Book Chat: Some Odd Titles

With Commentary

I associate Spring with lengthening days, a new baseball season, and reading books. For Summer, the days are long and the nights warm (in California) and I love to read all night until I can’t keep my eyes open. The Autumn comes and the days shorten: perfect for reading books and I’ll have those moments where I’m reclining on a couch for hours, then feel drowsy, the book falls to my chest and I don’t quite fall asleep but get some hypnogogic imagery: of reading in September or October as a kid. Winter is just flat-out a great time to read something. Like a book. A dead-tree codex.

I’ve found I can read for a great many hours in the day if I just move around the place: now I’m sitting in a chair, then I’ll be on a couch, then I move to another room or the porch. I don’t know why changing settings in such a seemingly inconsequential way can give me that sort of endurance, but it does.

On with some book titles.

The Secret Forest, by Patricia Westerford. This book was written by a character in the novel The Overstory, by Richard Powers. It seems clear that Powers based the character on a real person, Suzanne Simard, who wants to alert the world to the magnificent intelligence of trees and plants and their vast telecommunications systems, largely mediated by mycorrhizal network of fungi, etc. Simard wrote Finding the Mother Tree, which I’ve skimmed. Related to these works in my mind: The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben, which surely contains magic in it, and The Secret Life of Trees, by Colin Tudge. Publishers found out in the past 15 years that books about how plants seem much more intelligent than we thought sell pretty well. There’s an audience. The sentinel book here, the precursor, great grand-daddy of ‘em all, must be 1973’s The Secret Life of Plants, by Tomkins, which was a pretty big influence on a lot of weirdos, including Robert Anton Wilson. To hardcore scientists it was “woo” then, and, pretty much now also. Although things might be slowly changing, if I’m reading the landscape accurately over the past 15 years or so. But RAW had traced subtle consciousness and intelligence back to the earliest years of agriculture (his reading in James Frazer’s The Golden Bough), and earlier: shamanism. I recently read a few fascinating articles on scientists studying slime mold, which is brainless but seems to act intelligently, and I think RAW would say, “I told you so!”

I hope to write on plant intelligence in these spaces soon.

It can’t hurt the authors or publishers to put “hidden” or “secret” in the titles of books, either. I think we all know the score here.

On the Shadows of Ideas, which appears to be a book inside Giordano Bruno’s De Umbris Idearum, published in 1582. Frances Yates discusses De Umbris in her Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition:

Philothimus asks what is the book which Hermes holds in his hand, and he is told it is the book On the Shadows of Ideas, the contents of which its author is in doubt whether or not to make known. Philothimus points out that no great work would be produced if such hesitations were allowed to prevail. The providence of the gods does not cease, as the Egyptian priests used to say, because of statutes promulgated at various times by repressive Mercuries. The intellect does not cease to illuminate, and the visible sun does not cease to illuminate, because we do not always all turn toward it. (193)

Cagey Bruno puts a book inside another book (with basically the same title), the inner book discussing the pressing political issue for Bruno himself: what can he get away with writing and saying without being busted? 18 years later he found out: burned at the stake at Campo de’ Fiori.

The idiocy of book burners and banners, and persecution of writers marches on in our “enlightened” times. Why? Wilson and Leary thought it was because too many humans were stuck on the digital, robotic first four metaphorical “circuits” of the nervous system; when you turn on right hemisphere, analog circuits you are fine with any expression, as long as no one is actively harming anyone else. What a couple of nuts, eh?

To quote Grady McMurtry, “Why does the gnosis always get busted?”

Erotic Adventures of Loren Ipsum, by Etienne Cherdlu. With an odd provenance. Tell me if you think this is weird too ‘cuz I’ve never seen this: on the copyright page it says “published jointly between Olympia Press and Bell Labs.” I mean…

Loren’s kink is to do it on top of old linotype machines or on papers filled with banks of meaningless digital data. Lorem took a weird - and this is a weird book, make no mistake - sexual imprint: at age 14, with her junior high school boyfriend one magical Saturday afternoon she used the key to her computer scientist father’s office at the Stanford Research Institute in 1969, and had her first glorious experience among banks of computers and print-outs. The boy was a close friend of Douglas Engelbart’s son. Or it seems to allude to that, not that it matters. I’ve just read a ton of stuff on “The Mother of All Demos.”

Where was I? Oh yea: It seems the factor of maybe “getting caught” plays into her excitement, and she ups the ante as this erotic novel, very popular among coders, moves toward a, uhhh, climax. There was a bizarre excursus on George K. Zipf’s 1935 book The Psycho-Biology of Language right in the middle that I can’t see as pertinent to the story, although it was interesting. The final scene, after her 22nd birthday party, in the basement of CERN, is probably too weird to discuss. I take it the author is French, and it figures. Not bad, although there seems to be too much text that just fills in the space of the novel.

