OVO

Benchmarks for the next two issues of OVO have been accomplished this week.

Primary research for OVO 19 PORTLAND has been completed. This is a book-length record of every memorial in downtown Portland Oregon. As of this week, after three years, I will have walked every street and made note of every address and location. I will have a manuscript in hand by October 2011.

The material for OVO 20 has been compiled. This will be a human-readable anthology of thirty years of my writing and art, as differentiated from the rat’s nest of ovo127.com. OVO 20 will be published simultaneously with OVO 19 PORTLAND.

Tabletop gaming is a niche hobby at best. A selection of relatively simple board games is marketed for children and families by big toy companies. The granddaddy of all role-playing games, Dungeons and Dragons, is a major product line for its publisher, Wizards of the Coast, but the company still relies on card games and miniatures to keep itself afloat. And Wizards is just a small division of the toy giant Hasbro.

Only a handful of other games can compete with D&D for profitability. Many are lucky if they can even make it onto the shelves. Major book retailers like Borders prefer to deal only with established and well-supported games. Local gaming stores, meanwhile, are usually shoestring operations with limited shelf space and a bewildering array of options. Again, an established line is usually a safer bet.

Selling directly to fans seemed to become easier with the internet – anyone who could find your game online could order it, regardless of whether their local gaming store stocked it or not. But the costs of printing a large enough run were still prohibitive. Some publishers tried selling digital copies, starting with various e-book formats but quickly settling for the basic .pdf.

Unfortunately, anything sold as a .pdf is quickly shared, and stops selling as free copies become available. Sharing music isn’t catastrophic for independent artists, because they can make their money on live performances. Game publishers have no such option, however – the book or manual itself is their primary source of income. They don’t sell concert tickets or t-shirts. And independent game writers, without the resources of a bigger company to back them up, can’t subsidize their game books with collectible cards or miniatures.

If they can’t get paid to create games, they can’t keep doing it. At least they can’t give it the time and attention that it deserves. One game writer, however, is trying a new model, one that’s off to a promising start.

In 2004, Greg Stolze and Daniel Solis created a fun little game called Meatbot Massacre. It’s a tactical dice game where players design bioengineered war robots and fight them in an arena. It’s well-written and tightly designed, and introduces an innovative dice-rolling system. It’s a game that feeds the enthusiasms of a select group of gamers, a niche within a niche, but it’s not a game that will generate enough profit to be worth printing. Not on a traditional retail model, at least.

But Stolze re-imagined his audience. Instead of a group of individual customers, he saw them as a collective. He wanted to harness the support of the gaming community to sell the game to the community. They didn’t all have to buy as individuals – they just had to offer enough collectively. So he decided to hold the game for ransom.

In December of 2004, he announced that the game had been written, and would be released into the public domain when he received $600 for it. It was a small start – the game itself was only ten pages, and Stolze set the price by determining all the expenses and then paying himself four cents a word, the low end for game writing. Solis set up a ransom website with a PayPal button, and they set a deadline of September 2005. If the ransom wasn’t collected by then, the game wouldn’t be released, and whatever money had been raised would be turned over to a homeless shelter.

Ransoming a game was a novel idea, and no one knew how it would work. After a strong start, donations slowed to a trickle, but they kept coming in. The $600 goal was achieved in five months, half the time allotted, and the game was released as a free download in April 2005.

With this success under their belts, Stolze and Solis went on to produce …In Spaaace!, a comic role-playing game of space shenanigans. Like Meatbot Massacre, it was an innovative system, based this time on bidding with tokens instead of rolling any dice. And like Meatbot Massacre, while it would find a hearty welcome in a certain narrow audience, it would never be profitable for retail.

They set the ransom in July 2005, this time at $750 for a fifteen page game, still paying Stolze less than five cents a word. Instead of ten months, however, they set the deadline at six weeks, and it only took four to collect.

There was another big difference in this ransom, apart from the shorter time period. Instead of running their own site and collecting PayPal donations, Stolze and Solis moved their operation to a new site, www.fundable.org. Describing itself, Fundable says it “lets groups of people pool funds to make purchases or raise money.” It collects pledges, not actual payments, towards whatever goal the group leader sets. When the goal is met, the money is collected, Fundable collects 7%, and the remainder is sent to the group leader by PayPal (or by check, for a $10 fee.). If the goal isn’t met, the pledges are released and no money changes hands.

Greg Stolze went on to release two more games on Fundable. Soon after the success of …In Spaaace!, he teamed up with four other writers and designers to produce Executive Decision, in which characters are Oval Office advisors who compete for the President’s ear while pursuing their own agendas. It was offered in September 2005 as a fundraiser for the Red Cross after Hurricane Katrina. In one month, it met its goal of $1000, which was devoted to relief efforts.

Then in February 2006, Stolze and fellow game developer Dennis Detwiller offered Nemesis for a $1000 ransom. In this case, there was a 25-day deadline that was met in just 11 days. Nemesis was the largest yet, at 56 pages, and it was also an important release for other reasons.

Stolze and Detwiller had worked together before, notably on 2002′s Godlike, a superhero role-playing game set in World War II. For this game, Stolze developed the dice mechanic that would become the One-Roll Engine (ORE), a generic game system that could accommodate any setting. Stolze and Detwiller would release Wild Talents, the sequel to Godlike, at the end of 2006, but in the meantime Godlike was all there was.

Nemesis was the ORE, stripped of superpowers, spliced to a system for madness from Stolze’s earlier work on the Unknown Armies game, and placed in a horror setting reminiscent of the Cthulhu mythos. It was the first ORE release since Godlike, and by working with characters who were ordinary mortals, it made the system accessible to a much broader range of settings than a superhero game could be. It served as a default system document for the ORE, and continues to fill an important function within the system.

But Nemesis only set the stage for Stolze’s next project. Reign was to be his long-awaited fantasy adaptation of the ORE, with a new set of rules for characters to build organizations and play on a much larger scale. It was to be a full-size core rulebook, over 350 pages, far larger than anything that had been published by ransom. Stolze didn’t want to stretch the ransom model to the breaking point, but he couldn’t afford to print the books himself either. He chose instead to use Lulu.com for print-on-demand (POD).

Reign came out on Lulu in May 2007. It came in four editions: hard or soft cover, and with a choice of cover art by Daniel Solis or Dennis Detwiller. The softcover editions ran into trouble with some misprints, which took several months to clear up. Also, POD can’t offer the price breaks of mass production, so the books were spendy: $36.89 for the soft covers and $49.30 for the hard, with more tacked on for postage. This compares to $29.95 for hardcovers of the core D&D books, and $39.95 for the hardcover of Godlike from the small press Arc Dream Publishing.

Despite the problems and the cost, Reign has sold well for POD. In October of 2007, Stolze reported on his website that he’d sold 675 copies. Not a lot compared to D&D, but a decent showing for an independent game. He reported that he’d currently made over $12,000 from Lulu, selling the four editions of Reign and one small book of short stories. None of that money included what he made from the supplements.

Traditionally, role-playing games offer one or more hefty rulebooks, followed by a number of supplements. Managed well, new supplements can continue to bring in money once the core books have leveled off. But from the player’s perspective, the constant flow of supplements sometimes feels like being milked for every available penny.

At the end of the Reign rulebook, Stolze makes a promise: “You’re holding in your hands the last Reign product to be released solely as a print book with a fixed price. Everything else is going to come out via the Ransom Model.”

From June to October 2007, Stolze offered for supplements for a ransom of $1000 each. Each one had a deadline of 25 days. The first three made their goals; the last one came up $20 short but was released anyway. More are said to be in the works.

Stolze seems to have dedicated himself to building a new model of making and selling games, one with the potential to reach players directly, saving the game’s creator the overhead of printing and distribution and bypassing the fight for retail shelf-space. He’s made a good start, but important questions remain.

Stolze and his collaborators were already well-known in the gaming community. Stolze had worked for White Wolf Publishing, the main competitor to Wizards of the Coast, as well as the smaller Atlas Games, where he had worked on the seminal Unknown Armies. The ransom model depends largely on his well-established reputation, which also helps to overcome the high price of print-on-demand. But will his model work for a writer without his reputation? What happens to a designer without a built-in audience? How will a system based on reputation allow for new blood to enter the field?

It also remains to be seen if this model will work for Stolze in the long run. Will ransom continue to work when the novelty wears off, and will it allow him to establish a regular source of income? Other than coming up $20 short on one Reign supplement, he hasn’t failed to achieve a ransom yet. What will happen when he does? The system looks good when it succeeds, but is it robust enough to handle failure?

Finally, what else can the ransom model support? Fundable’s primary market seems to be non-profit fundraising and group purchases. It also boasts of supporting books, music and film. How far can this approach be taken, and can it be optimized for particular types of products? Game design has such a narrow audience that it may have to ride the coattails of more popular fields, such as independent musicians.

Stolze’s efforts may succeed and grow, or they may become another internet casualty. But in the meantime, they’ve already put good innovative games in the hands of players, and broadened the range of what can be done with gaming. Long-range success is by no means assured, but Greg Stolze is doing his best to find a new way for his industry to work.

RESOURCES:
www.gregstolze.com
www.gregstolze.com/downloads.html
www.fundable.org
www.lulu.com
stores.lulu.com/gregstolze

Johnny Brainwash only talks about gaming and riding his bike. johnnybrainwash@hotmail.com

from OVO 18 MONEY (April 2008)

17 July 1990 interview with V. Vale, publisher of Search and Destroy, co-founder of Re/Search Publications.

OVO: What is the main source for the information that you publish?

VALE: We never tire of saying that our main influences were surrealism and situationism, and surrealism as you know placed a great deal of influence on objective chance and randomness and insanity and systems for deciphering the world that are a-logical systems We will admit that a lot of it is just purely chance. But of course through the years we have friends and our friends really help us. For example, the film book [Re/Search #10 Incredibly Strange Films] which was actually the first book that broke out of our small industrial music underground audience, that was done just because we got a letter from Jim Morton, who had been collecting these incredible films all his life but particularly since the advent of VCR. He wrote us, and then we went over to his house every Saturday night for years and watched two or three of four movies there and ate popcorn. It took four or five years he guest-edited the Incredibly Strange Films book and we put it out. We wouldn’t have done it if we hadn’t known Jim Morton, let’s face it.

OVO: What is the purpose of Re/Search?

VALE: The surrealists had a slogan, something like “Matter Over Mind,” but what it meant was it is a mistake just to assume that one proceeds from the idea to the material reality. Very often its just the opposite. You might say the material reality suggests the theory, shall we say, and frankly I got started publishing back in ’77 because of punk rock. Of course it wasn’t called that then but it was very exciting, as undifferentiated and undefined and unlimited as it appeared to be because it was revolt, it was the youth revolt or revolution (if you dare to use that word) of the ’70s. And I was involved right from the very beginning before it had become codified and more or less set in amber. And so for me it was like a vehicle, it was an opportunity to… I don’t know, I just did it. My main motivation was kind of anger at the status quo. I’d always been angry at the status quo anyway, but, you know, what do you do? A lot of people just become criminals or whatever, or drug addicts, or they just can’t cope for a lot of good reasons. Society gives us all plenty of reasons but it also provides the narcotics in the form of television and actual narcotics so that we can “adapt,” shall we say.  And so yes, it’s definitely a struggle against mind control, against conditioning, against banal information.  We were born with the birthright of curiosity and there’s nothing more natural than to be curious, but of course this faculty is extinguished early in life.  It seems like society does everything it can to either extinguish this faculty or to channel it only along channels of consumption rather than you yourself doing something creative on your own, something creative and original and obsessive and unique on your own.  I don’t think society can really handle that, because it’s too destabilizing.  It’s like we’re in a vast consumption machine, we’re part of it, and society would function (it thinks) better if we would just go along with the programs.  And so obviously anyone who is a lover of freedom is going to go against that in all its manifestations.  And yet it’s not just enough to fight, whatever that means.  You have to eventually start doing something.  And in our case we more or less accidentally discovered that we could do something and sort of realize our own identities and destinies by becoming publishers.  Re/Search however is not the same as Search and Destroy.  Re/Search happened when I met Andrea [Juno] back in 1980, after we’d been very depressed for a year by what we thought was the death of punk rock.  It was certainly the death of punk rock as we knew it, that is as a viable underground, a microcosmos of society.  We were depressed for a year but then realized that this shouldn’t be the end of publishing.

