manuals, “sweet-and-sour eggplant” being perhaps the lengthiest to date. [ . . . ]

Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon, pp. 114-119.

I won my first free book through Goodreads!

goodreadsThe other day I was mucking around in Goodreads. I know some of my friends are Goodreads site members because I see your stuff on there. I noticed the “First Reads” contest thing, where authors put up a certain number of books to give out to people to promote their books, sometimes in advance of publication. I spent a good hour going through the list and entering to win books that seemed like they might be interesting.

Last night, I got notification that I’m a First Reads winner!  I’m getting a copy of The Presidents and UFOs: A Secret History from FDR to Obama by Larry Holcombe and Stanton T. Friedman.  I’ll be sure to read it and post a review when I get it.

Part of me wants to encourage my Goodreads friends to go check out the giveaway section, and the other part doesn’t really want you to dilute my chances. I’ll listen to the better angels of my nature this time, go check it out! There’s a dropdown arrow next to the Explore link at the top of the Goodreads page, choose that and then choose Giveaways. Happy hunting!