BOOKS ARE FOR PUSSIES: OSHO
Man, this book was kind of bullshit...trying to make Rajneesh aka Osho out to be a cult leader, when he wasn't...trying to make him out to be Charles Manson on that cover above...please...dude had fuck all to do with anything...he was arrested for not separating church and state well enough in his community and turning the other cheek on some shady marriages to get green cards...hardly a Jim Jones...still the book gave me a perspective on how people in Oregon felt about Osho and his friends...and granted a few of his friends were a bit fucked up and went a little overboard on a couple of things...but this wasn't a cult...i know cults...fuck i was a cult leader myself once upon a time...this was a case of people reacting to something that's different...anything that's different in our culture gets quickly labeled and dismissed or labeled in a negative view point...i mean jesus christ could be reborn and hit up the nearest church and he would be quickly labeled as sandal wearing, granola eating hippy and shown the door...
Win McCormack was the publisher of Oregon magazine when Rajneesh and his disciples relocated in 1981 from India to a 64,000-acre ranch outside of Antelope. For five years McCormack ran editorials and investigative pieces, warning of the dangers presented by the cult, dangers that came to include harassment, wiretapping, orange-clad Rajneeshees brandishing automatic weapons and, in an attempt to keep citizens from the polls and thus steal a county election, the poisoning of salad bars in The Dalles with a strain of salmonella that sickened more than 700 people.
Currently publisher and editor in chief of Tin House, McCormack recently sat down over blackened catfish and eggs to talk about what attracted people to "the guru of shortcuts," the personal consequences of speaking out against Rajneesh and how, had the cult had its way, the world's population would be smaller by two-thirds.
Q: The Rajneesh Chronicles was first published in 1987. Why rerelease it now?
A: The hook is, it's the 25th anniversary of the poisonings in The Dalles. People know the story, but they don't know how the different parts of the plot fit together.
Is another reason to republish to remind people not to be foolish?
Right. Not to be taken in. But people, even when they're reminded, if the particular thing they're attracted to comes along, they might not associate it with a cult, or a charismatic leader with bad motivations. I delved into how he manipulated people. He fashioned this whole ideology that was a combination of Eastern mysticism and Western humanistic psychology, then he fed it back to them.
He also told them they could have lots of sex while building a better world.
He did, he did. (Laughs.) You could have sex and be religious at the same time.
His followers tended to be educated and intellectual, people who believed they had the power and responsibility to foment change. The more they were deprived -- and by all accounts, commune life was vile, filthy and dangerous -- the more they blamed themselves and worked all the harder to create utopia.
That's one of the techniques cults use. They promise you nirvana if you join them. And then when nirvana doesn't come, they blame it on you. "It's your fault because you're not living up to our creed," or working hard enough. They turn it back on the follower.
Was Oregon uniquely poised to grow the Rajneesh organism, pitched as it was between central and eastern Oregonians' rock-ribbed independence, and super-liberal Portland?
Super-liberal Portland did not understand what was going on in Antelope. The way it was perceived was there was this religious leader who had come from India and he was being persecuted by these know-nothing hicks out of central Oregon who didn't like him because he was foreign and was preaching a different religion and blah, blah, blah.
In 1984, at the height of this whole thing, I was at the Democratic Convention in San Francisco. (The Rajneeshes) had been involved in prostitution and escort services. I was talking about it, and the guy who was chair of the Democratic Party heard me. He turned around and left the room. He thought I was being bigoted, anti-liberal, intolerant, whatever. That was kind of the general attitude -- "you're picking on this guy."
In one of your editorials, you wrote, "Rajneesh leaders and followers do not deny they are in a cult, they merely assert that ... unlike other cults, theirs is a good one."
(Laughs) Yes! That's sort of the way it is. Even if it started to dawn on them that Rajneesh might have some similarities to Jim Jones, he wasn't out to do anything bad. He was good, and they were good; they had good purposes.
Did Rajneesh believe in anything?
Oh no, no, no. He actually didn't hide the fact that for him it was all a joke; that was part of his message. He said at one point, "This is my circus, and I enjoy it."
One might appreciate the comic imagery of his driving one of his 96 Rolls-Royces around the ranch by day, and huffing nitrous oxide by night.
He did. I actually saw it afterwards. I went on a tour of the place. I saw his nitrous oxide machine. It was right next to his bed.
Less funny was the crematorium his followers built on the ranch. Disciples often said they would do anything Rajneesh asked. One imagines them flinging themselves in.
We have a picture of the crematorium (in the book), and the caption I wrote was, "If it had ended in a simulacrum of Jonestown, as some people thought it would, this is probably where the event would have taken place."
One of the most frightening things, in retrospect, is that they had this program (at the ranch) to try to culture a live AIDS virus.
In 1984, Rajneesh prophesized that two-thirds of the world's population would be dead from AIDS within 10 years.
A, he was predicting it. B, they were culturing this virus. Put the two together. Why were they trying to culture a live AIDS virus, except to use it? I was trying to get people to realize the significance of this. That there was a group of people out there in Oregon trying to culture a virus that they thought would kill two-thirds of the human race. They weren't a bunch of peace-loving, enlightenment-seeking people.
Have you had former followers of Rajneesh say to you, "How could I have been so stupid?"
No, I have never encountered a follower who said something like that.
Were you ever personally threatened by anyone from the cult?
There was an incident in the summer of 1984. My wife and I were having a Labor Day party. A couple days before, I picked up the phone and there was this person on the other end; I thought this was some sort of teenage prank, but the person said, "We're coming to get your son." My son was 12. So, we were freaked out. Even though it sounded like a teenager, we couldn't be sure. There were a couple hundred people coming, so we hired Pinkerton detectives to come and guard our son during this party. I don't know if that was them or not, but we couldn't take the chance.
Were you on a quest for justice back then, and are you still now?
Now? No. Back then, yeah, I was. I wanted people to know, and understand, and I wanted this guy to ... to what? I don't know. Be exposed for what he was? Yeah.
BOOKS ARE FOR PUSSIES: ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE
Man this book kind of creeped me out...kind of like that photo
of that custom ride above...i thought it would be a book that would expand my mind...challenge me to think on some things...which it did...i also thought it would have a little subplot about a father and a son trying to connect on the road...which it did...what i didn't think it would be about was mental illness...i've seen first hand a person go from "normal" to mentally ill and it's one of the most fucked up things you could ever witness in your life...it's a game changer for all involved...how you view things will never be the same again...this book reminded me of all that...the psych ward...the meds...the fear...
The interview: Robert Pirsig
The Seventies bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was the biggest-selling philosophy book ever. But for the reclusive author life was bitter-sweet. Here, he talks frankly about anxiety, depression, the death of his son and the road trip that inspired a classic.