OVO: Are the Re/Search archives open to the public?

Vale: No, because we’re not public figures.  If all we were to do were to run a library we’d never get any work done, and obviously our work comes first.  It’s hard enough as it is right now just to deal with all the business aspects let alone function as some sort of archive.  It so happens that we’ve been attacked by Jesse Helms [R-NC] and Dana Rohrabacher [R-CA] and entered into the Congressional Record because they don’t like our book Modern Primitives, which is yet another Re/Search publication which is advocating a certain theory of self-liberation or exploration.  That’s all it was intended to do, provide theory for this kind of activity, but apparently the powers that be would like to have this kind of theory and information repressed.

OVO: What kind of trouble have they been giving you?

VALE: Actually we should context this in a much wider overview that obviously America right now is under (thanks to less than probably one-tenth of one percent of the population) which is these very organized fundamentalist Christian fascists who have nothing to do with their lives but write letters all day to their congressman and call up advertisers threatening to boycott things like The Simpsons.  In other words, a minority group trying to pretend and camouflaging themselves as some kind of vox populi majority, which they are not. They’re mostly these very ignorant people in the South, people who have long since shut off any creative potential in their lives.  They’re just consumed by envy and they want to control all the rest of the population, who might be having more fun than them in some way. The Reagan agenda was to turn the country back to the McCarthy ’50s, since he was an informer for McCarthy, and to take away all the gains of the ’60s.  That complex agenda is still being realized. Every day there’s some new article in the paper on page 40 how 160 stores in the deep South took away Playboy Magazine from their stands. Little things like that don’t even get reported here on the West Coast. Thing like that are happening all the time but the more you find out about it the scarier it gets.

OVO: Yesterday a group called AIDS Response Knoxville had their office fire bombed. I just found out about that this morning.

VALE: If you could send me the clipping… see, that was not in our paper today. It doesn’t surprise me. So what you have now is a great deal of information containment going on. We’re living in the illusion that all the information is available, that were living in a global village and all that, but most people get their information from TV news, which is of course extremely compressed and bowdlerized and operates by omission. We should all be subscribing to our own little clipping services I suppose to get the kind of news such as the incident you told me about just now.

OVO: I didn’t find out about it from the paper. I found out about it from a friend and he said there’s only a tiny article about it.

VALE: That’s perfect, that’s exactly the way things happen and are happening. The propaganda techniques which Hitler initiated in terms of mass media control of the population, they‘re real good now. Helms is a master of negative campaigning, in which life gets simplified down to whether you’re for child pornography and obscenity or… Helms’ voting record is incredible, he’s a madman, the total enemy of liberty. But even when Helms is gone there‘ll always be someone to take his place. This kind of control mentality will apparently always be with us but yet we’re trying to do a small campaign so that all the minority papers across the country will at least have a copy of his voting record and also start to get a larger overview of all these isolated little incidents that’ve been happening, which together paint an extremely depressing picture of the abridgment of our freedoms.

OVO: Have there been specific incidents of you having trouble with Modern Primitives?

VALE: Knock on wood, no. We had two art shows based on the book, and that‘s how it started. If you don’t have any information on this I’ll send it to you.

OVO: No, I don’t have any.

VALE: Okay, I’ll send you the whole little press packet on that, with all the articles that’ve come out. See, that’s what l mean, someone as relatively hip and aware as you don’t know. Multiply this by about a thousand for all the little environmental groups all over. Their little news things never get reported. I just found out today that all the searches that the FBI did of all these Earth First houses, the people involved with Earth First because of two people blown up by a bomb, the FBI keeps reporting to the news that they blew themselves up rather than what they should be doing which is trying to find out who really did it. I didn’t realize until I read the paper today that all the searches the FBI did of people who deal with Earth First were all warrantless. To me that is really frightening. Did you know that? Do you think that means anything? And we only found out because our good friend Jock Sturges, a photographer, got busted recently. We’ve known Jock for years. For the last twenty years he has specifically focused on, shall we say, beautiful adolescent girls who are developing. But they are not pornography, he’s not the head of a kiddie porn ring by any means. He’s got the most incredibly beautiful negatives you’ve ever seen, eight by ten inch view camera negatives blown up to twenty by twenty-four inch prints that have a million gray tones in them. And we only found out from him that basically the First and Fourth Amendments are dead. The Fourth Amendment is unreasonable searches and seizures. Because the FBI just busted into his house without a search warrant. And this was all done, as Burroughs has kept us appraised of and warned us against all these years, in the name of fighting the “drug problem.” Because here’s what they can say now: they can come in because (a) they have a reason to believe you are about to destroy evidence and (b) they have a right to watch you because they have reason to believe you might try to commit suicide or commit harm to yourself. Isn’t that nice?

OVO: They’ve certainly got our best interests in mind.

VALE: Yes, of course.

OVO: How do you prevent Re/Search from becoming a part of the process of -

VALE: – co-option and assimilation? You’re dealing with what McLuhan called a very cool medium (or is it hot, I can never get that straight), but you’re dealing with a medium that is a book, and do you realize how few people read anymore? The numbers are incredible, how much reading has declined even though the population has doubled. When people do read, what do they read? They mostly lead these airport kind of books. It’s really frightening. The reason most people avoid books is because, let’s face it, there’s only a minority that reads any more, almost everyone else watches television and gets their information from TV. And in order to read effectively I find that l must have complete silence, as much as possible, and this is not the modem way. A lot of people these days, it’s like a conspiracy to keep them from thinking. As soon as they get up in the morning they have their radio blaring or put on a tape or something. We’ve all known people who’ve had the TV on eight hours a day. Of course we don’t know people like that any more, but they’re out there, like zombies or something. And so I still think that if you’re putting something out in a book you have more of a chance of making it with some kind of integrity. Because books aren’t you, Re/Search is not me or Andrea; it’s on its own. And if it has some ideas that light up your brain and catalyze in some way, which is the best that one can hope for… the books really do have a life of their own. And we’re just putting out a combination of information, images and ideas, hopefully, as well as trying to direct people to other books, which continue the same kind of inspiration.

Re/Search
20 Romolo Street #B
San Franslsco CA 94133 USA
http://researchpubs.com/

from OVO 11 CONTROL (September 1991)

Update, February 2011
Jim Morton writes about films, pop culture, and advertising.
http://popvoid.blogspot.com/

Boyd Rice was formerly credited as guest editor for Re/Search #10 Incredibly Strange Films.
http://www.boydrice.com/

Andrea Juno founded Juno Books.
http://twitter.com/AnimaJuno

Jesse Alexander Helms, Jr. died in 2008.

Dana Tyron Rohrabacher is the U.S. Representative for California’s 46th Congressional district.

AIDS Response Knoxville served at least between 1987 and 1999 and may still exist.

Jock Sturges’ studio was the subject of an FBI raid on 25 April 1990. Accused of child pornography, a Grand Jury did not bring an indictment against him.

Wikipedia, Judi Bari Car Bombing:

In 1990, a bomb exploded in Judi Bari’s car, shattering her pelvis and also injuring fellow activist Darryl Cherney. Bari and Cherney were later arrested after police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation suspected that they had been transporting the bomb when it accidentally exploded. The case against them was eventually dropped due to lack of evidence. Bari died in 1997 of cancer, but her federal lawsuit against the FBI and Oakland, California police resulted in a 2002 jury verdict awarding her estate and Darryl Cherney a total of $4.4 million. Eighty percent of the damages were for violation of their First Amendment rights by the FBI and police trying to discredit them in the media as violent extremists despite ample evidence to the contrary. The bombing remains unsolved.

House of the United States of America:
Warbucks Intra-Family Communique

I know that you don’t like to think this, but we are much like humans. We are subject to the human frailties. We forget. We get slip-shod. We fall short of our disciplines. You have selected me to be the family coordinator and I agreed to be, at least until someone better comes along. So that’s why I’m now reminding you of some of our basic principles for handling slaves.

Our slaves can get bored easily. When bored, they get restless. They start thinking, and questioning order. Therefore it is necessary for us to direct their thinking into areas which keep them dependent on our leadership. We must make them feel dependent on society for all their needs. Make them feel important to the Great Whole to which they belong. Keep them too deep in debt to have any spare time to experiment with principles of self-sufficiency, or even just getting out of hole.

A few of the slaves who refuse to conform are squatting in various places and planting their apple seeds, plum pits, grape seeds, avocado pits, orange seeds, nuts of all kinds and vegetables. They are not using our hybrid seeds. They found organic natural seeds more productive. They are creating Gardens of Eden, with free food, no rent and and acceptance of the Golden Rule instead of Government. So far, only a few of the smarter nonconformists are doing this. This gets them off our case; however, we must not give them any publicity, as it might encourage more our workers to not conform.

The family came up with a great innovation when they first decided to “allow” the peons to “own” land. Ownership gives them roots ties them down and makes it a easier to find them. It also gives us a classification of slave known as landlords. They serve us by forcing people to pay them rent in order to have a space to sleep on this planet. Thus they all work for us for the rest of their lives. We must always make them think that this is normal and that everyone has always had to pay rent and that they always will.

If the slaves deviate from present thought patterns, they might think it strange that they “agree” to work for us for 30 years to buy a place to sleep. They might wonder why some “primitive” people are able to build their homes from the material at hand in a couple of weeks and have no mortgage to pay. They might even find it simpler, more enjoyable and even more adventuresome to walk to where they wish to go instead of working for us to earn money to make perpetual car payments to us, so that they can get to a job to make the money to make their car payments. To say nothing of the car maintenance costs and depreciation. We must constantly entice them to buy. They make much better workers if are always in debt.

If we allow them space to think, they may question the vehicle with which they are killing themselves: 50,800 persons dead and 1,900,000 disabled in 1981 in the United States alone.They may see how machines and their present manufacturing processes are destroying their life-support system. They may see that all the processed junk food we’re selling them is making them sick and costing them more; see that their boring, unsatisfying jobs are driving many of them crazy. They might even discover the simplest unprocessed foods which are cheap and healthful.

As it is recorded in our family archives, one of our forefathers, Galus Julius Caesaer once sald: “Give them breed and circuses, to keep them from rebelling.” It is a simple matter to give them food, but it takes a little more imagination to give them circuses. I guess this is the creative part of being slave masters – to create diversions to keep their gullible little minds busy.

Our Watergate Scandal was a fine circus. It kept them thinking and talking along safe lines for years. We are still getting some mileage out of the Kennedy Assassination and they still aren’t sure whether we shot the real Kennedy, his double or a dummy. We have fine show going on Central America and in the Middle East, some still lingering in Germany, others in Vietnam, the USSR and China.

We may use the recent invasion to start another World War. It will be a challenge to attempt to involve our sheep in another big war, so soon after the last one. However, we may be able to pull it off, to get them angry enough to fight. We wouldn’t need to use the older nuclear bombs, as they could be dangerous to our families’ health. We might use a few of our cleaner H-Bombs. It will be a creative, fun time for us. Wars are truly the sport of kings. They are more fun to stage and run than chess games, or are hum-drum activities of production or politics.

Creating straw men for slaves to knock down is one of our best numbers. We set it up and let them tear it down. It diverts much of their creative energy. We create another excellent diversion by resisting their efforts to tear it down.

We learned long ago that people can think only one thought line at a time. We feed them thoughts and they either fight them or go along with them.

Music has always been an effective tool for setting their moods, their pace and leading their thoughts. While dancing they learn to step to the beat of our drummer and keep the pace we set. This teaches them to obey orders. The drum has always been useful for this. We let them touch each other during the dance. They seem to enjoy touching and they feel successful when they keep in step, so this training process becomes self-perpetuating. It also serves as an excellent distraction.

They must occupy their minds with keeping in step to the beat and with how they are going to entice their partners to deb. If they are constantly bombarded with distractions they will have no time to do any real thinking. They will only be aware of that which we make them aware.

Our closest guarded secret is the fact that slavery still exists in every country on this planet.

