The Odd Volume- Volume 2

After two aborted blog attempts (one on college degrees and one on Richard Wagner) I decided to do another one of these posts on weird books in my personal library.
A note to new readers, this blog is not entirely about books (just mostly.) Also, once again, you can click on the pictures to make them bigger.

On the left is a book that probably should be called an encyclopedia rather than a dictionary. It's a book of information a la the Encyclopedia Britannica except that it is entirely focused on imaginary places like Oz, Neverland, Lilliput and so on. There are maps and drawings of flora. For some reason I've always loved books that break down the fourth wall of imagination and treat the fantastic as one treats the scientific. It's far from exhaustive, but it is a rip-roaring fun book to take down and spend a few hours in. The writers did a fantastic job. The entries have history, geography, economics, and other information on the imaginary place followed by the work of fiction from which the place comes.
As interesting and on a similar note, A Natural History of the Unnatural World deals with crypto-zoology which is to say the zoology of creatures which are most likely mythological. This one's design is far more compelling although slightly less information rich with photographs, drawings, biological information, testimonies, geographic information, and so on. There are entries on dragons, Basilisks, elves, trolls, kobolds, kelpies, sea serpents, mermaids, minotaurs and on and on and on. Both books play it very straight. Both are the kind of thing that I would have carried with me at all times as a child.


Philip K. Dick was a science fiction author who one day found himself living in one of his plots against his will. For those of you who don't know, he had a strange experience in the 1970s where reality went all funny on him, he saw ancient Rome superimposed on modern times, he saw visions of fire, flashes of works of modern art, and much more. One of the stranger bits was he "received" the information that his son had an uncommon life threatening hernia which, while not easy to detect, was easily solved with surgery. He took his son to the doctor to check and, indeed, he had that very condition. The vision saves his son's life. This sort of visionary oddness lasted several months and then stopped. PKD spent the rest of his life (about a decade) trying to figure out what had happened to him.
But he didn't come up with any concrete answers. He wrote three novels on the subject (which I think are his best work. They are Valis, The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.) But he also wrote thousands of pages of what he called his "Exegesis" speculating soviet (or Nixonian) mind control, theophanies, anamnesis, schizophrenia, messages from aliens, or any mixture of those. When PKD fans hear about this, they tend to say "my gosh, I wish I could read that." For a short time they could because Lawrence Sutin put together a highly abridged version in the early 1990s. It's now extremely rare. There are very few people in the world who would be interested in such a volume, but those who are are VERY interested.




Sparrow is a poet in New York. On the left is an account of his "run for president" on the Pajama Party ticket in 1992. He lost. Mainly he stood outside political events with a megaphone and read poetry.
The volume on the right is Yes, You Are A Revolutionary! It's an instruction book for revolutionaries and it is hilarious. It gives advice like "train yourself to leave a movie in the middle" or "infiltrate the Boy Scouts" or "draw with your foot" or "study the hula." It also has some striking bits like this "Begin taking long walks, through a city. Notice the CEOs and limousine drivers and toiling waitresses and laughing children. Look at the children carefully. What will they become when they are large? Will they still be laughing?"
It also has recipes for Revolutionary Fortune Cookies, The People's Polenta, and Victory Ice Cream.




This book is many lists of dead celebrities. It has how and when they died, but more importantly it has where they are buried. I used to live in Southern California and you'll notice the book has a lot of wear to it. That's because I used to organize groups to go to Hollywood on cemetery trips to visit the graves of celebrities. I cried at Truman Capote's grave by the way.
One time we went to the Hollywood Memorial Cemetery and I wanted to go into the mauseleum where Vincent Price and Peter Lorre and Rudolf Valentino were buried, but it was closed. I was dejected and an older man came up and asked if we had come to see River Phoenix. I said, "No, I wanted to see Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Rudolf Valentino." The man was thunderstruck that kids our age even know who those people were and he was so impressed that he (who was an off-duty tour guide) gave us a free walking tour of the cemetery (which included Douglas Fairbanks, Mel Blanc, Tyrone Power, and Virginia Rappe who was the girl that Fatty Arbuckle killed.)
It's an old edition so I think it only goes up to about 1998, but I'm sure there are even more recent editions.




Ah, fellow hardcore Orson Welles fans know this rare little volume. Clifford Irving, fresh from hoaxing the world with a fake "autobiography" of recluse Howard Hughes, wrote this biography on Elmyr De Hory, the greatest art forger of our time. It's said that if you go to a museum of modern art there is a strong chance that a large portion of the major works you're looking at are actually by Elmyr. It's a tremendous story about art forging and the dishonesty of experts. Orson Welles made a film based on it (but also drawing Clifford Irving's own fakery and, in fact, Welles' own fakery into the story. Even to the point of suggesting that Elmyr may or may not have actually existed and the whole thing may be either entirely true or entirely false or some variation thereupon.) Along with all of that, it's a very interesting and well told story. As with all of these, it's a shame that it's not more widely available.



Well, I don't know about you, but I'm enjoying these posts and plan on doing more. It's great fun for me to do, I get to write about books which I love, and it's something for slow news/opinion days. I have a Religion edition and a Cookbook edition planned in the near future. Ta!

I'm Going Live Forever

"Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed.
He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making sure your attention is always filled.
And this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imaginations atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world." -Chuck Palahniuk

On my way home from the post office this morning in my 12 year old Ford Explorer with peeling paint, 3 months after my layoff and 2 days without shaving, I heard someone say something on my radio that I've heard many people say in the past 3 weeks, "Where were all of you people who now profess your love for Michael Jackson when he was alive?"