At 78, Robert Pirsig, probably the most widely read philosopher alive, can look back on many ideas of himself. There is the nine-year-old-boy with the off-the-scale IQ of 170, trying to work out how to connect with his classmates in Minnesota. There is the young GI in Korea picking up a curiosity for Buddhism while helping the locals with their English. There is the radical, manic teacher in Montana making his freshmen sweat over a definition of 'quality'. There is the homicidal husband sectioned into a course of electric-shock treatment designed to remove all traces of his past. There is the broken-down father trying to bond with his son on a road trip. There is the best-selling author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, offering solutions to the anxieties of a generation. And there is, for a good many years, the reclusive yachtsman, trying to steer a course away from cultish fame.
Pirsig doesn't do interviews, as a rule; he claims this one will be his last. He got spooked early on. 'In the first week after I wrote Zen I gave maybe 35,' he says, in his low, quick-fire Midwestern voice, from behind his sailor's beard. 'I found it very unsettling. I was walking by the post office near home and I thought I could hear voices, including my own. I had a history of mental illness, and I thought: it's happening again. Then I realised it was the radio broadcast of an interview I'd done. At that point I took a camper van up into the mountains and started to write Lila, my second book.'
It is that second book, recently republished, that has prompted him to talk to me now. He sits in a hotel room in Boston and tries, not for the first time, to make some sense of his life. He is, he suggests, always in a double bind. 'It is not good to talk about Zen because Zen is nothingness ... If you talk about it you are always lying, and if you don't talk about it no one knows it is there.' Generally, rather than analysing, he says, he would rather 'just enjoy watching the wind blow through the trees'. Reclusion has its discontents, however. 'In this country someone who sits around and does that is at the bottom of the ladder, but in Japan, say, someone who goes up into the mountains is accorded great respect.' He pauses, laughs. 'I guess I fall somewhere in between.'
Ever since I first read Pirsig's motorbike quest for meaning, when I was about 14, I've been curious to imagine its author. Part of the compulsion of that book, which has sold more than five million copies, is the sense of autobiographical mysteries that remain unexplained. While Pirsig's narrator tries to marry the spirit of the Buddha with western consumerism, discovers the godhead in his toolkit, and intuits a sense of purposive quality independent of subjects and objects, he also constructs a fragmentary picture of his own past. His pre-shock-treatment former self, the ghostly Phaedrus, haunts his travels across the Midwest.
'What I am,' he writes at one point, 'is a heretic who's recanted and thereby in everyone's eyes saved his soul. Everyone's eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.' My 14-year-old self double-underlined this and put two Biro exclamation marks in the margin. Twenty-six years, and several revisionist readings of the book later, I'm still wondering what Pirsig thinks of when he thinks of himself.
He suggests a lot of that idea still goes back to his childhood as a disaffected prodigy. He says that ever since he could think he had an overwhelming desire to have a theory that explained everything. As a young man - he was at university at 15 studying chemistry - he thought the answer might lie in science, but he quickly lost that faith. 'Science could not teach me how to understand girls sitting in my class, even.'
He went to search elsewhere. After the army he majored in philosophy and persuaded his tutor to help him get a place on a course in Indian mysticism at Benares, where he found more questions than answers. He wound up back home, married, drifting between Mexico and the States, writing technical manuals and ads for the mortuary cosmetics industry. It was when he picked up philosophy again in Montana, and started teaching, that Phaedrus and his desire for truth overtook Pirsig once more.
At that time, he recalls, in his early thirties, he was so full of anxiety that he would often be physically sick before each class he taught. He used his students to help him discover some of the ideas that make up what he calls the 'metaphysics of quality' in his books, the ideas that led him to believe that he had bridged the chasm between Eastern and Western thought. No two classes were the same. He made his students crazy by refusing to grade them, then he had them grade each other. He suggests that by the end of each term they were so euphoric that if he had told them to jump out of the window they would have done. The president of the university gave a speech, and he contradicted him in the middle of it by shouting: 'This school has no quality.' He saw clearly how American society was disconnected from life and he believed he could help it connect. He was reading Kerouac, and trying to live in truth.
Alongside that, I say, as he describes that time with some fervour, I guess there was some depression setting in? 'Well,' he says, 'there was fear. All these ideas were coming in to me too fast. There are crackpots with crazy ideas all over the world, and what evidence was I giving that I was not one of them?'
Such evidence proved harder and harder to present. One day in the car with his six-year-old son Chris, his mind buzzing, Pirsig stopped at a junction and literally did not know which way to turn. He had to ask his son to guide him home. What followed was the point where he either found enlightenment, or went insane, depending on how you look at it (really the root of all the questions in his first book).
'I could not sleep and I could not stay awake,' he recalls. 'I just sat there cross-legged in the room for three days. All sorts of volitions started to go away. My wife started getting upset at me sitting there, got a little insulting. Pain disappeared, cigarettes burned down in my fingers ...'
It was like a monastic experience?
'Yes, but then a kind of chaos set in. Suddenly I realised that the person who had come this far was about to expire. I was terrified, and curious as to what was coming. I felt so sorry for this guy I was leaving behind. It was a separation. This is described in the psychiatric canon as catatonic schizophrenia. It is cited in the Zen Buddhist canon as hard enlightenment. I have never insisted on either - in fact I switch back and forth depending on who I am talking to.'
Midwestern American society of 1960 took the psychiatrist's view. Pirsig was treated at a mental institution, the first of many visits. Looking back, he suggests he was just a man outside his time. 'It was a contest, I believe, between these ideas I had and what I see as the cultural immune system. When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.'
That immune system left him with no job and no future in philosophy; his wife was mad at him, they had two small kids, he was 34 and in tears all day. Did he think of it at the time as a Zen experience?
'Not really. Though the meditation I have done since takes you to a similar place. If you stare at a wall from four in the morning till nine at night and you do that for a week, you are getting pretty close to nothingness. And you get a lot of opportunities for staring in an asylum.'
When he was released, it only got worse. He was crazier; he pointed a gun at someone, he won't say who. He was committed by a court and underwent comprehensive shock treatment of the kind described by Ken Kesey in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
I wonder if he remembers the mechanics of it?
'Well they put a little rubber thing in your mouth and then they gave a drug like curare, used by South American Indians in their darts. It stops your lungs before it stops your mind. Before you go under you had a feeling like you were drowning. I woke up one time and I thought: where the hell am I? I had a feeling I was in my Aunt Flossie's house, which I had liked as a child. I thought I must have passed out drunk.' He laughs. 'This was after the 14th treatment I think.'
When his wife came to see him he knew something was wrong but he did not know what it was. A nurse started to cry because she knew that his wife had divorced him while he had been in hospital. 'The funny thing about insane people,' he says, 'is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.'
Pirsig was able to keep a tenuous grip on his former self, despite the treatment. He figured that if he told anyone he was in fact an enlightened Zen disciple, they would lock him up for 50 years. So he worked out a new strategy of getting his ideas across. He embarked on a book based on a motorcycle ride he made with his son, Chris, from Minnesota to the Dakotas in 1968. 'It was a compulsive thing. It started out of a little essay. I wanted to write about motorcycling because I was having such fun doing it, and it grew organically from there.'