Laborers, farmers, traders, professionals, managers, directors and presidents – all take pay, so they must obey our orders. They are not aware of their bondage. Some are vaguely aware of the idea that “big money” runs everything. But they are unable to relate to the idea that they are part of that “everything.”

They think that they are free people, making all their own decisions We allow them to make the unimportant ones. The important ones we cover in their laws, and in their customs and religious and moral codes. We have even trained them to punish their own kind when they do not conform.

We have been masters for a long, long, time. We teach kids how to work, to be submissive and to obey orders. These kids grow up to he good slaves, like their parents. Most of the parents even go so far as to break their own kid’s spirits. So by the time they are of work age, them are docile, gullible and easy to manipulate.

Through all our media, including books, we give them a substitute for living. For example, we encourage them to live vicariously through the exciting adventures of fiction. This puts their fantasy life through an exciting energy drain which seems to satisfy some of their emotional hunger.

This substitute fills one of those spaces in time which they might have used to go out and experience life first-hand. Distractions keep them from discovering the bondage they are in. We must continue to titillate them to want to watch television and movies, to read newspapers, magazines and books to listen to radio and music.

We use the mass media not only for a distraction but also to help create their basic beliefs and expectations. Of course, the schools and churches serve this purpose too, as do popular songs and music. We use the media to create the desire to buy. In this way we motivate them to work for us.

They continue to administer to our needs as they did to Caeser’s and as they did for the priests in the time of the great pyamids. Our ancestors really knew how to handle people! As slaves get more education it takes a little more finesse to keep on top of them; however, it’s basically the same even today. Keep them fearful; fearful of death, fearful of pain, fearful of each other. Always encourage competition: it’s like fighting, separates people and keeps them fearful of losing.

We have made them afraid of death by telling them that they have spirits which live on after their death. If they obey our rules, which we tell them were inspired by God, their spirits will be assured entrance into Heaven or reincarnated into a better existence, depending on which of our religions they have chosen. This makes them afraid to die, because they know they haven’t obeyed all the rules (which we deliberately made too difficult to always be obeyed). If they can be kept afraid they are more easy to manage. Then they look to us for guidance and protection.

Promoting fear of pain is another distraction we have always used. We must not give them time to discover that pain is their body’s method of alerting them to the fact that they are doing something wrong to it. So before they can check out the reason for the pain, we channel them to a doctor who will attempt to numb the pain. The doctor will take up time and money doing so. It creates a great diversion, and debt. Some people talk about their pain constantly. The patients’ pain will usually return (sometimes to a different part of their body) after their cure. Doctors usually don’t remove the cause of pains. This would put them out of business.

We hire some of the slaves to act as police and soldiers so that we can threaten to inflict pain and imprisonment on the others. They literally enforce their own slavery when they take jobs in law enforcement and the military. We keep them too busy and too broke to realize this.

Sports and gambling have always been good spectacle. Sex may rate second place, drugs third. We have achieved a sort mass hypnosis by using movies, TV and music, with which we have been able to implant suggestions and beliefs without their being aware of it.

We may need to give our ecology program front page coverage again soon. It can take up the Slack to hold their attention in case it is untimely to start a war now.

Remember, the Warbucks family has ruled on this planet for six thousand years, so it is our right and destiny to continue doing so. Keep up the good work and if you have any problems, contract Alexandria or Ernest, as I’m taking a little vacation.

- Cleopatra Warbucks

from OVO 11 CONTROL (September 1991)

See also:
OVO 2 (1987)

Let us examine the consequences of irrationalism [...] The irrationalist insists that emotions and passions rather than reason are the mainsprings of human action. To the rationalist’s reply that, though this may be so, we should do what we can to remedy it, and should try to make reason play as large a part as it possibly can, the irrationalist would rejoin (if he condescends to a discussion) that this attitude is hopelessly unrealistic. For it does not consider the weakness of ‘human nature,’ the feeble intellectual endowment of most men and their obvious dependence upon emotions and passions.

It is my firm conviction that this irrational emphasis upon emotion and passion leads ultimately to what I can only describe as crime. One reason for this opinion is that this attitude, which is at best one of resignation towards the irrational nature of human beings, at worst one of scorn for human reason, must lead to an appeal to violence and brutal force as the ultimate arbiter in any dispute. For if a dispute arises, then this means that those more constructive emotions and passions which might in principle help to get over it, reverence, love, devotion to a common cause, etc., have shown themselves incapable of solving the problem. But if that is so, then what is left to the irrationalist except the appeal to other and less constructive emotions and passions, to fear, hatred, envy, and ultimately, to violence? This tendency is very much strengthened by another and perhaps even more important attitude which also is in my opinion inherent in irrationalism, namely, the stress on the inequality of men.

It cannot, of course, be denied that human individuals are, like all other things in our world, in very many respects very unequal. Nor can it be doubted that this inequality is of great importance and even in many respects highly desirable. (The fear that the development of mass production and collectivization may react upon men by destroying their inequality or individuality is one of the nightmares of our times.) But all this simply has no bearing upon the question whether or not we should decide to treat men, especially in political issues, as equals, or as much like equals as is possible; that is to say, as possessing equal rights, and equal claims to equal treatment; and it has no bearing upon the question whether we ought to construct political institutions accordingly. ‘Equality before the law’ is not a fact but a political demand based upon a moral decision; and it is quite independent of the theory – which is probably false – that ‘all men are born equal.’ Now I do not intend to say that the adoption of this humanitarian attitude of impartiality is a direct consequence of a decision in favour of rationalism. But a tendency towards impartiality is closely related to rationalism, and can hardly be excluded from the rationalist creed. Again, I do not intend to say that an irrationalist could not consistently adopt an equalitarian or impartial attitude; and even if he could not do so consistently, he is not bound to be consistent. But I do wish to stress the fact that the irrationalist attitude can hardly avoid becoming entangled with the attitude that is opposed to equalitarianism. This fact is connected with its emphasis upon emotions and passions; for we cannot feel the same emotions towards everybody. Emotionally, we all divide men into those who are near to us, and those who are far from us. The division of mankind into friend and foe is a most obvious emotional division; and this division is even recognized in the Christian commandment, ‘Love thy enemies!’ Even the best Christian who really lives up to this commandment (there are not many, as is shown by the attitude of the average good Christian towards ‘materialists’ and ‘atheists’), even he cannot feel equal love for all men. We cannot really love ‘in the abstract;’ we can love only those whom we know. Thus the appeal even to our best emotions, love and compassion, can only tend to divide mankind into different categories. And this will be more true if the appeal is made to lesser emotions and passions. Our ‘natural’ reaction will be to divide mankind into friend and foe; into those who belong to our tribe, to our emotional community, and those who stand outside it; into believers and unbelievers; into compatriots and aliens; into class comrades and class enemies; and into leaders and led.

From The Open Society and its Enemies Volume 2. Princeton University Press 1966

Kerry W. Thornley
The Idle Warriors
Atlanta: IllumiNet Press 1991

Written between 1959 and 1961, The Idle Warriors is the story of a troop of Marines in the Far East getting laid, pulling pranks, eating and talking about life. It’s a story similar to any number of films and books from that time both in style and content. But there are two significant qualities in this book that set it apart from, say a Bowery Boys film (which is what it reminds me of the most).

First, it is written by Kerry Thornley.  I’ve been reading Kerry’s work since 1979 and have always found him insightful and interesting.  I also consider him a friend and it’s always good to see a friend make it.

Second, one of the characters in the novel, Johnny Shelburn, is based on a friend Kerry had in the Marines named Lee Harvey Oswald.  In his introduction Kerry said he was trying to explain why Lee defected to the USSR.  In hindsight he said he failed, and I agree.  But the book is still a sort of eerie novelty, like the appearance of Fidel Castro as an extra in a Busby Berkeley film.  Kerry’s introduction by itself makes the book well worth reading.

from OVO 11 CONTROL (September 1991)
see also OVO 17 The Dreadlock Recollections (January 2007)

Harold S. Long
Surviving in Prison
Port Townsend, Washington: Loompanics Unlimited, 1990

Surviving in Prison is a record of one man’s experiences in prison, offered as a guide for physical survival in a system designed to break and control lives.

The book describes prison from conviction to incarceration to the hole.  It describes the inhumanity of prisons, the humiliation and the petty rules that demand exaggerated penalties for violation.  The factual nature of the writing, presented without evaluation in the knowledge that the horrors of prison speak for themselves, are so descriptive that one feels the shutting off of light and hope as they are systematically removed from the author.

This book is of great utility to anyone who believes they might end up in prison for any reason, or who is a supporter of prisoners’ rights.  It is far outside the arena of “political correctness.”  Prisons do not make such subtle distinctions in their oppression and the author does not either.  This book proves most completely that there is no life in prison, only survival, and the insight the author has to survival in prison is of unique value.

from OVO 11 CONTROL (September 1991)

Marx’s terrible picture of the economy of his time is only too true. But his law that misery must increase together with accumulation does not hold. Means of production have accumulated and the productivity of labour has increased since his day to an extent which even he would hardly have thought possible. But child labour, working hours, the agony of toil, and the precariousness of the worker’s existence, have not increased; they have declined. I do not say that this process must continue. There is no law of progress, and everything will depend on ourselves. But the actual situation is briefly and fairly summed up by Parkes in one sentence: “Low wages, long hours, and child labour have been characteristic of capitalism not, as Marx predicted, in its old age, but in its infancy.”

Unrestrained capitalism is gone. Since the day of democratic interventionism has made immense advances, and the improved productivity of labour – a consequence of the accumulation of capital – has made it possible virtually to stamp out misery. This shows that much has been achieved, in spite of undoubtedly grave mistakes, and it should encourage us to believe that more can be done. For much remains to be done and to be undone. Democratic interventionism can only make it possible. It rests with us to do it. [...]

Thanks to Marx’s prophecy, the Communists knew for certain that misery must soon increase. They also knew that the party could not win the confidence of the workers without fighting for them, and with them, for an improvement of their lot. These two fundamental assumptions clearly determined the principles of their general tactics. Make the workers demand their share, back them up in every particular episode in their unceasing fight for bread and shelter. Fight with them tenaciously for the fulfilment of their practical demands, whether economic or political. Thus you will win their confidence. At the same time, the workers will learn that it is impossible for them to better their lot by these petty fights, and that nothing short of a wholesale revolution can bring about an improvement. For all these petty fights are bound to be unsuccessful; we know from Marx that the capitalists simply cannot continue to compromise and that, ultimately, misery must increase. Accordingly, the only result – but a valuable one – of the workers’ daily fight against their oppressors is an increase in their class consciousness; it Is that feeling of unity which can be won only in battle, together with a desperate knowledge that only revolution can help them in their misery. When this stage is reached, then the hour has struck for the final show-down.

This is the theory and the Communists acted accordingly. At first they support the workers in their fight to improve their lot. But, contrary to all expectations and prophecies, the fight is successful. The demands are granted. Obviously, the reason is that they had been too modest. Therefore one must demand more. But the demands are granted again. And as misery decreases, the workers become less embittered, more ready to bargain for wages than to plot for revolution.

Now the Communists find that their policy must be reversed. Something must be done to bring the law of increasing misery into operation. For instance, colonial unrest must be stirred up (even where there is no chance of a successful revolution), and with the general purpose of counteracting, the bourgeoisificalion of the workers, a policy fomenting catastrophes of all sorts must be adopted. But this new policy destroys the confidence of the workers. The Communists lose their members, with the exception of those who are inexperienced in real political fights. They lose exactly those whom they describe as the “vanguard of the working class;” their tacitly implied principle: “The worse things are, the better they are, since misery must precipitate revolution,” makes the workers suspicious – the better the application of this principle, the worse are the suspicions entertained by the workers. For they are realists; to obtain their confidence, one must work to improve their lot.

Thus the policy must be reversed again: one is forced to fight for the immediate betterment of the workers’ lot and to hope at the same time for the opposite.

With this, the “inner contradictions” of the theory produce the last stage of confusion. It is the stage when it is hard to know who is the traitor, since treachery may be faithfulness and faithfulness treachery. It is the stage when those who followed the party not simply because it appeared to them (rightly, I am afraid) as the only vigorous movement with humanitarian ends, but especially because it was a movement based on a scientific theory, must either leave it, or sacrifice their intellectual integrity; for they must now learn to believe blindly in some authority. Ultimately, they must become mystics – hostile to reasonable argument.

