animal liberation - Boston Breakout

The Boston Breakout
Roy MacGregir
Tundra Books
2014
162 pages

Boston Breakout is a kids novel about a hockey team, the Tamarack Screech Owls, who travel from Ontario to Boston to play in a hockey tournament and get mixed up in animal liberation. Hockey's boring so I skipped all the hockey parts of this book to get to the animal liberation parts. One of the Screech Owls, Samantha, gets mixed up with a group of animal rights activists who, unknown to her, are planning to free the penguins and everything else from the Boston aquarium by blowing the thing apart so all of its water, and the animals that live in it, flow into the Boston Harbour. Samantha believes in the animal liberation cause but not the tactics so when she sees the activists she's made friends with interfering with the animal count she goes and tells on them so that their plan is stopped before any good can be done.

The book was pretty good if you skip the hockey and if you ignore the dumb statements about zoo animals preferring the zoo. If I had one little tiny critique, it would have to be about the ending, its all wrong: I would have changed it so the activists successfully pulled off their plan to destroy the acquarium, all of the animals would have flowed out into the habour and thrived there. I would have written the animals as playing a role in obtaining their freedom from the aquarium. Then, in my version, over a period of millennia, the wind would erode the city of Boston down to gritty ruins and the networks of roads and infrastructure would crumble from the growth of plants and trees and the effects of animals, sun, snow, and rain. The city of Boston would become a nameless wild, home to a strange colony of North American penguins. That would have made a much better ending for this book.

casuals - 1996 - The Football Factory

The Football Factories
John King
1996
Vintage
262 pgs

I've watched a number of documentaries about English football casuals where a talking head representing the subculture expresses his resentment about punk getting all the attention back in the 70s and 80s when the casuals were just so much more interesting. Its such a dumb and funny thing to express since the punk subculture gave rise to new fashions, music, attitudes, literatures, ethos, semiotics, philosophies, dance. The Casuals pretty much bashed eachother at and around football matches. When punks were exploring the limits of every cultural form within the framework of their DIY ethos and post-situationist anti-establishment attitudes, the Casuals were becoming even more conformist by dressing in designer sportswear. Sociologically the Casuals are interesting, but they're interesting for the absence of creativity in their culture.

The Football Factories is a dramatic film about casual firms, starring Danny Dyer who went on to host a documentary TV series about the subject, The Real Football Factories. It was first a 1996 novel by John King that's written in the first person consciousness stream from the perspective of a Casual Chelsea supporter named Tommy. The novel reminds me of two other works of transgressive fiction, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, and Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho. A Clockwork Orange because King writes in the heavy cockney slang of Tommy - not the lyrical rhyming slang we sometimes hear about in Canada either - reminiscent of the slang Burgess invented for his novel. I'm well aware that there really are people out there calling the police 'old bill' and whatever, but its foreign enough to me to make me think of the nadsat language.  American Psycho because the sex, intoxication, and violence of Tommy's life becomes a dull pattern that moves around Chelsea's home/away schedule, otherwise the narrator expresses his views about life and such and every single idea he has is a cliche trapped in a painfully constricted worldview.

beats, piracy - book - 1991 - Ghost of Chance

Ghost of Chance
William S Burroughs
Serpent’s Tail
1991
56 pages

Ghost of Chance is a short fictional work that surveys many of the ideas that Beat writer William S Burroughs was working with through the 1980s (and also through much of his career).  The core idea of Burroughs work from this era was to bring figures from outlaw history into his literary concerns of drugs, disease, language and authority.  Ghost of Chance returns to Burroughs exploration of the terrain of pirate utopias (c.f. Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes by Peter Lamborn Wilson) the he first traversed in his 1981 novel Cities of the Red Night, with legendary Captain Mission returning as a primarily character in this novella.