When the book came out, in 1974, edited down from 800,000 words, and having been turned down by 121 publishers, it seemed immediately to catch the need of the time. George Steiner in the New Yorker likened it to Moby Dick. Robert Redford tried to buy the film rights (Pirsig refused). It has since taken on a life of its own, and though parts feel dated, its quest for meaning still seems urgent. For Pirsig, however, it has become a tragic book in some ways. At the heart of it was his relationship with his son, Chris, then 12, who himself, unsettled by his father's mania, seemed close to a breakdown. In 1979, aged 22, Chris was stabbed and killed by a mugger as he came out of the Zen Centre in San Francisco. Subsequent copies of the book have carried a moving afterword by Pirsig. 'I think about him, have dreams about him, miss him still,' he says now. 'He wasn't a perfect kid, he did a lot of things wrong, but he was my son ...'
I ask what Chris thought of the book, and Pirsig's face strains a little.
'He didn't like it. He said, "Dad, I had a good time on that trip. It was all false." It threw him terribly. There is stuff I can't talk about still. Katagiri Roshi, who helped me set up the Zen Centre in Minnesota, took him in hand in San Francisco. When Katagiri gave Chris's funeral address tears were just running down his face. He suffered almost more than I did.'
When his son died, Pirsig was in England. He had sailed across the Atlantic with his second wife, Wendy Kimball, 22 years his junior, whom he had met when she had come to interview him on his boat. She has never disembarked. He was working at the time on Lila, the sequel to his first book, which further examines Phaedrus's ideas in the context of a voyage along the Hudson, with Lila, a raddled Siren, as crew.
The book is bleaker, messier than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, though it carries a lot of the charge of Pirsig's restless mind. 'If I wrote it today,' he says, 'it would be a much more cheerful book. But I was resolving things in Lila; the sadness of the past, and particularly Chris's death, is there. Zen was quite an inspiring book, I think, but I wanted to go in the other direction with Lila and do something that explored a more sordid, depressing life ...'
He hoped Lila would force the 'metaphysics of quality' from the New Age shelves to the philosophy ones, but that has not happened. Though a website dedicated to his ideas boasts 50,000 posts, and there have been outposts of academic interest, he is disappointed that his books have not had more mainstream attention. 'Most academic philosophers ignore it, or badmouth it quietly, and I wondered why that was. I suspect it may have something to do with my insistence that "quality" can not be defined,' he says.
This desire to be incorporated in a philosophy canon seems odd anyhow, since the power of Pirsig's books lie in their dynamic personal quest for value, rather than any fixed statement of it. But maybe eventually every iconoclast wants to be accepted.
He still sails. He lives in rural New England and has just been up to the islands of Maine with his wife on the same boat that he describes in Lila - perfectly maintained, of course. He lives these days in cyberspace, he says, where his ideas circulate. He plans to learn to tango, and visit Buenos Aires. He's just discovered YouTube. He doesn't write any more, though, and he hardly reads. I wonder if that old depression ever returns?
'I've been hit with it lately,' he says. 'It did not seem related to my life in any way. I have money, fame, a happy wife, our daughter Nell. But I did for the first time go to a psychiatrist. He said it's a chemical imbalance and he prescribed some pills and the depression has gone.'
Otherwise, he says, he tries to live as best he can to the dictates of 'his dharma': to stay centred. I ask if he fears death.
'I'm not depressed about it,' he says. 'If you read the 101 Zen Stories you will see that is characteristic. I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life. Up until my first book was published I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I could say: No, I didn't screw up.'
He smiles. 'It was just that I was listening to a different drummer all along.'
Pirsig's pearls
· The Buddha resides as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain.
· Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a 30,000 page menu and no food.
· Traditional scientific method has always been, at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.
· Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?
· The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
Now and Zen
Born 6 September 1928, Minneapolis.
Family Father was a law lecturer and mother was Swedish-born. Pirsig married Nancy Ann James in 1954. They had two sons: Chris, and Ted, now 48. Now married to journalist Wendy Kimball, with whom he has a 25-year-old daughter, Nell.
Education Judged to have an IQ of 170 at age nine. Went to University of Minneapolis at 15, but joined the army in 1946, serving in Korea before returning to the university to study philosophy. Then studied at Benares in India.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Appears in Guinness Book of Records as the bestselling book rejected by the largest number of publishers (121). Sold 5m copies worldwide.
BOOKS ARE FOR PUSSIES:
KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD EDITION
MY STRUGGLE 2: A MAN IN LOVE...is a book by Karl Ove Knausgaard and it's about a Norwegian man who builds a time machine so that he can go back in time to tell Adolf Hitler that he loves him, which will then be reciprocated...which will then avert WW2 from happening...haha...just a joke...books not about that at all...books about a depressed Norwegian writer with a wife and 3 kids, and...fuck i'll just attach part of an email i sent to a friend...
...reading this book i found at the library by this norwegian writer karl ove knausgaard...called "my struggle 2"...on the back it says "this book is about leaving your wife and everything you know, it is about fresh starts, about love, about friendship, it is also about the earth shattering experience of becoming a father, the mundane struggles of family life, ridiculously unsuccessful holidays, fights with quarrelsome neighbours, the emotional strains of childrens birthday parties and pushing a stroller around stockholm when all you really want to do is write"...obviously being a husband, father and writer, i felt drawn to read more...i guess it outsold the bible for a bit...and his books were banned from being talked about at the "office" because people would get too heated in their discussions and wouldn't get any work done...anyway...i have more to say on it but i found this passage relatable..."nonetheless, i couldn't help thinking about dad, who had left my mother just a few weeks before he turned forty. the age coincidence, which in this case was down to a week, was neither a family nor a genetic matter and the midlife crisis was not a myth: it had begun to hit people around me, and it hit them hard. some went almost crazy in their despair. for what? for more life. at the age of forty the life you have lived so far, always pro tem, has for the first time become life itself, and this reappraisal swept away all dreams, destroyed all your notions that real life, the one that was meant to be, the great deeds you would perform, was somewhere else. when you were forty you realised it was all here, banal everyday life, fully formed, and it always would be unless you did something. unless you took one last gamble..."
...i took that "gamble" 2 years ago...tried to blow up my life...fucked up and blew myself up...been putting myself back together since then...humpty dumpty...