It seems that it is not only capitalism which is labouring under inner contradictions that threaten to bring about its downfall…

From The Open Society and its Enemies Volume 2. Princeton University Press 1966

Sondra London is a publisher and author.  Her publication history has included original fiction, non-fiction and art by convicted serial killers.  A solicitation letter for OVO 10 MAYHEM received this reply. In this letter, Ms. London makes reference to having dated Gerard John Schaefer in high school. Schaefer went on to become a serial killer, and Ms. London published his book Beyond Killer Fiction. My first book credit was writing the back cover blurb for Beyond Killer Fiction.  Ms. London was also instrumental in my publication of The Dreadlock Recollections by Kerry Wendell Thornley.

“I’d like to know what you mean about supporting serial murder and glorifying crime.  I’m sorry if it appears that the work I publish implies in any way that I condone violence, and if so I must take steps to correct that impression.  If you only knew what pitiful lives these killers live, you’d realize there’s nothing attractive about it, nothing that deserves to be emulated.  The essence of my quest is to make sense out of a tragedy that fate has made a part of my life.  I need to study the whole broad topic of violence and it’s roots in order to bring this research to bear on the man whose tears of rage, frustration and fear have wet my face.  I’m learning to see the world through the tears of a serial killer, and I’m hoping that the original material I have obtained will be used as a significant part of the quest to understand this very dangerous pathology.

“As to your question about why I’m doing what I am, I will close with a reference I hope you will understand.

‘Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’  Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?  And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, and when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say unto you, as you did unto one of the least of these my bretheren, so you did it unto me.’  Matthew 25:34-40

“Regards,

“Sondra London”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sondra_London
http://www.sondralondon.com/

(from OVO 10 MAYHEM July 1991)

Ginger Hutton was a friend of mine who worked in a used bookstore in Knoxville, Tennessee USA.

OVO: Who buys true crime books?

GH: Everybody, it’s the fastest growing section in the store. A lot of times people will come up with a handful of Harlequin and historical romances and true crime. There are a lot of 40-year-old women who are overweight unhappy-looking housewives who are reading historical romances and true crime, and obviously getting a kick out of both because they keep coming back. It’s mixed as far as male and female but I think women buy more. All ages although again it’s older people mostly.

OVO: Are there people who just get true crime or do most people get the romances as well?

GH: There are people who just get true crime. Most of them are very normal and conservative looking, they don’t look like the kind of people who are taking a book home to study from it. But I have had people come up to the desk and recommend stuff for me. “Oh, if you read that kind of stuff this one’s really good, he does it with an axe.” l’m not sure that they’re distinguishing between fiction and non-fiction. I’m not sure that its real to them. It’s entertainment. And that’s what’s happening with ell these TV shows, America’s Most Wanted, Emergency 911, you watch them go out and rescue people who got hit by cars. Suddenly sick voyeurism is socially acceptable. I’m not sure why that is. Part of it may be that the world is starting to fall apart in more obvious ways. Crime rates are up all over the place, the environment has become so bad that it can’t be ignored, and I think what used to be horrifying to people when compared to all the other problems in their life is not at all horrible. It diverts them. If they can read about a serial killer in Seattle they don’t have to think about the drug dealers in their neighborhood. I think American culture is sick and has been getting sicker for a long time, and is finally reaching a point where it’s not concealed any more. When I started reading true crime it was something you snuck out of the store, like sex books. Now it’s everywhere, there’s no stigma attached. Which you could say is good because its more open but its also an indication of a dangerous trend in American culture.

OVO: When did you start reading true crime books?

GH: I started reading them when I was about 14, reading Reader’s Digest which always condensed the best crimes. I read about Bundy right after he was arrested. It was very scary and very compelling and something you didn’t talk about and something your parents didn’t let you watch on TV. I have always been fascinated with death, and violent death is more interesting than other kinds. That’s why I was attracted to it.

OVO: Why do most people read it?

GH: Most people are afraid of dying and afraid of crime. That’s the big issue now. The government is really pushing that, as if crime is the worst thing we have to worry about, which it’s not. People are afraid and this is a way of confronting their fears or overloading themselves. If you read about something long enough its not shocking or frightening any more. Maybe its a way of desensitizing themselves.

OVO: Do most of the people who buy these books progress to the books with more graphic descriptions and violent deaths?

GH: l don’t know. They tend to buy them buy the bunch, six or eight at a time. People are demanding more graphic true crime books because if you look at the latest ones coming out (I get to see them all at work) the photos are getting more and more graphic. The ones that came out ten years ago had no pictures at all, or if they did they had pictures of the victim and the killer before they were victims and killers. Whereas now you get morgue shots of somebody’s face blown away. People won’t buy them if they have no pictures in them, they’re disappointed. l’m assuming that this trend in publishing is somehow related to demand.

OVO: Have you progressed in your reading, starting with Reader’s Digest, which is rather sanitized, and now you seek out things that are more extreme?

GH: Yes, but I don‘t do it to shook myself. What l do is find something that interests me, a particular serial killer or a particular method, and read everything I can get on that subject. And I prefer that it be more graphic because then you actually know what happened. I don’t like the sanitized version because in the back of my mind it’s still a confrontation with mortality and you have to look it full in the face to get anything out of it. If you’re going to start digging around to find reality then you have to look at the whole thing, and it’s not pleasant, but the less pleasant it gets, at least with crime, the more real and true it is. That’s why I do it, that may be true with other people. Seeing the people who buy it I don’t think it is.

OVO: Does true crime media contribute to a sense of jadedness and to crime?

GH: To jadedness, yes. I doubt that it contributes to crime but it makes crime so common that there’s no horror to crime any more, it’s entertainment. Its creating some disturbing attitudes. Reading about crime and being fascinated by crime is one thing but thinking of crime and murder as entertainment is something entirely different. Most serial killers don’t think of murder as entertaining and it’s disturbing that that’s how its being billed in America, and that’s how people tend to look at it. Its just a TV show with a bad guy and a nice dead person.

OVO: Why do you think it is that most of the people who get these books are women when most of the people described as victims in these books are women?

GH: If you look at it as confrontation with your own mortality then reading about your own sex being killed would be that much more disturbing and that much more of a confrontation. I think part of it is that they like to read about people who kill women, then get caught, then get killed. I think its a way of extending hatred. The way most true crime books are written you can direct all your hatred at this one bad man and you can believe that everything is caused by bad men. In a way you aren’t responsible, and no one else is responsible. They hardly ever dwell on the circumstances that led this bad man to be bad. It’s an outlet that women don’t have. Women don’t generally go out and beat each other up. They don’t have as much of an organized focus for hatred.

OVO: What are things going to be like in ten years?

GH: We can’t even begin to imagine the number of serial killers we’re going to have. It’s been doubling or more every year for years. Ten years ago l think there were six. Last year there were thirty-five known serial killers. These are the ones that we know about. There are people disappearing who are certainly being killed. It’s going to continue to go up because child abuse is on the rise. Our culture has accepted violence as entertainment. Now kids who were going to have problems anyway can sit around every single night and watch people kill each other on TV. In spite of the moralistic tone, TV is like hypnotism, you sit and absorb, and if you’re hearing about this guy who sliced up ten women and this guy who’s wanted for killing his wife and two kids it gets in your mind and becomes acceptable because its just a TV show. I think that will contribute to a lot of murders. I think everybody ought to be doing more reading and preparing themselves.

(from OVO 10 MAYHEM July 1991)

The cypher the Zodiac killer mailed in three parts to three San Fransisco area newspapers was solved within a month of being printed in August 1969. This is not an explanation of how the cypher was solved (that information can be found in Zodiac by Robert Graysmith) but instead how to use it.  This is the only time the means to use the Zodiac cypher has been published. I backwards-engineered the code from the description in Graysmith’s book. Since the letters J, Q and Z were not used in the initial Zodiac cypher, there is no symbol for them in this explanation.

1. Write the source message to be encyphered, using poor spelling occasionally.
2. Replace the letters of the source message with cypher symbols in an ordered rotation. For example, go through the source message until you find the first letter A. Replace the letter A with the first symbol for A. The second time the letter A appears, use the second symbol for A. After you have used all four symbols for the letter A, use the first symbol again. Proceed to the letters B, C, etc.
3. Very neatly copy the encrypted message into seventeen-character lines, omitting all punctuation and spaces. Add letters at the end or at random within the encrypted message to insure each line has seventeen characters. Divide into equal parts as desired.

(from OVO 10 MAYHEM July 1991)

As the pillars of Western culture collapse (replaced by institutionalized alienation) schizophrenia and violence cease to be deviations and instead become survival characteristics. The apocalypse culture has bred a new form of death, the multiple (serial or mass) murderer. Death sports, murder clubs and snuff art may have existed only in fiction or as isolated instances in the past, but accelerated decline in social order coupled with spectacular un-living creates new possibilities for such to flourish and federate. The multiple murderer is an agent from an increasingly inevitable future.

Heralding the multiple murderer is a support system of mayhem fetishists and media. This is not an exposure of deviants but a warning about what is to become as “normal” as any slasher movie, comic book or pornography.

Anyone seeking to understand the roots and effects of modern alienation would do well to study multiple murderers. There is a wealth of information about multiple murder in the mainstream and alternative press that has not been assimilated into an anti-authoritarian critique. This issue is offered as a summation of research into multiple murder from a variety of perspectives, as a contribution to the struggle against the apocalypse culture.

(from OVO 10 MAYHEM July 1991)

Stuart Swezey is co-editor with Brian King of the AMOK Fourth Dispatch, an essential guide to extremes in print. This interview was most kindly granted on the 23 May 1991, after many hours of miscalculation of time-zone differences between Knoxville and Los Angeles. I offer much thanks to Stuart for his patience and interest.

OVO: The next issue of OVO is not about multiple murderers but about people who follow them, either as sociological studies or evil heroes or somewhere in between, especially in print, like the MAYHEM section of the AMOK catalog. ls there an an average type of person who buys the books in that section?

SS: I don’t know. It could be everybody from people who are into it on an industrial music level to people who are Marines. We get so many different types of people its hard to say what the average is. This stuff is getting more and more popular. Every week there is a new TV movie about a murderer. Last Gasp carries true crime stuff and they never used to. So I guess it’s getting trendier than it used to be.

OVO: What about at the store, are a variety of people buying it there?

SS: We had a woman who worked for the coroners office come in when we had the John-Wayne Gacy paintings up. She thought that was pretty neat. I can’t really classify it at all. You should really talk to Brian, because he’s much more into this stuff than me. He’s working on a compilation of work by murderers writing and artwork that we‘re going to be putting out in a year or so.

OVO: Are there more mayhem books coming out now than ten year ago?

SS: There are definitely more of them. We’re not interested in many of them. A lot of them are in the genre of inter-family murders or the mob. Compilations from True Detective magazine and magazines like that. Definitely not good writing or good journalism. A lot of good stuff is coming back into print like the book on Albert Fish called Cannibal. It seems they’re reprinting more of the classic stuff.

OVO: Is this increasing in the small press as well?

SS: Maybe very peripherally. We carry a book called They Called Him Mister Gacy, which we think is put out by his attorney in Illinois, which is basically a photostat compilation of letters to Gacy. There was the Mansonfile book that Amok Press put out. There’s not a lot. I don’t see a lot of small press stuff put out along those lines. But something like Silence of the Lambs has become big business.

OVO: I was thinking of something more like PURE, something tiny and photocopied.

SS: On a Factsheet Five level.

OVO: Right.

SS: We don’t see a lot of that.

OVO: I just put out a few feelers out for that and it’s not stopping. There’s more of it out there than I ever wanted to know about.

SS: So what do you think of this stuff?

OVO: I think its indicative of what Colin Wilson was talking about when he said we’re entering the age of the psychopath. These people feel alienated and more aware than the people around them but they’re making a mistake when they think that these serial killers are “getting things done” and “manifesting their will.” l think they’re confusing random outbursts with a cognitive critique. Things that show up in the small press tend to come out in mainstream later, and I’ve seen so much of this in the small press – and in the mainstream media – that it indicates to me that it’s going to get even more common and acceptable.