The only textual account of Captain Mission is from A General History of the Pyrates, a 1724 book by Daniel DeFoe that essentially serves as a reference guide to the golden age of pirates.  According to DeFoe, via Burroughs’ afterword, Mission was one of the first pirates to establish a short-lived libertarian community.  In Ghost of Chance, Mission appears as a leader of his community, and as a man who communes with the indigenous population (and their customs) and with the animal population as well.  He cares greatly for the lemurs of Madagascar (where his community had settled) and keeps one that he called Ghost as a pet.  

The Captain Mission narrative eventually dissolves into Burroughs ruminations on Christ and a surrealist vision of bizarre disease (referred to as ‘the hairs’ in the text, a disease where hair-like organisms consume a host-body and spread to other hosts by contact), as well as devastation and incompetent authority in the contemporary period.  In some ways this book is a short glimpse into the things that concerned Burroughs around the time of writing, including a turn towards a fondness for animals that continued until the author’s death, and an interest in the environment.  The Captain Mission character is a central site for the interrelated spheres of Western anarchism, indigenous life, and the natural environment.  Mission is an embodiment of some of Murray Bookchin’s ideas of social ecology, and members of his community are expected to show respect to plant and animal life as they show respect to their fellow pirates.  The pirate captain represents the opposite of the European colonists who overrun and destroy Madagascar and its natural environment, which sets a pattern of force meeting counter-force that carries through the short book.

This book may also be a tribute to Burroughs close friend, Bryon Gysin, who died in 1986, a few years before this volume’s publication.  Burroughs and Gysin developed a number of ideas together (the cut-up, the dreammachine) that were intended to break down our perceptions of reality and by extension its apparatus of control.  Captain Mission was an experimenter of breaking down control systems via new forms of political and social organization.  Gysin, in collaboration with Burroughs, was an experimenter of breaking down control systems via new forms of language and sensory perception.  Burroughs makes a number of references to insights Gysin had through his text.  Furthermore the book is rife with black-and-white representations of uncredited abstract paintings of the kind Gysin (a painter who was, at one time, a member of the Surrealists) produced.  

abstract calligraphic work by Bryon Gysin

Ghost of Chance is probably one of Burroughs most accessible texts.  It is not fully linear, although it is also not oriented around cut-up text fragments and choped bits of narrative like many of his other novels are.  His rewriting of the Captain Mission story recalls the work Jorge Luis Borges did rewriting fragments of Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York and other texts, although Burroughs pushes Mission into an extreme that extends well beyond the figure’s textual origins.  This short book may serve as an entry point into Burroughs heavier Cities of the Red Night that covers some of the same ground via Captain Mission.

survivalism - book - 1985 - The Postman

The Postman 

David Brin 

Bantam Books 

1985 

321 pages

    The Postman is an acclaimed science fiction novel that is now well known for inspiring a film adaptation that is considered one of the unloved movies of the 1990s.  The film was directed by, and starred Kevin Costner, and its notoriety as a three hour long waste-of-money is probably only exceeded by his previous film, Waterworld.  With that being said, the novel that provided the film with its source material is an interesting speculation on a post-apocalyptic America without industrial or electronic technology, that struggles to find a foundational myth upon which to rebuild.  With THAT being said, and having read the novel, I am now interested in viewing the film adaptation regardless of how bad its supposed to be.  

    David Brin, the author of The Postman,  is an astronomer and science-fiction novelist whose work is identified with an emphasis on ‘hard’ science in fiction.  He has won a number of prestigious awards for science-fiction writing, including the Hugo award and the Nebula award.  The Postman received the John W. Campbell award and the Locus Award for Science Fiction.  Brin also writes a blog wherein he comments upon the political and cultural uses of science and technology, and maintains a speaking schedule where he gives talks on such matters.

    The Postman is one of a number of science-fiction novels wherein the United States has experienced an apocalyptic collapse of their high-tech infrastructure, rather than the millennial singularity of a technological mediated Heavenly Jerusalem predicted by futurists such as Ray Kurzweil.  Other novels that carry similar themes to Brin’s text are Hello America (1981) by JG Ballard, a post-apocalyptic parody of American culture, and the more recent World Made by Hand (2008) by James Howard Kunstler.  While Kunstler’s novel is primarily focused on the details of an ecological collapse and the day to day life of its survivors, Brin’s novel appears focused on survival via cultural myths.  In both Kunstler’s and Brin’s novels the characters do not know exactly what caused collapse, or what the state of the nation is, but it is presumed in both novels that former official forms of governance have been decimated and lawlessness and danger are the prevailing order.