Anyway, to be honest the book was kind of boring...thought i was gonna get some Dostoyevsky 2.0 shit...there's no drama and nothing that makes it a page turner...there's alot of bullshit intellectual writer's talk conversations...not sure what people are excited about with this book...he disses Stockholm quite a bit and maybe people got their underwear in a knot over that...and i felt like the writer was showboating a bit with how well he could write...there's even a line in the book where his friend tells him how he's envious because he can write 50 pages about somebody going to the washroom and make it seem interesting...i don't know, the book was like telling a friend to come over everyday for a couple of hours for a couple of weeks and have them tell you about a period of their lives from age 25-40...how they got into their current relationship...the ups and downs of the relationship...how they feel about having 3 kids...talking about some of their friends and what they mean to them...their family...fuck man, you'd need some serious alcoholic aperitifs to get through those sessions right...especially when nothing really dramatic happens in their life...and fuck all happens in this guys life...fact of the matter i'd rather hear a friends life then this dude's...i guess there's 6 books in the My Struggle series...think i'll cut my losses here...wash my hands of this intellectual hand wringing shit and get into some serious porn magazines for awhile.
BOOKS ARE FOR PUSSIES:
HENRY MILLER EDITION
"She seems to tremble when she feels my tongue in her cunt. She can't think of enough things to do to my dong in return...she bites it, licks my balls, does everything but swallow the whole works. She even pulls her fig further apart with her fingers, until i have my tongue so far in that it must be tickling her womb. Suddenly there's a flood. She's come, and she almost bites my prick in two. I let her fuck my mouth with her juicy thing...I want to see what she looks like, what she'll do when John Thursday blows up in her teeth...i lie on my back again and watch her work over him. Her head rises and falls slowly. The look of surprise...she's found something warm coming into her mouth. Then her slant eyes close. She swallows and sucks, swallows and sucks..."
CHRIST ALMIGHTY, MY COCK WAS ROCK HARD READING THIS BOOK...from beginning to end...from page 1 to page 288...i had such a case of blu balls boy that i had to wear an ice pack strapped to my cock...my mom who was visiting asked me what was going on...i told her a peacock bit me...she fucking bought it, but that's not surprising as she was fucked up on sleeping pills and wine 98% of the time she was here...anyway, this book is pure comedic porn...pure raunch...says on the back that "In 1941, Henry Miller was commissioned by a Los Angeles bookseller to write an erotic novel for a dollar a page...and Opus Pistorum is that book."...i was always kind of pissed at Henry Miller for literally biting the style of one of my all time favourite writers Louis Ferdinand Celine...but i've come around in recent years to appreciating Miller a bit more...and i'm all the way around after this cock sucking romp through Paris...Miller and his cock that he names "John Thursday" do some serious fucking in this book...every page has fucking in it...it makes James Joyce "Penelope" chapter in Ulysses read like a boy scout manual...Opus Pistorum runs the jewels on every fucking way to fuck or be fucked...you got standard missionary, woman on top, from the side, doggy style, 69, lots of dick sucking, jism swallowing, pussy juice drinking, lots of ass fucking too...you got fucking with midgets, with dogs, with cult leaders, with lesbians, with wives, with 10 year olds...you got rapes, blind dates, one woman even sticks the back end of her brush up her bush...you got black, white, chinese, french, italian, spanish, british, american...you got one on one, two on one, three on one, four on one...you got one guy and one woman, two guys and one woman, two women and one guy, three women and two guys...a math teacher could draw up some excellent skill testing questions for the kids with a book like this...tonight as i was reading this my dick was making my pants look like a teepee...my cat was looking at me like "i betta get the fuck out of here"...i most certainly am up for fucking pussy though...WARNING: but like i said this book will give you a serious fucking hard on...which should make your wife or girlfriend extremely happy...and if you're single you're gonna need to hit up the atm machine and get you a lady of the night...cause your hand ain't gonna do shit to relieve the itch you'll be getting...
BOOKS ARE FOR PUSSIES:
JAMES FUCKING JOYCE EDITION
I guess the man's a genius,
but what a dirty mind he has, hasn't he?
- James Joyce's wife
FINISHED. FUCKING. ULYSSES!!!...wow…fucking epic bro…fucking biblical bro…i should get laid for finishing this book bro…at the very least a fucking tshirt…it was like a marathon…went through alot of emotions…ups and downs…didn't think i would make it at some points…a notch in my literary bedpost with this one done…i've become a bit of a Joyce fanatic after reading this bad boy…just started into his first shits, Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man…also got into a book breaking ULYSSES down called Ulysses and Us…Joyce was a game changer...radically altered how you write a novel...then i read a fascinating book on the shit that went down to get that bad boy published, the Most Dangerous Book: the Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses...ULYSSES was a book that become public enemy #1…we're talking about not only being banned from being sold in Amerikkka…but it was banned from even entering into Amerikkka…and if it did get smuggled in somehow…it would get tossed in a pile and burned!…
Write the dirty words BIG, and underline them and kiss them and hold them for a moment to your sweet hot cunt, darling, and also pull up your dress a moment and hold them in under your dear farting bum.- James Joyce in a letter to his wife
Why was it so flammable…because Joyce held nothing back…at the end of ULYSSES Leopold Bloom's wife is lying in bed thinking about raunchy sex scenes…thinking about sucking cock…getting some cock up her ass…she jokes about sticking a banana up her cunt…writing about that kind of shit just didn't happen up to that point in time...1920s…and the higher ups got concerned it would corrupt people…Joyce didn't give a fuck though…he wouldn't edit that stuff out, but fought to keep it in, even if it meant not getting published or not getting money…took its toll on the dude though…
Print was the way an idea entered the culture's bloodstream, and literary bans ensured that the culture would never absorb dangerous subjects and concepts. What made Ulysses revolutionary was that it was more than a bid for marginally wider freedom. It demanded complete freedom. It swept away all silences. An angry soldier's threats in Nighttown..."I'll wring the bastard fucker's bleeding blasted fucking windpipe"...Molly's imaginary demands..."Lick my shit"...and Bloom's appalling image of the dead sea..."the grey sunken cunt of the world"...are declarations that hencforth there would be no more unspeakable thoughts, no restrictions on the expression of ideas. This is why printing the word fuck was more than schoolboy mischief. "He says everything- everything," Arnold Bennett marveled, "the code is smashed to bits." Ulysses made everything possible. -Kevin Birmingham, from The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses
But what does JAMES FUCKING JOYCE have to do with hip hop...well, in 1988...88 kid!...a bomb in the name of N.W.A dropped...the name stood for NIGGAZ WIT ATTITUDES...aka the World's Most Dangerous Group...
Man, just on the name alone it had white Amerikkka shook…and the albums…STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON, NIGGAZ4LIFE...the albums son…and the lyrical content on those albums…the lyrical content son...which included copious cussing, droog abuse, porno and a dose of the old Clockwork Orange ultra violence...not to mention a song straight up telling the police to go fuck itself and you had white Amerikkka reaching into the back of their closets for that coiled noose...NWA got a personal letter from the FBI saying "howdy"...and had one of the first parental warning stickers slapped on the tape case...parents sure did get their knickers in a knot over this one...shouts out to other controversial rap shit that got people fired up, like Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet...Body Count...Eminem...2 Live Crew...gotta keep those JAMES FUCKING JOYCE banners burning people!...cause without JAMES FUCKING JOYCE we'd still have shit like this...