The answer is that they were outside of the locked, guarded gates of Neverland. The answer was that the very weird and confusing bits of personal news from the artist's life that filtered to their eyes and ears in the past 20 years has kind of tainted people's appreciation for the artist's work. Until he died. Now it is nice dance music. Now people feel okay appreciating the work again since there isn't some very disturbed, very sad and vaguely sinister artist behaving lawlessly, remorselessly somewhere. I come to bury Jackson, not to praise him. One would like to think that the evil men do dies with them, but turns out it really does live after them.
I never owned a Michael Jackson album and my connection is really just that I lived through the peak of his career and decline. His body of work has always struck me as meatless. Actually, that's a bit of a high horse statement on my part. In all honesty I should say it's not the kind of meatless music I tend to go for when I go for meatless music.
Laurie, however, was crazy about his music from back in the day, the pre-Thriller stuff, and Gina grew up when he was bigger than the Beatles. I am told she danced as a child to Man in the Mirror or some such thing. This is the only contact we will, could or ever will have with the man. Really, the artist could be a complete recluse and the only thing we know about them is the art that shows up with their name on it (Pynchon comes to mind as does Salinger.)

However, if one has a platform, ought not one use it? Even if one risks losing the platform, ought they not risk it for something they think worth risking it over?

I was dinking around the internet (you know how the internet can be) and ended up on a vaguely familiar video clip the other day. It was Sinead O'Connor's infamous performance of a a capella Bob Marley cover (with "racism" replaced with "child abuse")which culminates in her tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II on SNL from the early 1990s (which, if you've never actually seen it, I highly encourage you to click this link and watch it.) I realized (I suspect with a large portion of the studio audience) that while I was struck by the courage and defiance she was showing, I had absolutely no idea what she was on about. So I looked it up!

She was on about the sexual abuse of children in the Roman Catholic Church, and how the allegations were being ignored because they were made by women and children. Which, in retrospect, seems rather astute and prescient on her part as the performance occurred in 1992. At the time people were very upset about it, as I remember, (I'm not sure if they all understood why they were upset aside from someone dragging emotional depth onto Saturday Night Live) and O'Connor's career took some rather dramatic turns. Today she has eschewed pop music, released a Reggae album and is about to release an album called "Theology." She is an ordained priest in the Independent Catholic Church and she says that her mission is to "rescue God from religion." That's another frustrating soundbite for me as depending on what the speaker means I might absolutely agree or disagree with them. Part of the game of being a "normal" or "unfamous person" is that I may die not knowing what she is talking about. I am out of the loop and only receive the information allowed me. There is no conversation, there is only a monologue. And so I have traded one mystery of what she's talking about for another.
The SNL clip reminded me of Marlon Brando's Oscar acceptance by proxy, Michael Moore's Oscar speech, Harvey Pekar's Letterman strike appearance, and that is just off the top of my head. I'm sure I could come up with many more. All of their careers shifted as well but mainly bounced back to their former state after a time. How is it that other pop stars like Bono and Sting can get all sanctimonious and get away with it? The cynic in my thinks it may have to do with them not being bald women.

I do not know these people and probably never will. They care about me, my life, and what I think of them or even are as aware of my existence about as much as the crystal formations in the Lechuguilla Cave care about me.
There is an admiration I have for those who see that they have a platform and risk losing the platform to speak out for truth, justice, peace, conservation, equality or good. The celebrity system is asinine. People who act in movies or make music or write books that get published are just people. They are not magical beings. They are just as human as a produce truck delivery driver, possibly with less talent. We don't have to take orders from them. Just like anyone, we can agree or disagree, regard or disregard them. Just because I like the song you made doesn't mean I want to know anything about your life (I was amazed at how much I knew about the life of Michael Jackson, having very little interest, and realizing I was aware of pretty much every major point of his public life) and I don't necessarily care what you think about things any more than you care what I think about things. Also, I don't hold you in higher esteem than anyone else. I doff my hat to no man.

Mainly because I don't wear hats.

Also please do bear in mind that I am not immune or outside of the paradigm I am describing. Intrepid readers have probably already noticed the long list of names I've dropped in this post. But I will do everything in my power not to bow at their altars.

If I had not put the quote and citation on the quote at the top of this post I would be passing it off as my original thought, which is stealing, dishonesty and plagiarism. By citing and quoting I am giving due credit. Names are useful. For example, I have enjoyed every piece of music I've ever heard by Tom Waits, so I can be fairly certain when I come again to a point in my life where I have money to throw at music, that I will enjoy any future music by Tom Waits. Also, as another example, I can point people at things that are wonderful (which I love to do.) I can tell you about Nicki Jaine, this wonderful dark cabaret performer whose albums you should all buy. But maybe we had better let it go at that.

In a perfect world, people use tools. In an imperfect world, people abuse tools. People worship false idols. My encouragement for you is to sanctify sanctify sanctify. Revere and bless. Seek to always follow the Shema "You shall love the Lord your God with all you heart and with all your soul and with all your might." And the other part of the Great Commandment "Love your neighbor as yourself." (hint: your neighbor is everyone else.)
As for life on an imperfect world, there are so many laws, customs, and cultural pressures to do such horrible, evil, greedy, wicked, inappropriate things. They smell like death and they are infernal. Keep your eye on your treasure and ignore the chaff, the blather, the noise and distractions. As Sinead would agree and as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Good men must not obey the laws too well." Celebrities are not to be obeyed.
Do the real work.

Fight the real enemy.