Tag: book reviews
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Review: Carr’s Bad
Bad: The Autobiography of James Carr James Carr I’ve read scores of memoirs from radical political activists. This one, by James Carr, is among the best. Carr was a career criminal, in and out of jail until he ended up in Soledad prison and befriended George Jackson, became politicized, and became one of Jackson’s top…
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Review: Lukas’s Big Trouble
Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America J. Anthony Lukas I’m always surprised more people haven’t read this book about the assassination of Idaho’s former governor and the class war in the courtroom battle that grew out of it. It’s a well written, fast…
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Review: Sinclair’s White Chapel: Scarlet Tracings
White Chapel: Scarlet Tracings Iain Sinclair An odd but of work, this novel by poet, bookseller, novelist and pyscho-geographer Iain Sinclair was one of the main inspirations for Alan Moore’s From Hell. It’s a pretty out-there novel that is part investigation into the Jack the Ripper murders, part fictionalized pseudo memoir of life amongst the…
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Taking Trash Culture Seriously: Kerekes and Slater’s Killing for Culture
Now this one, guys, this one was weird. An well researched, well written, investigation into the so-called death on film focusing primarily on the “mondo” films phenomenon of the 1970s and 80s. If you’re of a certain age, you remember these collections of deaths and other gruesome scenes, allegedly caught on film. This stuff was…
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Sensory Deprivation Tanks, Talking Dolphins, and Aliens: Remembrances of reading John C. Lilly
The Scientists: A Novel Autobiography Simulations of God: Science of Belief Programming and Metaprogramming of the Human Biocomputer John C. Lilly Lilly was a well know and respected scientist who, like many in the late sixties, kinda start going off the rails. Did young Sean read the works of science Lilly produced early in his…
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A Bit Dark, Kinda Cynical, But Still Pretty Woo-Woo: My Remembrances of Being a Young Dude Reading Too Much Robert Anton Wilson
Prometheus Rising Quantum Psychology Coincidence Cosmic Trigger Vol. 1 Cosmic Trigger Vol. II: Down to Earth Chaos and Beyond the Best of Trajectories Robert Anton Wilson It’s probably just best to come out and admit I’ve read pretty much everything Robert Anton Wilson wrote up to about 1995. After that, nothing. Much of Wilson’s writings…
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Review: The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz
The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (trans. Joscelyn Godwin) Here’s one of the problems for the autodidact who follows his bliss this way and that, from one book to another, reading what he wants. He can end up, at 18, reading one of the foundational texts of western hermeticism without any real context, or real…
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Review: Mondo2000’s Users Guide to the New Edge
Mondo2000s Users Guide to the New Edge R.U. Sirius, Rudy Rucker, Queen Mu Friends, now-a-days, it seems hopelessly naïve that the birth of the internet age would bring with it a techno utopia of virtual reality, direct democracy, and extensive leisure. But in the early 90s, to a certain set of California techno-utopians (and the…
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Review: Charter’s The Portable Beat Reader
The Portable Beat Reader Ann Charters A collection of excerpts from many of the most important beat works and writers including Kerouac, Burroughs, Cassidy, and Ginsberg. I read this as a teenager eager to learn about the world outside the small Connecticut town in which I was raised, and boy did it deliver. Back then,…
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Literature Reveals the World: Some Quick Thoughts on Finley’s The World of Odysseus
The World of Odysseus M.I. Finley A stunning work of social history which uses what we know about the historical time period which produced the Iliad and the Odyssey to help understand these two classics. We need to remember that even to homer, the events of the Iliad and Odyssey were ancient history. His codification…
Milo and the Calf 