I end not far from my going forth
By picking the faded blue
Of the last remaining aster flower
To carry again to you
BOOKS ARE FOR PUSSIES:
WILLIAM BURROUGHS EDITION
Before Daylyt wanted to fuck Diddy...i mean, if you ever want to see if you're gay, read some Burroughs...you know like Naked Lunch or Wild Boys...as a test let's see if your cock gets hard while reading this...
He rubs the oil in Johnny's ass hairs and lightly around the rectum. Johnny sighs feeling the cold burn and looks down at his throbbing cock..."Like that Johnny?"...Mark takes a jar of mentholated Vaseline from the medicine cabinet. He rubs the Vaseline around Johnny's ass parting the soft pink flesh and shoves the middle finger all the way up vibrating the finger. Burning inside Johnny squirms and whimpers. His body pulls up his ass contracts spasmodically hot white spurts cover his thin stomach. - The Wild Boys
No...didn't get you turned on...didn't get you a little hard?...maybe a little...hehe.
Before Slick Rick shot his cousin, Burroughs...trying to shoot a shot glass off his wife's head, missed and shot her in the forehead.
I am forced to the appalling conclusion that i would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, a constant need to escape from possession, from control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the ugly spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which i have had no choice except to write my way out. - W.B.
Before Ab Soul had an album called Control System, Burroughs was writing about control systems. Things that control us, bind us, handcuff us...things that keep us from realizing our true potential...things like the education system, government, police, drugs, religion, family morality, sex...throughout his life Burroughs tried dozens of ways to break free of those control systems...from cutting up his writings and words with tape recorders to scrying techniques with mirrors and paintings...
...from Scientology to ESP, psychoanalysis, Wilhelm Reich's orgone box and Reich's Vegetotherapy. He practised the Alexander posture method, studied general semantics, Robert Monroe's out of body seminar, Konstantin Raudive's paranormal tape experiments, Major Bruce MacManaway's pillar of light, the Psionic Wishing Machine, and Carlos Castaneda's fictional Don Juan. He believed in UFO's and Whitley Strieber's aline abductions and used the "control" computer in London that answered questions for 12 shillings and sixpence a time. - From the biography "Call me Burroughs" by Barry Miles
Before Alchemist and Oh No made their Vodka and Ayahuasca album, Burroughs was down in South America searching for the Yage plant aka Ayahuasca...on the run from Mexican authorities for the death of his wife and on the run from America for drug arrests, he journeyed deep into the Amazon in search of a Shaman who could prepare a hallucinogenic concoction from the Yage vine...in a search to reclaim his soul.
Before the Ghostface Killah was a mystery, there was El Hombre Invisible aka the Invisible Man...known for his ability to walk through busy Tangier streets without being seen. Without the beggars and the hustlers hitting him up he walked invisible...his theory was that if you scan fast enough and see people...see everyone before they see you...you disappear.
Before Bushwick Bill and the Geto Boys had their minds playing tricks on them, Burroughs was dealing with that same evil force.
I would have to say yes, evil exists, definitely. I asked myself, why do these demons have such necessity to possess, and why are they so reluctant to leave? The answer is, that's the only way they can get out of hell. It's sort of like junk. They possess somebody and they want to hang on to it because that's their ticket out of hell. - W.B.
Before Eminem was "Poppin Percocet" and hitting Rock Bottom, Burroughs had popped every known drug and its combinations the world over.
I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of heroin addiction. ... I did absolutely nothing. I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness... When I speak of drug addiction I do not refer to keif, marijuana or any preparation of hashish, mescaline, Banisteriopsis caapi, LSD6, Sacred Mushrooms or any other drugs of the hallucinogen group... There is no evidence that the use of any hallucinogen results in physical dependence. - From Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness
Before Mobb Deep were Daydreamin, Burroughs had come to some interesting conclusions on the purpose of dreams...
He found that animals like calves and foals, who can fend for themselves immediately after birth, dream alot in the womb and relatively little after that. Humans and kittens dream less in the womb and are unable to fend for themselves at birth. He concluded that human babies could not walk or feed themselves until they had ENOUGH PRACTICE IN DREAMS. This indicates that the function of dreams is to TRAIN THE BEING FOR FUTURE CONDITIONS. I postulate that the human artifact is biologically designed for space travel. So human dreams can be seen as TRAINING FOR SPACE CONDITIONS. Deprived of this vital link with our future in space, with no reason for living, we die. - W.B.
And way, way before Bobby Shmurda was talking about the "9 millis" on his block...Burroughs was running around with weapons on weapons...the list includes a .454 hand gun with scope that he got from Hunter S Thompson...a collection of shotguns and rifles...switchblades and bowie knives...cattle prods, swords, bear claw brass knuckles!?...and a cane collection with a variety of swords and guns inside of them!!!...i mean, you really didn't want to be fucking with this guy on the stroll...in the immortal words of ice cube...Burroughs was "the wrong nigga to fuck with"
Before "Heisenberg", Burroughs was the man...say my name...Burroughs...say it again...BURROUGHS!!! I just finished Barry Miles bio called "Call me Burroughs" and it's one of the most fascinating biographies i've ever read. From America to Tangier, from Mexico to Paris, from South America to London...from being part of the Beat generation with friends Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg to his experimental cut up projects with the artist Brion Gysin in the Beat hotel, Burroughs has quite honestly seen and done it all. If you can't get into his fiction, then i highly recommend this biography...i give it 5 out of 5 needles to the telepathic vein...william brown
CHARLES FORT –
THE MAN WHO INVENTED THE SUPERNATURAL
By Jim Steinmeyer
review by william brown
review by william brown
If you asked the next person you see if they’ve ever seen a UFO, there’s a pretty good chance that they have. At the very least, they won’t look at you like you fucked your mother’s sister. The same goes for ghosts, and bigfoot, loch ness monster and other such mysteries that go bump in the night.
Well, imagine talking about that shit in the early 1900’s. You’d be drawn and fucking quartered…luckily for Charles Fort that didn’t happen cause the man was interested in exploring some pretty virgin territory in regards to these subjects.
“I shall be accused of having assembled lies, yarns and hoaxes and superstitions,” Fort writes “and to some degree, I think so, myself. To some degree I do not. I offer the data.” He follows with accounts of bleeding statues, mysterious animals, sea monsters, lights in the skies from unknown airships, unexplained cattle mutilations, spontaneous human combustion, disappearing people, peculiar injuries, psychic criminals, mysterious diseases, and frogs falling from the sky.