SS: I never know but sometimes I feel like this serial killer stuff is going to be almost passé as a cultural thing, a rebellious stance. You better back it up by either killing somebody or cotton to the fact that it’s as trendy as anything else within a year or two. After Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer that’s not going to happen to every movie that comes down the line that deals with this subject mater. They’re not always going to praise what I think was a glorified student film as brilliant. The room for that is going to be gone. That won’t really effect the murderers. We’re really interested in the interplay between culture and the criminals. How Ed Gein could have inspired the Psycho book, which leads to a great film like Psycho, and how these murders do in certain ways have repercussions that are felt by everyone.

OVO: The success of Psycho led to the film Dementia 13, which was blamed for some murders.

SS: There’s a lot of that happening, but what about Catcher in the Rye inspiring Mark David Chapman to kill John Lennon? Who hasn’t read Catcher in the Rye?

OVO: What do you think the effects are of the increased accessibility of true crime books and other books formerly considered too graphic and horrendous to be read as entertainment?

SS: I think its pretty reasonable. I don’t think its necessarily unhealthy. People are fascinated with violence and to a certain extent the books are slanted in a way that something like PURE isn’t, in that they’re very moralistic. Cops are glorified, cops solve the crime, there are a lot of things the writers do to distance themselves and the reader from the murderer. People like the reassurance of that, that they didn’t do it. It gives them this titillation and a raw experience even if it is once removed. Kind of an “I can take it” thing. I think its weird that it’s cropping up at the same time as we‘re blowing up whole populations like in Iraq and you don’t even see it. I think that that’s a strange state of affairs that people are going out of their way to find this graphic violence and yet we’re not allowed to see as a national policy the kind of havoc that we wreak.

OVO: Do you think there are any trends that can be used to spot what kinds of books and magazines are going to come out in the future on this topic?

SS: Obviously there are some murderers that haven’t been completely covered. It took so long for a book to come out on Richard Ramírez. I think the idea of looking at the actual artwork and writing of these murderers as we’ll be publishing in Lustmord, that’s what a lot of these supposed experts have that you and I as individuals don’t have access to. It’s going to be an interesting twist to give people these actual crazed writings, to look at them as art brut, I think a lot of people will respond to looking through an alien mind in terms of their writing. Sometimes it’s insightful and sometimes it isn‘t but that‘s all you have to go on because no matter how many of these fanzines come along or how much violent fiction is sold the average person can’t even begin to understand the psychopath. This is just an attempt to try on people’s part, whether they do it in a sarcastic way or idealistic way or moralistic cop-loving way, it still shows the vast chasm between someone who can perform these kinds of things and someone who can’t.

OVO: Somebody who can buy a magazine about it.

SS: Right, and that’s all they’re doing. Violence is at the root of so much literature… Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, some violent act usually occurs. Somebody gets murdered in most of our supposedly great works, so there’s got to be something in this catharsis that we need as a culture. I find true crime is more informative than fiction but that doesn’t mean you have to identify with these people. It’s more tragic. If people enjoy that its not necessarily bad at all. It is mind boggling the extremes a human being can go to.

OVO: And survive.

SS: And justify to themselves in some bizarre manner.

I’ve been compiling photos from forensic journals for the AMOK Journal that I’m working on. I want to use them in the form that they’re found. I stayed away from murders to cover other terrains of really graphic bizarre shit like auto-erotic fatalities and things about amputation and self-mutilation, things people do to themselves. I find that is more disturbing for people to look at and talk about than murder for some reason. l’m very intrigued with what Ballard called the hidden literature of medical and psychiatric journals. There are great stories in there that will never see the light of day in an actual book. That’s why you get to the point of collecting medical books. We used to sell a lot of copies of The Color Atlas of Forensic Pathology, considering it’s a $70 book. Some do want to see more and more and more but I don’t know that the average true crime reader does. We just got a promo from a publisher about a murderer who was picking up Marines in Orange County and murdering them. In the book they used actual police forensic photos and I don’t remember seeing that in a regular true crime book before. You can’t get much more graphic than that. I don’t even begin to project where things are going. I just see things peek at some point, then people are saturated and they look for something else. A lot of people who are heavily committed to this will back off and say they weren’t really into it.

AMOK Books
1764 N. Vermont Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90027
United States

Fax: 323-550-8833

http://www.amokbooks.com/

(from OVO 10 MAYHEM July 1991)

It must be admitted that the structure of our social environment is man-made in a certain sense; that its institutions and traditions are neither the work of God nor of nature, but the results of human actions and decisions, and alterable by human actions and decisions. But this does not mean that they are all consciously designed, and explicable in terms of needs, hopes or motives. On the contrary, even those which arise as the result of conscious and intentional human actions are, as a rule, the indirect, the unintentional and often the unwanted byproducts of such actions. Only a minority of social institutions are consciously designed, while the vast majority have just “grown,” as the undesigned result of human actions, as I have said before; and we can add that even most of the few institutions which were consciously and successfully designed (say, a newly founded University, or a Trade Union) do not turn out according to plan – again because of the unintended social repercussions resulting from their intentional creation. For their creation affects not only many other social institutions but also ‘human nature’ – hopes, fears, and ambitions, first of those more immediately involved, and later often of all members of the society. One of the consequences of this is that the moral values of a society – the demands and proposals recognized by all, or by very nearly all, of its members – are closely bound up with its institutions and traditions, and that they cannot survive the destruction of the institutions and traditions of a society. [...]

In order to make my point clear, I shall briefly describe a theory which is widely held but which assumes what I consider the very opposite of the true aim of the social sciences; I call it the “conspiracy theory of society.” It is the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon (sometimes it is a hidden interest which has first to be revealed), and who have planned and conspired to bring it about.

This view of the aims of the social sciences arises, of course, from the mistaken theory that, whatever happens in society – especially happenings such as war, unemployment, poverty, shortages, which people as a rule dislike – is the result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups. This theory is widely held; it is older even than historicism (which, as shown by its primitive theistic form, is a derivative of the conspiracy theory). In its modern forms it is, like modern historicism, and a certain modern attitude towards ‘natural laws,’ a typical result of the secularization of a religious superstition. The belief in the Homeric gods whose conspiracies explain the history of the Trojan War is gone. The gods are abandoned. But their place is filled by powerful men or groups – sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from – such as the Learned Elders of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists.

I do not wish to imply that conspiracies never happen. On the contrary, they are typical social phenomena. They become important, for example, whenever people who believe in the conspiracy theory get into power. And people who sincerely believe that they know how to make heaven on earth are most likely to adopt the conspiracy theory, and to get involved in a counter-conspiracy against non-existing conspirators. For the only explanation of their failure to produce their heaven is the evil intention of the Devil, who has a vested interest in hell.

Conspiracies occur, it must be admitted. But the striking fact which, in spite of their occurrence, disproves the conspiracy theory is that few of these conspiracies are ultimately successful. Conspirators rarely consummate their conspiracy.

Why is this so? Why do achievements differ so widely from aspirations? Because this is usually the case in social life, conspiracy or no conspiracy. Social life is not only a trial of strength between opposing groups: it is action within a more or less resilient or brittle framework of institutions and traditions, and it creates – apart from any conscious counter-action – many unforeseen reactions in this framework, some of them perhaps even unforeseeable.

To try to analyse these reactions and to foresee them as far as possible is, I believe, the main task of the social sciences. It is the task of analysing the unintended social repercussions of intentional human actions-those repercussions whose significance is neglected both by the conspiracy theory and by psychologism, as already indicated. An action which proceeds precisely according to intention does not create a problem for social science (except that there may be a need to explain why in this particular case no unintended repercussions occurred). One of the most primitive economic actions may serve as an example in order to make the idea of unintended consequences of our actions quite clear. If a man wishes urgently to buy a house, we can safely assume that he does not wish to raise the market price of houses. But the very fact that he appears on the market as a buyer will tend to raise market prices. And analogous remarks hold for the seller. Or to take an example from a very different field, if a man decides to insure his life, he is unlikely to have intention of encouraging some people to invest their money in insurance shares. But he will do so nevertheless. We see here clearly that not all consequences of our actions are intended consequences; and accordingly, that the conspiracy theory of society cannot be true because it amounts to the assertion that all results, even those which at first sight do not seem to be intended by anybody, are the intended results of the actions of people who are interested in these results.

From The Open Society and its Enemies Volume 2. Princeton University Press 1966

The Invisible Community College is a study group dedicated to Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles moderated by Popjellyfish, Trevor Blake and Klint Finley. Weekly reading assignments will be sent to a mailing list for one year beginning January 23, 2011. If you would like to participate, you must sign-up for the mailing list before then.

There will be monthly public, in-person discussions in Portland, OR based on the reading. Those in other cities are encouraged to organize their own study cells.

Curriculum:
‘The Invisibles’ by Grant Morrison.
‘Our Sentence is Up’ by Patrick Meane
‘Anarchy For The Masses’ by Patrick Neighly
‘Grant Morrison’ by Patrick Meaney

The Invisibles
Available as individual issues, in digital form for the iPad, collected trade paperbacks and in an incomplete form in German-language trade paperbacks. Individual issues out of print, include letters to and from GM not collected in trade paperbacks. Trade paperbacks in print, include art not found in individual issues.

Individual monthly issues published by DC Comics 1994 – 2000:
Volume 1 Issues 1-25: September 1994 – October 1996
Volume 2 Issues 1-22: February 1997 – February 1999
Volume 3 Issues 12-1: April 1999 – June 2000

Individual Digital Issues
Available through DC Comics app for the iPad

Trade Paperbacks (English):
1. Say You Want a Revolution. (ISBN 1-5638-9267-7)
2. Apocalipstick. (ISBN 1-5638-9702-4)
3. Entropy in the UK. (ISBN 1-5638-9728-8)
4. Bloody Hell in America. (ISBN 1-5638-9444-0)
5. Counting to None. (ISBN 1-56389-489-0)
6. Kissing Mister Quimper. (ISBN 1-5638-9600-1)
7. The Invisible Kingdom. (ISBN 1-4012-0019-2)

Trade Paperbacks (German, incomplete):
Invisibles Monstereditionen 1: Revolution Gefallig?
Invisibles Monstereditionen 2: Ordnung & Entropie

Reference:
Patrick Meaney: Our Sentence is Up / Seeing Grant Morrison’s The
Invisibles. Book. (ISBN 978-0578032337)
Patrick Neighly and Kereth Cowe-Spigai: Anarchy For The Masses / The
Disinformation Guide To The Invisibles. Book. (ISBN 0-971-39422-9)
Patrick Meaney (director): Grant Morrison / Talking with Gods. DVD.

Enrollment information here.

My Struggle is a book of 280 pages measuring 5.25 x 4.5 inches, written in 1975 and printed in a single edition of one hundred copies in 1978. These small thick books have red covers to make them look the same as Chairman Mao’s Book of Quotations. Some red cover copies had red ribbon page markers, and some had yellow covers and no ribbon. The pages of the book book are bound by two large staples and the cover is glued to the spine and inner edges of the first and last pages.

Almost every page of My Struggle has an illustration with a numbered caption, usually having nothing to do with the surrounding text. Most of these illustrations are clip art but some are collages or drawings by Mothersbaugh. There are also a few photographs of DEVO. The text of the book is a continuous flow of words, occasionally knotting itself into an essay but usually stream of conscious rambling. The text is presented without hyphens and in full justification. It reads as the work of someone who doesn’t understand what the bell on a typewriter is for.

My Struggle has the same concerns as the lyrics, music and films of DEVO: mutation, medicine, eugenics, potatoes, de-evolution, tyranny, corporate culture and sex. The chicken-winged chimponaut seen on the dust jacket to Duty Now for the Future and in the film Love Without Anger appears here, as does the beaker / man / atom logo. The warty-faced man described in the film The Men Who Make The Music as the work of “God in his Picasso period” is in My Struggle. Boojie Boy appears throughout the book, as does Chinaman. Chinaman is seen stroking a coathanger in the film Secret Agent Man, is described as giving the papers to Boojie Boy in the film Jocko Homo, and is mentioned in the song All of Us. The Chinaman’s glasses, minus their ‘velly clevah’ slanted eyes, are the glasses Mothersbaugh is wearing on the cover of Oh No It’s Devo. These words, images and concepts show a continuity of work by Mothersbaugh that lasts decades.