Farewell, America: The Plot to Kill JFK, by James Hepburn. Okay, okay, I have yet to read this one, because I haven’t found it in any library. I only know about it because it’s written about so colorfully in editor-of-Ramparts-magazine Warren Hinckle’s If You Have A Lemon, pp. 252-268. Hinckle tells us this book came out in 1968 and was immediately suppressed in the US and Canada. And now we know that “James Hepburn” didn’t exist. Who wrote it? Possibly Herve Lamarre, and agents from INTERPOL, Andre Ducret of the French civil police forces, and Phillipe Vasjoly, an agent for Big Oil in France. It seems the French wanted us to believe Big Oil was behind the JFK hit. Why? Maybe I’ll get to it this late November. Or next year. If you’ve read it, you tell me in the comments.

This book was finally released to the public c. 2002 and most of the reviews I’ve seen say it’s “dated” (no! really?) but somewhat compelling. Publisher’s Weekly wrote, c.2002: Most of the text is a damning jeremiad, portraying pre-1964 America as a vicious, discriminatory oligarchy controlled by alliances of Big Steel and Big Oil, the military and organized crime, which all had reason to fear JFK’s proposed reforms. The reviewers at Amazon mostly seem happy: it fed their JFK hit fix. Sometimes ya just gotta have it. I tend to read reviews by these guys and picture them having a literal wall of JFK conspiracy texts in their man-caves. Big-time JFK assassination writer William Turner wrote the introduction. I think I have an insider’s idea of what it’s like to be one of those people who’ve read 700 different JFK books. I mean: I get it. It seems sorta like a secular version of medieval monks going over the same sections of writings about Jesus, for decades, arguing over all the minutiae. And there is a lot of it.

Hinckle tells us that ex-FBI-turned-Ramparts editor Turner had stacks of contraband copies of Farewell, America piled up in his basement in San Rafael. I wonder what the real purpose of this banning was in the first place. Who did Turner sell to after 1968, and what was it like? Was it like making a drug deal in a park near San Francisco? I imagine codes, the right colored hats, hand signals, brown paper bags, synchronized Timexes and Bulovas. Maybe Donald Sutherland is lurking not more than 20 feet away. That is, if Turner sold to anyone. What do you do with all those copies of a book people want? How did he go from FBI to the Catholic-Left and Ramparts?

When Robert Shea was asked a final question in an interview, published in Tom Jackson’s recent book, Every Day Is A Good Day: Who killed JFK? Shea responds: “We all did.” Which, at this point, I accept…with an explanation, if I may, Your Honor…

My Past Was An Evil River, by William S. Burroughs

The Hindsight Saga, by SJ Perelman

These are the titles of two books of memoirs that the authors never got around to finishing. It seems likely WSB never wrote anything for his book; it’s cited in William S. Burroughs: Cutting Up the Century, (2019), ed. by Hawkins, Wermer-Colan, Cannon, et.al, on page 58. Perelman never got around to finishing his autobiography, which was originally titled Smiling, The Boy Fell Dead, but his wife Laura said that was too morbid. (see Conversations With SJ Perelman, p.66) Both Burroughs and Perelman have at times made me laff out loud reading them, to the point where I got a mild side-ache. I’ll have to be content with their writings extant.

In John Barth’s wonderful The Friday Book I read about The Three Imposters, a book that garnered much commentary in the 17th century. The three imposters were Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, so you can see why there wouldda been a ton o’ ballyhoo then. Then it was revealed that the book didn’t exist; the word had gotten out and people just felt like it was their right to comment on it, having heard a little about it. My how times have changed!

What’s really funny is that…suddenly the book appeared! Barth links this to the impossibly marvelous Sir Thomas Browne and…Borges? See The Friday Book, pp.70-71

Speaking of Borges (who is required to appear in articles like this one), have you heard of The Anglo-American Cyclopedia (1917)? It was an actual pirated version of the 10th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and it features prominently in Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar Orbis Tertius.” Which “is” fake.

Blacktopolis: The Intransigence of African-American Urban Poverty and Baggy Clothes, by Foy Cheshire. A maddening sociological rant by a guy who felt like Bill Cosby before we knew he was drugging and raping women. There’s a lot of humor here and it’s all unintentional. What a strange book. I found out about it reading Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. See p.48

I, Libertine, by Theodore Sturgeon (1956) This supposedly became a best-seller. Sturgeon’s a fine writer, but I can’t find reliable best-seller info for this one. Which is interesting, because the title started out as a non-existent book hoax/put-on by New York radio legend Jean Shepherd, who was satirizing the mass-marketing/Mad Men-like process of the making of a best-seller. Then Sturgeon asked Shepherd if he could write an actual book by the title and was given the green light.

This, and the aforementioned The Three Imposters (and many, many other books) seem to provide a corollary to John Lilly, which might go like this: Within the province of books and publishing, what is imagined is a real book or becomes a real book within certain publishing limits. In the province of the possible library of the mind there are no limits.

Finally, because I can only pull my readers’ legs for so long and no longer: Semiotic Analysis of Various Translations of the Necronomicon, ed. Timothy F.X. Finnegan (1944). The highlight of this, for me, at least, was de Selby’s attacks on the imperialist structure of British grammar. Erudite, witty, bonkers. Highly recommended. For more information, see Robert Anton Wilson’s Introduction to The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick, 1977-1979, p.4