Charles Fort set the stage nicely for all the kinds of shit we enjoy to this day…shows like the X-FILES…Spielberg movies…sci-fi books…comics…fuck I bet he even influenced porno if I can figure out how…he made looking into the night sky that much more interesting! The dude spent thousands of hours researching a wide spectrum of strange… "I studied all of the arts and sciences I had ever heard of and I invented half a dozen arts and sciences. Then came to me a plan of collecting notes upon all subjects of human research upon all known phenomena, and then to try and find the widest possible diversity of data- law or formula, something that could be generalized. I collected notes upon principles and phenomena of astronomy, sociology, psychology, deep sea diving, navigation, surveying, volcanoes, religion, sexes, earthworms, that is, I was always seeking similarities in the widest seeming differences.”
The guy mentions collecting notes…yeah he collected notes all right…try 40,000 individual notes in cardboard boxes…guy would’ve loved the computer is all I got to say about that!
Check this philosophy of life out…called orthogenesis: which insists that evolution is never random or scattered, but proceeds along a predetermined path, cosmically or chemically implanted in every organism. Fort goes onto explain…
“The whole thing may have been originated somewhere else, worked out beforehand, as it were, in the brain of something or somebody and is now being orthogenetically or chemically directed from somewhere; being thrown on the screen, as it were, like a moving picture, and we mere dot pictures, mere cell built up pictures, like the movies, only we are telegraphed or teleautographed from somewhere else.”
Like Juicy J would say, “that’s trippy man.” Fort called his new book “X” and it wasn’t just a title for the book but it was the name he gave to the outside motivating source that influenced all of society. In his book, Fort suggested that this controlling source resided on the planet mars. That x communicated through rays that could create all things…”you, me, all animals, plants, the earth and fullness, its beauty and variety and strangeness, its joy and sorrow and terror as well as ecstasy of this thing we call life.”
He continues on…
“If, in acting upon us, x could only make use of what we should naturally do anyway – we should if stimulated to action by x, think that we were but following what we call our own free wills. Then, in the search for x, we should look not for strange, seemingly supernatural phenomena, but for things that we should have done anyway, but in a lesser degree, historical events which have heretofore been accounted for by reason, but have in them somewhere a vague mystery or an atmosphere of the unaccountable, despite all the assurances of their own infallibility that our historians have given us. I shall try to show that x exists, that this influence is, and must be evil to an appalling degree to us at present, evil which at least equals anything ever conceived of in medieval demonology.”
According to Fort, "we have no free will but are controlled by a powerful, outside force that simulates free will." It was echoed in his own powerlessness, the inability “to do things I feel I ought to do.”
In his next book “Y” Fort proposed a theory of “complementaries”, that every phenomenon has a complementary phenomenon. Similarly x has a complementary force called y and this is acting upon earth.
Fort proposed that Kaspar Hauser, a strange boy who stumbled into Nuremberg one day in 1828, was actually an envoy from y. Hauser exhibited odd traits like supernatural senses, but could barely communicate and did not recall any family. After making his home in Nuremberg, he was killed under puzzling circumstances – stabbed as he walked in the middle of a snowy park; no other footprints in the snow, no murder weapon.
According to Fort “y-land” existed in a sort of depression or basin at the top of the earth. And that we were destined to merge with the other race.
X and Y were compiled with other stories and put into a single volume called “the book of the damned” that you can find here….http://www.resologist.net/
Charles Fort used his research studies and his imagination to push the boundaries of how we view reality. He didn’t need the shackles of scientific study to prove his theories right or wrong, it was irrelevant. A lot of his stuff is tongue and cheek and to be taken with a grain of salt, but that’s what’s great about him. When you read him it’s a fun carnival ride through the solar system.
During his lifetime a number of people dug what he wrote about. A Fortean society was undertaken, and later after his death magazines like “doubt” and “fortean times” carried on looking at the world in different ways.
The book is written with a good energy and doesn’t come off as stale or boring, which a lot of bios tend to do for me. I definitely recommend this book to people who would like to stretch their minds for a bit....
4 out of 5 blips on the UFO loving radar
The Wheel of Time: Path of Daggers, Winter's Heart by Robert Jordan
 |
| This image has absolutely nothing to do with this review. * |
These are book 9 and 10 or 25 and 26 ( i just
don't give a rat's ass anymore) of this infernal series that I can't stop
reading because I've already dedicated the best years of my life to it and I
now have to see how it ends. Luckily Jordan
So hold tight as I hit you with a half assed review of not one but two novels in record time.
Basically imagine the Force (albeit with far
more powerful applications) having two sides but one for male and one for
female and the male half had become tainted so all men using the power
eventually went crazy leaving the females known as Aes Sedai to protect the
world and hunt down men who can "channel" to stop them from going mad
and breaking the world.
Add to that that even the females acknowledge
the prophecy of the Dragon reborn who will come to save the world from the evil
Saitain who has slowly been escaping from his prison that was constructed while
the male Aes Sedai still existed. Not to mention that there are other
interesting groups who also have their own versions of the prophecy.
Conceptually maybe the best fantasy series ever.
As for execution not so much, Jordan
*Holy fuck does typing the words "naked dragon" into Google images take you to places you don't want to go.**
**Unless you love dick.
The Night Angel Trilogy: The Way of Shadows, The Shadow's Edge, Beyond the Shadows
I saw a friend reading the Way of the Shadows
and since the cover art looks like the art from Assassins Creed I asked him if
the books where any good and he lent me the series. The author here starts the
story out with a young ghetto kid who wants to of course get out of the ghetto
and he thinks the best way to do so is to become the apprentice of the world's
premier wetboy Durzo Blint. Wetboys are basically super assassins. The
difference being that assassins have targets...because they might miss. Wetboys
don't have targets they have deaders because once the contract is signed they
don't miss. Wetboys always have super human powers. There's only one Wetgirl
which is funny because whenever she comes across a wetboy they say something
like, "so are you a wet girl?" to which she always has to reply,
"but not like you're thinking". Which is awesome because that joke
has to be made, I don't care what kind of writer you are you just have to tell
that joke..
Speaking writers I'd say Weeks is an average
writer with a big imagination. This series goes from assassins with minor
powers to immortals with major powers and everything in between. Very wide
scope to what he tries to get in here. Reminded me of how back in the 80's the
X-Men would fight Dracula, the Brood, and then Samurais all in the same year
more or less.
What is really annoying is the names. The
countries and characters tend to have names that sound too much alike and it
becomes a pain trying to keep everything straight. What's worse is he does it
in twos so he'll have a country named Cenuria and then the very next country
they go will be called Shocenuria or some such. Not sure why Weeks didn’t
realize how shitty that would be. All in all a fun series of stories to pass
the time. Also as a fan of the Double R(Martin not DMX you ninnies) I just have
to applaud man who can pump up this much work in so little time. Check them
out.
The Life of Pi by Yan Martel
A young boy finds himself on a life boat, the
sole survivor of a sinking ship that took the life of his entire family. The
sole human survivor anyway. Stuck on this 30ft life boat with the boy whose
name is Pi, is a zebra with a broken leg, an orangutan, a hyena, and a 500
pound Bengal tiger. All of these being wild
animals with no restraints to keep them in check. The story unfolds over the
year Pi is lost at sea.