Some of what appears in My Struggle didn’t appear in any other form for many years. On pages 108 and 109 are the lyrics of the song All of Us, a song which was distributed only in bootleg form for decades. In 1977 the song was performed in Minneapolis as Soft Core Mutations, and in 1981 the song was renamed Going Under for the LP New Traditionalists. Only in 1990, on the CD Hardcore DEVO Volume 1, was the original All of Us released. fifteen years after appearing in My Struggle.

My Struggle gives much attention is given to the Huboon, a type of low-grade Beautiful Mutant. Hardcore Devo Volume 1 mentions the Huboon in the song Soo Bawls. The song Huboon Stomp was performed in the first few years of DEVO but was not released until the 1998 CD Chef Aid. The lyrics to The Last Time I Ever Seen St. Louie and My Frauline Done Told Me (the first song performed at the first DEVO concert) are found in My Struggle but have yet to be released. My Struggle is written in a sing-song style and many more lyrics may yet be harvested from it.

My Struggle was published in a format that was made to last, and proves an unbroken line from the earliest DEVO to the DEVO of today. This book is nearly impossible to find. I’m fortunate to have a copy signed by Mark Mothersbaugh, Bob Mothersbaugh, Jim Mothersbaugh, Gerry Casale and Bob Casale (the original line up and the band as represented in the book), General Boy and (separately) a signature from Chuck Statler, the primary director of DEVO’s earliest video work.

from OVO 8 (May 1991)
re-written December 2010

Today (25 November) was a special day in the life of Yukio Mishima.  And it happens that today is also the US holiday of Thanksgiving.

No higher honour could have come to me than to have been permitted to partake of his stewed chicken.  Every morning, with profound gratitude in my heart, I ate the gizzard and the tough parts of the liver.  He ate only the soft parts, and I ate the rest. – Mishima, Five Modern Noh Plays

May you have gratitude in your heart as you eat the gizzard and the tough parts of the liver.

OVO triumphus for Yukio Mishima for 2009.
OVO triumphus for Yukio Mishima for 2008.

I was a used and rare bookseller in much of the 1990s. Selling books was a life-long goal and I am glad I was able do it. In January 1995 I had the chance to catalog a wonderful collection that disappeared soon after. This is that weird tale.

When I arrived at work that morning my boss said he had a project for me. Someone had brought in a major collection of works by and about Clark Ashton Smith, and I was to catalog what they were for sale. I spent several days doing nothing but that, each item more exciting than the last.

The day after I finished my catalog my boss said that the police had come asking about the collection. The seller, it seems, had stolen them from the rightful owner. The books disappeared back into the collection from whence they came. I have no record or memory of who the rightful owner was, I have no way to get in touch with him, and anyone who asks me to do so will be charged a five hundred dollar consultation fee.

What I do have is the catalog I prepared. This catalog has never been published, and I’m guessing that some of the items listed here have also never been published. Here is the catalog, errors and all, one of the many weird tales of my days as a bookseller.

- – -

I – ART

LOVECRAFT/GARCIA by MIKE GARCIA – OUT OF PRINT
Ken Krueger North Hollywood 1975, 1st thus 4to wraps np, fine condition. HPL-inspired artwork from The Library Lovecraftian, reissued & enlarged in an edition limited to 995 copies.

HALLOWEEN IN ARKHAM by HARRY O. MORRIS – SIGNED COLOR PRINTS
Portfolio of fifteen 11″ x 8.5″ color prints in glossy folder with numbered matching envelope. Small stain to cover, smudges to envelope. There is an ocean of bad collage; these are not among them. Good use of color and perspective, very high quality prints.

MAGIC LANTERN by CHRISTINE PASANEN & HARRY MORRIS – OUT OF PRINT
Esoteric Order of Dagon APA Albuquerque 1981, 1st edition 8vo oblong wraps np, fine condition. Story by Pasanen, collages by Morris, color cover, very dreamy.

ORIGINAL DRAWINGS BY CLARK ASHTON SMITH
Eleven original drawings by Clark Ashton Smith, generally 4″ x 3″, individually mounted. Profiles of human heads, some Arabesque, some portraits, some grotesques, all signed. ‘A Slave,’ ‘The Gorgio,’ ‘A Gentleman of the Renaissance,’ ‘Leopardi,’ ‘Parisians,’ ‘Alastor’ and five untitled drawings.

THE FANTASTIC ART OF CLARK ASHTON SMITH by DENNIS RICKARD – OUT OF PRINT
Mirage Press Baltimore 1973, 1st edition 4to wraps @ 48 pp, fine condition. Published in a single edition of approximately 15,000 copies, this book concentrates on the weird sculpture of C.A.S.: tiny stone fetishes with names like ‘Tsathoggua’ and ‘Mysteriarch.’ Accomplished, wish I had one. Introduced by Gahan Wilson.

GROTESQUES AND FANTASTIQUES by CLARK ASHTON SMITH – OUT OF PRINT
Gerry de la Ree, Saddle River 1973. 1st edition, 8vo wraps 40 pp, very good condition. Previously unpublished drawings and poems by C.A.S. from the personal collection of Gerry de la Ree. Printed in a first edition of 600 copies, of which this is #241.

CLARK ASHTON SMITH – ARTIST by GERRY DE LA REE – OUT OF PRINT
Hyperborian League, nd. 4to wraps 12 pp, very good condition. An appreciation of Smith as an artist, commercial and not-so-commercial. Illustrated.

CLARK ASHTON SMITH DUST JACKETS
Dust jackets for Lost Worlds, The Abomination of Yondo, Genius Loci and Out of Space and Time from UK publisher Neville Spearman. Folded once along spine, light wear else very good.

II – MAGAZINES

THE ARKHAM COLLECTOR – COMPLETE RUN AND DUPLICATES
Announcements of present and coming publications, bibliographical notes, art, poetry, letters, photographs, reproduced manuscripts, recommended reading, etc. Each 16mo issue contains a great deal of uncollected Arkham lore. Duplicate copies of Numbers Seven through Ten.

Number One – Summer 1967 – 24 pp – some underlining.
Number Two – Winter 1968 – 52 pp – some underlining.
Number Three – Summer 1968 – 88 pp.
Number Four – Winter 1969 – 124 pp – light smudging.
Number Five – Summer 1969 – 156 pp – light smudging.
Number Six – Winter 1970 – 180 pp – light smudging.
Number Seven – Summer 1970 – 220 pp – light smudging.
Number Eight – Winter 1971 – 256 pp.
Number Nine – Spring 1971 – 300 pp – light smudging.
Number Ten – Summer 1971 – 348 pp – light smudging.

FROM BEYOND THE DARK GATEWAY ISSUE FOUR
Silver Scarab Albuquerque 1977, 4to wraps 36 pp. HLP-ish fanzine with contributions and reprints from Campbell, Bloch, Morris and others.

INSIDE ISSUE TWO
Jonathan White New York 1963, 16mo wraps 54 pp.
Science fiction magazine including Maya by Clark Ashton Smith.

NYCTALOPS
Edited & with art by Harry Morris, high quality printing and lots of color art. All issues 4to size. Cockcroft, Garcia, Lumley, Morris, Sidney-Fryer, Wilgus – und Lovecraft, Lovecraft, uber alles. Scholarly, not just cheerleading. Watch the gothic aesthetic being born in these nine issues.

#9 – 1974 49 pp – errata page, rear page detached.
#11/12 – 1976 122 pp – good condition.
#13 – 1977 45 pp – very good condition.
#14 – 1978 52 pp – very good condition.
#16 – 1981 52 pp – very good condition.
#17 – 1982 63 pp – fine condition, duplicate, promotional card.
#18 – 1983 68 pp – fine condition, duplicate.

WHISPERS
Bloch, Campbell, Drake, Garcia, Howard, King, Lieber, Lumley, Russell, Wilson and plenty of HPLphilia. All issues 16mo.

V1 #2 December 1973 64 pp – very good condition.
V2 #4 December 1975 68 pp – duplicate, errata sheet, color plates, very good condition.
V3 #1 December 1976 67 pp – very good condition.
V3 #3-4 October 1978 132 pp – square bound, color plates, very good condition.

III – BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS

FANTASY COLLECTOR’S ANNUAL 1974 – MAKES YOUR JAW DROP
Gerry de la Ree Saddle River 1971, 4to wraps 64 pp, very good condition. ‘In the 36 years I have been active as a reader and collector in the fantasy and science fiction fields, I have amassed a great quantity of rarities and unique material. These are, of course, part of the joys of collecting. But to let such things merely collect dust in file cabinets or on bookshelves seems rather pointless.’ So de la Ree published this volume of glimpses into his truly astounding collection: unpublished letters, poems and art by E. A. Poe, Mahlon Blaine, H. P. Lovecraft – get the idea? Number 232 of a limited first edition of 500 copies.

INDEX TO THE VERSE IN WEIRD TALES by THOMAS COCKCROFT – OUT OF PRINT
Thomas G. L. Cockcroft, Lower Hutt NZ 1960, 1st edition, 8vo sq. wraps 16 pp. Arranged by title, then by author, as well as verse included in fiction, Virgil Finlay’s poetry series, Oriental Magic, a magazine index and The Thrill book. Signed by the author, limited to 500 copies.

A HISTORY OF THE NECROMOMICON by H. P. LOVECRAFT – SPECIAL LIMITED EDITION
Necronomicon Press West Warwick 1977, 16mo wraps np, fine condition. The first edition of this title was limited to a printing of four hundred and fifty copies, fifty copies of the original five hundred being lost by the U. S. Postal Service. This edition, the second, consists of five hundred numbered copies, of which this is #113.

H. P. LOVECRAFT: A SYMPOSIUM – OUT OF PRINT
Riverside Quarterly Los Angeles, 1st edition, nd 16mo wraps 17 pp. Robert Block, Arthur Jean Cox, Fritz Leiber, Sam Russel and Leland Sapiro on HPL, transcribed from the 24 October 1963 meeting of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. Annotated by August Derleth.

THE OCCULT LOVECRAFT by H. P. LOVECRAFT
Gerry de la Ree Saddle River 1975, 1st edition 8vo wraps 40 pp, fine condition. First appearance anywhere of two essays on the occult by HPL, with stellar artwork by Stephen Fabian, introductions by Frank Belknap Long and Samuel Loveman, and occult commentary by Anthony Raven. Limited to an edition of 990, of which this is #182. Just try and find this one anywhere else. Buy it before I do, please.

THE LAST OF THE GREAT ROMANTIC POETS by DONALD SIDNEY-FRYER – OUT OF PRINT
Silver Scarab Press Albuquerque 1973, 1st edition 4to wraps @ 26 pp, very good condition. An attempt to define the romantic tradition from its beginnings in the Middle Ages to modern times, firmly placing the Smith / Lovecraft / Howard circles therein. Illustrated by Herb Arnold.

THE FANES OF DAWN by CLARK ASHTON SMITH – LIMITED EDITION
The Fugitive Poems / Second Series – Fourth Volume / Xiccarph Edition 1976, 8vo wraps with special envelope, np. Book in as new condition, envelope very good. A total of 303 copies of this edition were printed, of which this is #28. Eight poems. Errata sheet.

SEER OF THE CYCLES by CLARK ASHTON SMITH – LIMITED EDITION
The Fugitive Poems / Second Series – Fifth Volume / Xiccarph Edition 1976, 8vo wraps with special envelope np. Book in as new condition, envelope lightly smudged. A total of 325 copies of this edition were printed, of which this is #28. Eleven poems.

THE BURDEN OF THE SUNS by CLARK ASHTON SMITH – LIMITED EDITION
The Fugitive Poems / Second Series – Sixth Volume / The Burden of the Suns. Xiccarph Edition 1977, 8vo wraps with special envelope np. Book in as new condition, envelope very lightly smudged. A total of 295 copies of this edition were printed, of which this is #28. Eight poems.

SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY PUBLISHED BY ARKHAM HOUSE AND MYCROFT & MORAN 1939 – 1976 by DICK SPELMAN – OUT OF PRINT
Institute for Specialized Literature, North Hollywood nd, 10 pp 4to wraps, very light wear. Indexed by author and title, date, pages, copies and original price of the two publishing houses listed, cross-indexed by title.