The protagonist of Brin's novel is Gordon Krantz, a nomadic, reluctant hero. Following an ambush by bandits who took his clothes and belongings, Krantz stumbles across the skeleton of a postman in an old USPS van.  Krantz took the uniform and mailbag off of the skeleton and began posing as a postman for the Restored United States.  For Krantz, his new profession was simply a ruse he developed so that he could better survive the treacheries of long distance foot-travel and gain leverage in dealing with dangerous town officials.  Krantz skillfully escapes many dangerous situations and that, in combination with his consistent posturing as a postman, establishes him as a trickster. This role for Krantz recalls in a distant although not unconnected manner the character of Nicho, the (actual) postman who transforms into a coyote (a trickster animal), from Miguel Ángel Asturias’ novel, Men of Maize (1949).  Krantz pretends to be founding post offices in various towns across the northwestern United States and he finds that people are eager to assist his work because of their desire to believe that the United States may be restored.

The bane of existance for Krantz and everyone he meets are the ‘hypersurvivalist’ followers of an ultra-Macho philosopher named Nathan Holn.  These men are referred to as Holnists and through their devotion to Holn’s philosophy, believe that they are superior human specimens and that the conditions of the collapse will reshuffle the social order so that their natural abilities and will-to-violence will place them on top.  In The Postman, encounters with Holnists are a recurring problem, and fighting with them is the theme of the second half of the novel, however it is also clear that many communities have already driven away Holnist groups.  This representation of macho survivalists as a threat to communities is the result of fairly astute observation of actual far-right survivalist groups.  Rebecca Solnit, in her 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, suggests that when collapse or disaster occurs, most people consolidate community bonds and build mutual networks of support.  The converse side to this  behavior is that individualist survivalists who consider the accumulation of weapons to be rule number one for post-disaster continuity are inevitably threats to such altruistic social networks.  

The Holnists are, in my opinion, the most interesting aspect to The Postman.  They preach a perverse gospel of Übermenschianism, and to emphasize their ethos, two of their leaders are, in fact, artificially augmented as the results of a pre-collapse military experiment.  Their adherence to the text of a distant philosopher recalls the real-life survivalist-terror group, The Order.  In the early 1980s, The Order was a small group of violent white power nationalists who drew inspiration from the writings of William Luther Pierce, a former physics professor who became the leader of the white power organization, National Alliance.  The Order lived in the wilderness of the American Northwest (rural Washington in particular, and incidentally some of the filming for The Postman was done relatively close to The Order member’s homesteads) and launched attacks on sites in nearby cities.  Some statements issued by Holnists are inflected by concerns about race, although they are not explicitly racist, and there is some resemblance between the fictional survivalists and the real white nationalist cell.

Fundamentally, The Postman is about cultural myths; how they compete for dominance or possibly merge with others into a foundation for national development.  The Holnist myth was persistent but already dying before the events of the novel.  A group of women, working as assassins but posing as submissives, exploit the macho ideals of the Holnists to get close to them in order to kill them off.  Krantz reflects on how this event created a new myth, one that may pose similar dangers to that of the Holnist philosophy.  The novel thus thrives on a tension between negative cultural myths of violent destruction and inherent group superiority, and positive myths of community building and social advancement.  For much of the novel Gordon works with a group of people who maintain a myth that an artificial intelligence called ‘Cyclops’ is in command of the social order, ironically so that people do not give up on the idea of the pursuit of knowledge and scientific progress.  Finally, the novel ends with Krantz reflecting on one of his postmen doing the work to perpetuate the myth of a postal system until the myth is no longer necessary.  Krantz imagines the possibility that his illusory postal system will become real, and in becoming real, unify the states into the actual Restored United States.