Not a really long novel but it bogs down a
little bit at times. Very clever premise that I wish a better writer had
thought of first. Not to say this book isn't well written but I think it was
very close to being spectacular. Very nice ending.
I Read Some Stuff: The Boy Meets Girl
Who is a Boy Who Meets
a Girl Edition
The Tamir Triad by Lynn Flewelling
The Bone Doll's Twin, Hidden Warrior, The Oracles Queen
The Bone Doll's Twin, Hidden Warrior, The Oracles Queen
There's a land called Skala and several moons
ago the Oracle of Afra said "So long as a daughter of Thelátimos’ line defends
and rules, Skala shall never be subjugated." So the denizens of Skala
followed the prophecy for years and all was good.
Funny thing happened on the way to paradise
though, one of the Queens went squirrel shit
nutty. So people were pretty glad when she died. However this mad Queen had
two children one a very young girl Ariani and the other a teenaged boy named
Erius. While many wanted the girl on the throne many more allowed that since
the boy was older and taking into account the last Queen was crazy, that the
boy should be made King until his sister came of age.
The trouble being that Erius never gave his
sister the throne when she came of age, AND he started killing all the girl
children of the royal line to protect the claim of his own son. During his
reign Skala started having many incidents of drought famine and sickness. The
people pointed to the prophecy.
King's sister Ariani was to have a child of her
own. Trouble is the damned prophet started sending visions to all the wizards
of Skala promising that a female would be born that would once again uphold the
prophecy.
This leads to a group of people drugging Ariani
who is pregnant with twins. They kill the boy child and using magic they graft
his image on to his sister to protect her from the king.
Don't consider that a spoiler because really
that shit takes place on page 3 not to mention the back cover of the first book.
Anyway the girl lives as a boy (Prince Tobin)
until she's ready to claim the throne as Queen Tamir. Adding to the suspense is
the fact that her dead brother comes back as a demon looking for revenge.
Of interest:
A girl living as boy and for much of her life
not even knowing she's a girl, and then when she finds out she's a girl she
still has to live as a boy. Which sucks because she falls for her best friend a
boy named Ki. Poor Ki gets real confused by the proceedings. Which is funny
because Ki knew Tobin/Tamir loved him and just assumed he was gay. Which he
could deal with but when he finds out Tobin is actually a girl it gets weird
for Ki and weirder for the reader. Talk about uncomfortable.
I find it funny that most women writers of
fantasy that I'm familiar with always seem to have to add a strong dose of man
on man loving. I mean half the dudes in this book are gay. What ever happened
to girl on girl? Girl on girl never hurt anyone. I mean just curve your finger
along the vaginal wall until you come to a fleshy protuberance, but I digress.
I will say that the author Lynn Lewelling drags
out the Ki/Tobin tension for so long you get use to it, but thank god they
never consummate their relation during the course of the series even though you
know they do at some point.
Of suckiness
From the time the series starts to when it ends
there is a "Guardian of the Bowl" surprisingly this has nothing to do
with Tobin's hidden cooch. It's an actual bowl. There are hints that the bowl
is part of a magical suit of armouror some such but the story clearly makes
the bowl an object of great power. I was expecting a golem or something to make
a play for it but I get to the end of the third book and the bowl plays no part.
I think to myself what about the god damn bowl?
On the very next page in the author's afterwards
she says"I bet your saying to yourself 'What about the god damn bowl"
"Why yes I think. That's exactly what I was
thinking about"
She goes on to explain that she ran out of room
in the book. THE THREE BOOKS. But that she'll explain the bowl in another
series she mistakenly presumes I'm going to read.
Really that's nearly as bad as when Todd
Macfarlene was putting out issues of Spawn in reverse order.
All in all a good read though. Definitely worth
the time.
Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvis
Maybe my favourite movie of last year and as usual I heard the book was better. Several times in the past I've watched movies and then read the book and most of those times I've still managed to find the book more enjoyable than the movie. This time however the experience was a little different and kind of weird. I think this is a good good book, but I think the movie got it so right that it took a little bit of enjoyment out of my read. Especially since my main hope for the book was to have it fill in some of the back story of the vampire Eli. Which it did but i still wanted it to be more in depth. That being said i did tear through this book at a rapid pace. Well worth a read especially if you haven't seen the movie and you aren't unduly disgusted by the hint of pedophilia*.
What I like most about this book is that it manages to add some sort of emotional depth to the vampire genre without going all Lestat and Louis on us. We get a tragic back story for Eli. Yes more tragic than being a child vampire. Yet we also get to see the friendship develop between Oskar and Eli that develops naturally. Though at the end we're left wondering how much is real and how much is vampire manipulation. Just a great addition to an age old genre.
*Fucking right you should be disgusted.
*Fucking right you should be disgusted.
Two Book Reviews:
by Drama En Sabah
Queens Reigns Supreme
by Ethan Brown
Summary: The basic premise of this book is to look at the impact that Queens has had on the hip hop generation. Starting with the hey day of some of America's most notorious (Am I the only one who can no longer spell notorious without channeling Biggie? N.O, T.O, R.I, O, U.S, you jess lay down slow) black gangsters and the entire generation of hip hop heads who grow up looking up to them.
Points of interest: It's funny but it's a negative thing that I like most about this book. I have a friend who's a hustler and while he's not trying to be a prick he tends to get on my nerves with questions like, "Why don't black criminals organize? You're the only ones who can't get together and do anything." Now maybe it's the Jane St. in me but questions of that nature piss me off. I mean sure I could find the answer in history of slavery SOMEWHERE, but I'm tired of the slavery excuse and it doesn't bare much weight with hustler friends anyway. The fact that this book talks about the efficiency with which such black criminal organizations as The Supreme Team, The Nichols Organization, and the Mickens Crew ran is testament that minorities too can run criminal enterprise as well as anyone ever has. Yes the bright side of crack.Also it's damn amazing how many hip hoppers have connections to Queens. After reading this book it would be very easy to determine that Queens is the most important borough in hip hop history. The major movers and shakers of the burgeoning 80's hip hop industry were from Queens.
The author successful shows how the real gangsters of Southside Queens influenced youngsters like DJ Irv (Gotti) and Murder Inc. It points out the Irv was never a street guy and kind of pulls a Jay-Z card as well. I can't remember the exact quote but it was something to the effect of (Jay like Irv didn't make his name in the streets but as a dj. He toured as Jaz-o's dj). One of the reasons Irv scooped up DMX is because Ja Rule and Jay-Z didn't have the street cred DMX did. The author points out that DMX was robbing everyone in Yonkers and was a problem.The book also provides some details of the issues 50 has with the Inc but nothing too mind blowing. It does link one of Little Kim's future boyfriends to the killing of 50's shooter but once 50 dissed Kim her boyfriend decided to light up the hotel 50 was staying at. There are several mentions of the fact that the Inc was indeed surveying 50 for Supreme Team head honcho umm, err Supreme (creative, no)?