IV – MANUSCRIPTS

ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPTS OF CLARK ASHTON SMITH
Predominantly poems, some translated prose and poetry; one page of English language text with date unless noted. Includes typed and mimeographed manuscripts, some with tape repairs. Dates range from 1915 to 1929.

ONE
Artemis – poem, signed, tape repairs.
Autumn Twilight – poem with corrections, signed.
Baillement – poem, signed, tape repairs.
The Barrier – poem with corrections, signed.
Beauty – poem with corrections, signed, tape repairs.
Beauty Implacable – poem, signed, notation at bottom, tape repairs.
Chance – poem with corrections, signed, tape repairs.
The Chimera – poem with corrections, signed.
Connaisance / Similitudes – two poems, signed, tape repairs.
Dead Love – poem with corrections, signed.
The Desert Garden – poem with corrections, signed.
Desolation – poem with corrections, signed.
Enigma – poem with corrections, signed.
En Sourdine – poem with corrections, tape repairs.
The Ennuye – poem with corrections, signed.
Exotic Perfume – poem, signed, tape repairs.
Faun-Lilies / Plum-Lovers – two poems, signed, tape repairs.
The Garden of Dreams – poem with corrections, signed.
Impression – poem with corrections, signed.
Incognita – poem, signed, tape repairs.
The Incubus of Time – poem with corrections, signed.
Inheritance – poem with corrections, signed.
Laus Mortis – poem, signed.
Le Mauvais Moine – poem with corrections, signed, tape repairs.
Les Aveugles – translation with corrections, signed.
Les Hiboux / Le Coucher d’un Soleil Romantique – two translations w/corr., signed.
Loss – poem, signed, tape repairs.
Maya – poem, signed, tape repairs.
Memorial – poem with corrections, signed.
Mirage – poem, signed.
Mirrors – poem with corrections, signed.
Mystery – poem, signed, tape repairs.
Necromancy – poem with corrections, signed, tape repairs.
Nocturne – poem with corrections, signed.
Moon-Dawn – poem with corrections, signed.
Nightfall – poem, signed.
A Prayer – poem with corrections, signed.
Psalm – poem with corrections, signed.
Query – poem with corrections, signed, tape repairs.
Reclamation – poem with corrections, signed.
The Refuge of Beauty – poem, signed.
The Remorse of the Dead – poem, signed, tape repairs.
Satiety / Song – two poems with corrections, signed, tape repairs.
Secret Love / Forgotten Sorrow – two poems, signed, tape repairs.
Solution – poem with corrections, signed.
Suggestion – poem with corrections, signed.
Vaticinations / The Autumn Lake / Harmony – three poems on a single page.
hall Meet / Brumal – two poems, signed.

This collection also includes envelope to Samuel Loveman from C.A.S. dated 5 March 1919 and 8 February 1980 letter from publisher / collector Gerry de la Ree to ‘John’ regarding the sale of C.A.S. poems.

TWO
Alexandrins – poem, French, signed with notation.
Canticle – poem, signed.
Clair De Lune – poem, correction.
Cumuli – poem, signed.
The Denial of St. Peter – translation, signed.
En Sourdine – translation, signed.
February – poem, signed.
L’Amor et le Crane – translation with notation.
L’Amour Supreme – poem, signed.
Le Faune – poem.
L’Imprevu – translation, two pages, signed.
Madrigal of Evanscence – poem, signed.
Paiennerie – poem, French, signed.
Solvet Seclum – translation.
Sonnet Lunaire – poem, French, signed.
Spectral Life – poem.
Sufficiency – poem- signed.
Une Vie Spectrale – poem, French, signed.
The Vampire – translation, signed.
Vaticination – poem, signed.

The Anarchist’s Guide to the BBS
Keith Wade
Port Townsend: Loompanics 1990
8vo paperback 90p

There were two main reference points I used to evaluate this book. First, as an anarchist [1982-1994], did this teach me anything about BBS? And second, as someone with a little knowledge of computers, did this teach me about anarchy? The results were mixed but worth the read to find out.

The Anarchist’s Guide to the BBS is written for the novice to computers, containing several chapters of introduction to terms and procedures that are well written and build on each other nicely. The book centers on computers as telecommunication devices but I learned more about computers in general than I’d known before. In this respect the book is exactly what it claims to be, a guide to the BBS, and does its job well.

But as an anarchist’s guide to the BBS I found it lacking. Like The Anarchist’s Cookbook (which Loompanics dropped from its catalog many years ago as dangerous and misleading), The Anarchist’s Guide to the BBS confuses anarchism with criminality. The reasoning something like this: anarchists oppose government, governments write laws, therefore to break a law is an anarchist act. This reduces anarchism to the loyal opposition of the state, dependent on authority to tell it what not to do rather than a movement that could create an alternative to the state. There is little or nothing in the Guide about breaking into government or corporate computer networks for fact-finding or sabotage purposes, the decentralized nature of BBS communication and its relevance to anarchist theory, or the debate on the role of technology in the anarchist struggle in the future. Not only are these ideas not explored in a book about anarchy and computers but there is no exploration or analysis of anarchism at all. There is plenty of information on use of credit card numbers that aren’t yours and running a prostitution service over your BBS but not even these ideas, which have been debate in the anarchist press for years, have any theory behind them. It is enough to scam the state; no need to use that power to achieve anything other than increased wealth and power for yourself. If I read this book as a computer user with no background in anarchism there would be nothing to contradict the state (amass wealth at the expense of others) nor the state perspective on anarchists (those who amass wealth at the expense of others without going through the proper channels). A change of title to “The Criminal’s Guide to the BBS” would bring the book more in line with its content and improve the ability of the book to be what it claims to be.

(from OVO 9 July 1991)

The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays
by L. A. Rollins
Charleston: Nine-Banded Books 2008
8vo, paperbound, perfect binding, gatefold cover, 304p.
$13 (on sale $5 post paid in the USA as of Sept 2010)
ISBN 9-780615-192987
Nine-Banded Books

The above illustration is not from The Myth of Natural Rights. It’s a poster I made when I was twenty years old in 1986. My self-importance began much earlier but this poster was the first time I put it on paper. When I made the poster it didn’t make sense, and it didn’t have to. That’s the funny thing about egoism. It doesn’t always make sense, and it doesn’t always (or ever) have to. When you sign on to Team Me, truth and consistency are only two more wheels in the head that can be entertained but are never captains. Egoism starts and ends with me, of course, but you might think it has something to do with authors from the past. Come, the royal we offers an introduction to the me-nut gallery…

Start anywhere. Perhaps with that prince of books, The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli. The Prince was circulated as a plagiarized manuscript until 1537, five years after the death of its author. It was hated enough to earn an unfavorable mention in The Merry Wives of Windsor and Pygmalion. While The Prince is interested in the health of the State, Machiavelli was interested in Machiavelli and wrote what he did to earn favor for himself. Serving the State is off the table at the egoist banquet, but in the case of a Prince the self and the State are one. “Time brings with it all things, and may produce indifferently either good or evil. [...] How laudable it is for a prince to keep good faith and live with integrity, and not with astuteness, every one knows. Still the experience of our times shows those princes to have done great things who have had little regard for good faith, and have been able by astuteness to confuse men’s brains, and who have ultimately overcome those who have made loyalty their foundation.”

Consider the Marquis de Sade, who used the 1791 fiction Justine to write “Every strong and healthy individual, endowed with an energetically organized mind, who preferring himself to others, as he must, will know how to weigh their interests in the balance against his own, will laugh God and mankind to the devil, will brave death and mock the law, fully aware that it is to himself he must be faithful, that by himself all must be measured.”

And then, the egoist wellspring: Max Stirner’s 1845 book The Ego and Its Own. One Friedrich Engles said “this work is important” to his comrade Karl Marx, but upon a scolding by Mr. Marx young Freddy recanted his praise. K&F made a killing selling the bait-and-switch of material conditions both changing with the times at the individual level (no human nature) and leading inevitably to specifically defined conflicts (human nature). The two also collaborated on The German Ideology, a multi-hundred page attack on Stirner and his ideas. Ideas such as these: “Away, then, with every concern that is not altogether my own concern! You think at least the ‘good cause’ must be my concern? What’s good, what’s bad? Why, I myself am my concern, and am neither good nor bad. Neither has meaning for me. The divine is God’s concern; the human, man’s. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is mine, and it is not a general one, but is – unique, as I am unique. Nothing is more to me than myself!”

Friedrich Nietzche did stare into the void, but only while holding the guardrails of ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ A superman that ought to be instead of is. But when he spoke of the Will, ah… “Man is something which is to be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883) “He who must be a creator in good and evil, he must first be a destroyer and break values into pieces.” (Ecce Homo, 1911) “That which does not destroy me, makes me stronger.” (Twilight of the Idols, 1899) Trevor Blake’s addendum: that which I do not destroy becomes stronger.

Max Stirner’s wellspring is well navigated by Ragnar Redbeard’s 1896 book Might is Right. Redbeard has a Shatner-like punctuation style employed by Stirner-in-translation that can make reading the book – difficult. Other times… “Freemen should never regulate their conduct by the suggestion or dicta of others, for when they do so, they are no longer free. [...] The freeman is born free, lives free, and dies free. He is (even though living in an artificial civilization) above all laws, all constitutions, all theories of right and wrong. He supports and defends them of course, as long as they suit his own end, but if they don’t, then he annihilates them by the easiest and most direct method.” The Myth of Natural Rights does not mention Redbeard’s Might is Right (although the introduction by TGGP does). Redbeard claims that ‘nature’s law is tooth and claw,’ that there is a natural right and the prone bodies of the vanquished point to those who possess it. But isn’t it convenient that title holders of natural rights are only known after the final bell? Might is the law of all life, yet some groups are more might than others. Every individual must struggle for existence, yet that ghost of might-right inside them takes a vacation once in a while and eventually moves out of town for good. What good to me is a natural right that I can’t know about until after I’ve used it, and which may leave me when I need it most, and which someone else might have more of than me? Lex talonis is the projection of matter-of-fact outcomes of conflict onto a cave wall and calling that shadow a natural right. To the victor goes the spoil – sure, but no need to get all wheelly about it. That’s what I got out of Rollins’ statement that “a bullet-proof vest may protect a person against being shot, but a natural right has never stopped a single slug.” ‘The mighty win’ is true but it is a mistake to say ‘the mighty ought to win.’ Evolution is the failure of the non-adaptive to survive, not the survival of the fittest. The former is how things seem to be, the later is the mistake of intelligent design. Not only is might is right a mistake, but kind of whiney, too. ‘But I was supposed to win… whaaa…’

The Book of the Law by Aleister Crowley “lays down a simple Code of Conduct. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” Crowley credited a deity named Aiwass as the author of this 1904 book, but as far as my field agents have determined it was Crowley who cashed the checks. Read on, seeker. “Thou hast no right but to do thy will. Do that, and no other shall say nay. For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.”  How close to egoism Crowley was with the Law, with the notion all events are equally lawful. But then the black skies are filled with wheels of stars. Flickering fairy lamps of nature, the law of our growth, lawful acts and right events. Why would the Beast not step boldly into the chaos? As Aiwass saying, close but no cigar.

Egoism, anarchism and communism all went to the ball, but we know which wicked stepsister got to dance for the next half century. We don’t see much of egoism again until Ayn Rand’s Objectivism (The Fountainhead 1943, Atlas Shrugged 1957, and so very etc.). Dame Rand had a decent egoist rookie season, what with her admiration of murderer William Edward Hickman (“Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should. [He had] no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a conscious all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel ‘other people.’”), her ‘rational self-interest,’ her railing against self-destruction while being a chain-smoker, her insistence on loyalty while having affairs. Truth and consistency be damned, hoist the dollar flag! But having dislodged the great catherine wheel of altruism from her head, she let it fill with sand to make a perfect impression of liberty. While Ayn Rand could have served Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand instead served Objectivism. How many more steps away from freedom then are those intellectual heir brains who splinter from her fossilized remains. It was a no-fault divorce, egoism and Objectivism. “Egoism, in the Objectivist interpretation, does not mean the policy of violating the rights, moral or political, of others in order to satisfy one’s own needs or desires. It does not mean the policy of a brute, a con man or a beggar.” So said Leonard Peikoff in the revealingly-named Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (le objectivism, ce moi). Objectivism put the vocabulary of egoism back into circulation. But instead of the dead-end of egoism (all roads lead to ME), Objectivism is an endless journey into ever-tighter circles of servitude.