The book does also provide enough info for one to draw their own conclusions in regards to the murder of Jam Master Jay.
It's hard for me to review books that deal with hip hop because I tend to always like them. Meaning I have to sift through the stuff I like and see if anyone else will like them before suggesting they read it. I can say it was hard for me to put this book down for the first half of it anyway after which I read it at a slower clip but still I read the entire thing in a day or so. The only real problem is that it seems to promise so much but doesn't necessarily deliver. That may just be my perception but hey it's my review.7 out of 10.
The Wu-Tang Manual by the RZA.
It's a point of contention with me that there are so many Wu-Tang fans who kind of deny themselves the full Wu-Tang experience by not ever asking themselves what the hell is Wu-Tang talking about? The myth of the Wu-Tang goes a lot deeper than their records indicate. Actually that's not true their records do indicate this group has an extensive story. It's just up to the people to gather the puzzle pieces and connect them. To that end the Abbot a.k.a The RZA brings forth book 1 of the Wu-Tang Manual.
Synopsis: The book opens up with biographies of all 9 original members. At the end of each biography is a section entitled "The Legend of..." My favourite being the Legend of GZA, where RZA tells a story about how like 8 thugs had RZA and GZA trapped in an apartment in the projects and they couldn't get out. GZA gets tired of sitting around waiting for the axe to drop so to speak and dons his koffi and his 7 star ring and walks out into the hallway among their enemies. Before anyone can do anything GZA says, "My name is Justice Allah from Brooklyn!" RZA goes on to state that GZA's voice just had that effect on people were they would just submit to him. Justice is GZA's righteous name which is why GZA was originally spelt Jizza.
Speaking of righteous names, the manual also provides a decent amount of info on the Nation of Gods and Earths, formerly known as the 5 Percent Nation of Islam. Who are possibly the most influential of the hip hop sub groups, with quick and yet concise lessons in the Supreme Alphabet and Supreme Mathematics.
The Manual actually spends as much time discussing Buddhism, as drug use. And Kung-Fu movies, as urban wear. Which is really the strength of this book, unlike most commercial offerings this book doesn't assume the average reader can't digest the Supreme Alphabet and enjoy a chapter on Kung Fu movies. The author doesn't assume because the reader may enjoy a story on Clark Wallabies that it's beyond the reader's ability to appreciate Buddhism or comic books.
I'm going to have to give this one 8 out of 10. Definite worthwhile read.
Positive Energy Actuates Constant Elevation
www.theghostfacedoll.com/main.html
Book review: L.A.byrinth by Randall Sullivan
by Drama En Sabah
Anyway the strength of this book lays in the fact that the writer has a pair. This guy names, names at the drop of a dime. Correct that. The drop of a nickel. I mean what does DJ Quik have to do with the case? Nothing. And yet the author still points out that Quik and his crew stomped a man to death in L.A not too long ago and got a way with it. He also puts Snoop Dogg on blast for advising the L.A police that Suge had 'Pac killed.
Which leads us to the point I can't really wrap my head around. While the book is mostly a look into the death of Biggie it does touch briefly on Tupac's murder. The author believes that all evidence points to Suge having arranged the murder. But as crazy as any man is, does he sit beside a guy whose about to be shot with a semi automatic weapon? I don't know about that.
However the evidence presented in regards to Biggie's murder is outstandingly believable and is backed up by several eye witness accounts. The mysterious bowtie man was pointed out as the shooter by several unrelated people. The bowtie man's connections lead directly back to Suge Knight and his goon squad. It goes on and on to the point it's hard to accept any other theories as credible.
The book also advises that it's possible the shooter was going to kill Puffy but since Puffy's car ran a red light Biggie's car was next in line. Perhaps.
The info presented in this book was the basis for the movie Tupac and Biggie by Nick Broomfield as well as the wrongful death suit filed by Biggie's mother Violetta Wallace. The same suit that ended in a mistrial as the judge determined the police were hiding evidence. Once the case goes back to trial it looks like the story may finally come out.
After reading this book I'm pretty sure Suge is the beyatch that had Big killed.
The book and the impending retrial have recently been revisited here:
www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/8898338
Book review: L.A.byrinth by Randall Sullivan 
by Drama En Sabah
This is an investigative piece written by award winning journalist Randall Sullivan. This book is more a less a look at one L.A police detective's (Kevin Poole's) work on solving the murder of the Notorious B.I.G. The book details the back story into the corrupt cops of L.A's Rampart division and how they were basically murderers for hire who at times worked for Death Row records and therefore were employees of Suge Knight. The Rampart division was so out of control that an officer could call into the station house request a couple kilos of cocaine for a "case" and the officer in charge of the evidence room would simply send the drugs by Purolator Express. The requesting officer wouldn't even have to sign for it. He'd then sell the cocaine at a profit and then return baking soda to the evidence room. Bonkers!
Also detailed in this book is the political web that has snared those trying to crack this case. The City of Los Angeles has a huge vested interest in making sure this case is never solved.
Also detailed in this book is the political web that has snared those trying to crack this case. The City of Los Angeles has a huge vested interest in making sure this case is never solved.
Anyway the strength of this book lays in the fact that the writer has a pair. This guy names, names at the drop of a dime. Correct that. The drop of a nickel. I mean what does DJ Quik have to do with the case? Nothing. And yet the author still points out that Quik and his crew stomped a man to death in L.A not too long ago and got a way with it. He also puts Snoop Dogg on blast for advising the L.A police that Suge had 'Pac killed.Which leads us to the point I can't really wrap my head around. While the book is mostly a look into the death of Biggie it does touch briefly on Tupac's murder. The author believes that all evidence points to Suge having arranged the murder. But as crazy as any man is, does he sit beside a guy whose about to be shot with a semi automatic weapon? I don't know about that.
However the evidence presented in regards to Biggie's murder is outstandingly believable and is backed up by several eye witness accounts. The mysterious bowtie man was pointed out as the shooter by several unrelated people. The bowtie man's connections lead directly back to Suge Knight and his goon squad. It goes on and on to the point it's hard to accept any other theories as credible.
The book also advises that it's possible the shooter was going to kill Puffy but since Puffy's car ran a red light Biggie's car was next in line. Perhaps.The info presented in this book was the basis for the movie Tupac and Biggie by Nick Broomfield as well as the wrongful death suit filed by Biggie's mother Violetta Wallace. The same suit that ended in a mistrial as the judge determined the police were hiding evidence. Once the case goes back to trial it looks like the story may finally come out.
After reading this book I'm pretty sure Suge is the beyatch that had Big killed.The book and the impending retrial have recently been revisited here:
www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/8898338