Rudy Ray Moore may have been quoting an unknown homeless man from 1960 when he performed his ‘Dolemite’ skit, but the results are me-tastic. Thus Spoke Dolemite: “Why the day he was dropped from his mammy’s ass, he slapped his pappy’s face and said from now on, I’m running this place. Dolemite said, bitch I had a job in Africa kicking lions in the ass to stay in shape. I got run out of South America for fucking steers. I fucked the she-elephant until she broke down in tears. I’ve swimmed across muddy rivers and ain’t never got wet. Mountains fell on me and I ain’t dead yet. I rode across the ocean on the head of my dick, ate nine tons of cat shit and ain’t never got sick.” Atlas may have shrugged, but Dolemite stuck his dick in the ground and turned the whole world around.

Anton LaVey published The Satanic Bible in 1969. LaVey built on Might is Right by the easiest and most direct method: plagiarism. Most of the chapter titled “The Book of Satan” is jot and tittle from Redbeard’s work. Elsewhere LaVey wrote: “Do not take that which does not belong to you unless it is a burden to the other person and he cries out to be relieved.” Let’s say altruist Anton was just helping Redbeard by helping himself. Not that LaVey couldn’t deliver the goods on his own: “The Satanist believes in complete gratification of his ego. Satanism, in fact, is the only religion which advocates the intensification or encouragement of the ego. [...] Life is the one great indulgence; death the one great abstinence. To a person who is satisfied with his earthly existence, life is like a party; and no one likes to leave a good party.” LaVey did put on a good party, and current Magister Peter Gilmore has done a fine job as well. It it perhaps eternally tempting to resolve the contradictions of orchestrating an organization for individualists, but the Church of Satan has kept its claw clean.

Loompanics Unlimited was founded in 1975. Until founder Michael Hoy closed shop in 2006, Loompanics published and distributed after the egoist fashion. Far left? Far right? Humor? Sex? Drugs? Parapsychology? And even some straight-up egoist titles and authors such as those mentioned above? Loompanics had it all, just no gods and no masters. In 2010 I can read most anything I like on a phone I carry in my pocket. In decades past, more ideas still had the stink of heresy on them and finding them in a book mattered. The Myth of Natural Rights and Lucifer’s Lexicon were first published by Loompanics. Loompanics was the last egoist monster movie shot on film before everything went digital. Most important of all, it was through Loompanics that egoism had the privilege of meeting me.

It takes someone like me to review the 2008 edition of The Myth of Natural Rights. A host of Great and Powerful Oz’s petition an audience with Scarecrow Rollins, notably Ayn Rand, George Smith and Murray Rothbard. Each offers their defense or examples of natural rights, and each one is sent home wizened from the encounter. It’s a real treat to watch the natural rights peddle by and Rollins spoke them one by one. Rollins’ explanation of why there is no contradiction in acting one way and advocating others act differently was also a pleasant read.

If there are no natural rights, then is everyone free to do everything? I’m able to do a great deal, and from what I can do I do only some of it. Rollins writes “My life is of supreme value to me.” And regarding an argument for natural rights by Murray Rothbard: “If I can advance my life with violent interference to Murray Rothbard, why should I care about Murray Rothbard’s needs? [...] Again, if I violently interfere with Murray Rothbard’s freedom, this may violate the ‘natural law’ of Murray Rothbard needs, but it doesn’t violate the ‘natural law’ of my needs.” Turns out that while no natural right prevents me from visiting the greatest misfortune on my fellows, simple man-made law (or laziness) does the trick. Rollins wrote “Real rights are those conferred and enforced by the laws of a State or the customs of a social group” and that’s the gospel truth. If man-made law claims to be based on the ‘inalienable’ or divinity, so much the worse for man-made law. It’s the guns and jails, taxes and soldiers that get the job done. Some guns and jails are preferable to others: “To deny that there are ethical differences between governments is not to deny that there are other kinds of differences between governments, differences which can be of great practical importance.”

It entertains me to note contradictions in Rollins’ work. On page 45 he writes: “There are no unconditional ‘musts’ or ‘oughts,’ no categorical imperatives [...] That is why, although I am an egoist of sorts, I nevertheless reject what Brian Medlin calls the principle of ‘universal categorical egoism,’ to whit, ‘that we all ought to observe our own interests, because that is what we ought to do.’ I say, to the contrary, that it is up to each individual, insofar as he has freedom of choice in the matter, to decide for himself whether or not to pursue his own interests.” This statement is worthy of me. But on page 85 Rollins writes: “For an egoist, the only ‘justification’ for one’s actions is that those actions benefit oneself. If, by means of reason, A concludes that he will benefit from living at the involuntary expense of B, then an egoist would agree that A is ‘rationally justified’ in doing so.” Squeak squeak little wheel. What need do I have for justification, rational or otherwise? How can I include inevitably unpredictable outcomes in my rational conclusions? What of indifference or humor as motivators? And what of doing something even to my own detriment for the purpose of keeping another from advancing toward his goals?

Another funny thing about egoism is that it’s funny. I’m experimenting with a new delineator between the political left and the political right. The left can tell a joke and the right can take a joke. It holds in the corollary too. The left gets bent about certain words and images that aren’t funny and the right rolls with it. Meanwhile, the best comedians tend to be lefty while the best comedians on the right are… who? The excesses of de Sade bring on exasperation and disbelief, companion emotions to laughter. Even in translation The Ego and Its Own is funny. There are some rough chuckles in Might is Right and The Satanic Bible. Rudy Ray Moore made his living as a comedian. Rand proves my point by having a little light in her for interviewers but in her pursuit of natural law she locked out the grins. Why do egoism and humor go hand in hand? Think about yourself enough and you’ll realize what an ignorant fool you are, that your problems are petty and your triumphs are trivial. The choice then is to laugh or to wish you’d never been born. Perhaps instead of looking for vindication or truth or beauty or justice or equality, we should have been looking for laughs. Or perhaps when you get rid of the wheels in your head, you get a little funny in your head. Left and right are as pliable as any other shibboleth and share bed partners more often than polite conversation can allow. Do you call it ‘eugenics’ or ‘family planning’ depending on what it is or depending on whether your enemy supports it? Splitting sides based on humor is a good one. In my political nyuk nyuk spectrum, egoism is more of the left than the right.

What is it like to live without natural rights, without human nature? Kind of like now but crabbier or funnier, depending. The lives of the egoist authors are generally mundane, while the lives of those who lived as egoists and didn’t write about it are often full of fireworks (note to self…). See the world as an egoist with this simple thought experiment. Lift your wet eyes from my words just for a moment and look at something. You’re seeing something, yes? Were you to count that something, you would count one of that something. Where is the “one” in that thing? When you look at two of something, where is the “two?” You already knew that numbers aren’t in things, even if you’ve never seen it put into words before. There is no number-essence. And even though you know numbers aren’t in things, you continue to use numbers. The convention of numbers is like the convention of natural rights or human nature. They aren’t really there but people keep talking about them as if they were. I’m fine with that (and that’s the opinion that matters here) until the smoke and mirror crew sets up for another production of It’s Natural to Do As I Say.

Natural rights are in the same category of sleight of hand as Plato’s theory of forms. Plato said that when we see a thing, we see only an imperfect echo of the thing. If we could but see it there is an ideal form of a thing behind the thing we see. That ideal form is the nature of the thing. Sounds good if you’re arguing for the existence of human rights. We’re all different and imperfect people, but there’s a natural human right somewhere that is in the real us, and we all get a share of it. Everything has a cause, and those causes have causes, and those causes in turn go back and back and back until you get to a primal cause, a prime mover, an ideal form, a human right. Did you see the trick? Everything has a cause – except that which doesn’t have a cause. The logic that takes you to an ideal form doesn’t end with that ideal form, it takes you to a super-duper ideal form behind it, and so on. There’s no particular reason to say our human natures are similar but not identical and not shared, in the same way that our human bodies are similar but not identical and not shared. Human nature is a strange sort of nature that isn’t natural to everyone. Since ‘natural’ was supposed to mean just that – natural to everyone – it’s no sort of nature at all.

Bridging the divide between what is and what ought to be has yielded some spectacular Tacoma Narrows over the centuries. Kant be done, friend. But build those is / ought bridges must needs be done, it seems. No other way to get those donkeys across the void, and each one of those donkeys has a satchel full of wheels to set spinning in the heads of would-be eager egoists. Take this wheel, for instance: natural rights. Somehow, the is (nature) brings us to the ought (rights). Is there any way to divine what ought to be from what is? Or is it all ‘because I said so’ in the end? Egoism has naught for ought. Things happen, and they are what I prefer or attempted, or they aren’t. But these ‘things,’ and even more so what you prefer or attempted? They are not-me, not-yet-me or was-me and thus a secondary concern if a concern at all. SUX 2 B U. Egoism is calling it like I see it. My way writ large. Not even ‘my best interests’ sits on the throne above me. That would suggest a difference between me and my interests, making ‘my interests’ a wheel in my head. That would also suggest a knowledge of what my best interests are, which is fine to pretend but can you write down your exact complete individual nutritional needs at this second? How about now? Nature is the Nuremberg defense on the cosmic scale. I vas only followink orders! It vas my nature! Well, it’s my nature to call BS when I see it.

From The Myth of Natural Rights:

If there are no unconditional “musts” or “oughts,” then there are no “duties” or “moral obligations.” Which means there is no “morality,” no “system of the principles and duties of right and wrong conduct.” Morality (like natural law and natural rights, which are specific examples of “moral” ideas) is a myth invented to promote the interests / desires / purposes of the inventors. Morality is a device for controlling the gullible with words. “You ‘must not’ commit murder!” Why not? “Because murder is ‘wrong!’ Murder is ‘immoral!’” Bunk! Murder may be impractical or excessively risky or just not worth the trouble. There are all sorts of reasons why I might refrain from committing murder even if I would like to do so. But murder is not “wrong.” Murder is not “immoral.” And the same goes for rape, robbery, assault, battery, burglary, buggery, bestiality, incest, treason, torturing children, suicide, canibalism, cannabisism, etc.”

But you don’t care about that cream puff stuff – let’s have some real controversy! The Other Essays forming the center section of The Myth of Natural Rights concern holocaust revisionism. Where does Rollins stand in 1983 on page 94? “It so happens that I am a skeptic regarding the Holocaust in general and the six million Jews supposedly killed by the Nazis in particular.” Rollins devotes twenty-eight pages to “The Holocaust as Sacred Cow.” And where does Rollins stand in 2008 on page 160? “As of now, I am a skeptic regarding both the Holocaust and Holocaust revisionism.” Rollins devotes forty-six pages to “Revising Holocaust Revisionism.”

Third up in The Myth of Natural Rights is an updated abridgment of another former Loompanics title by Rollins, Lucifer’s Lexicon. Revealing my own bias, let me draw out some of my favorite zingers…

Belief, n.: A fig leaf used to cover up one’s ignorance.
Born-again Christian, n.: One who has been brainwashed in the blood of the Lamb.
Catholicism, n.: Christian Pharaseeism.
Christ, Jesus, n.: The Meshugah.
Crusade, n.: A jihad for Jesus.
God-fearing, adj.: Afraid of nothing.
Gospel, n.: The Tallest Tale Ever Told. The Cruci-fiction.
Miracle, n.: A disaster that you are lucky enough to survive while fifty million other people die.
Religion, n.: A cult with clout.
Sacred Cow, n.: Food for freethought.
Salvation, n.: God’s merciful act of saving you from Himself.
Soul, n.: An invisible, intangible, inaudible, tasteless and odorless – but marketable – entity.

… and one more…

Cui Bono? Latin for, “Who can I blame?”

Hurry hurry, step right up, there’s a barb for your backside in Lucifer’s Lexicon. The concluding critical essays on Islam make sure nobody is left out of the fun.

The Myth of Natural Rights is good, you ought to buy it.