I started mail networking in the fall of 1978 when I was 25. I’d gotten a list of names & addresses from my friend Cathy Gayhardt wch I later realized had been at least partially provided to her by “Blaster” Al Ackerman. I started by sending my 1st Mike Film Form Letter to the people I thought had the most imaginative names. These included Anna Banana (the editor of the great “Vile” magazine), & Cosey Fanni Tutti (a member of “Throbbing Gristle” whose “Second Annual Report” I wasn’t to hear until 2 yrs later). By a decade later, I was corresponding w/ 1,400 people. But long before then, certainly by 1984, such massive correspondence had gotten to be a huge bureaucratic challenge. I’d send out as much as 20 mailings a day & was keeping track of the often changing names & addresses of the people I was corresponding w/. In 1984, as a result of going to England & France for a mnth, partially for the 8th International Neoist Apartment festival, my ability to keep up w/ the correspondence began to fall permanently into arrears.

This was a very exciting time. The sheer quantity of outreach, the senses of purpose, the lifestyle experiments, these were phenomenal. I wasn’t much interested in the “Mail Art”, wch was often just a matter of sending out thoughtless objects for maximal presence in catalogs, as I was in finding other like-minded individuals – esp tricksters. Some of us used many different names & even different addresses & other strategies in order to keep our identities shape-shifting.

It was probably in 1985, while I was still in the thick of this networking, that Trevor Blake, the editor of this bk, & I 1st contacted each other. He sent me the 1st issue of his magazine “Surreal Estates” & I sent him the 3rd issue of my “DDC#040.002″ magazine. By early 1986, I had an interview in “SE” #6. Not long thereafter, “OVO” replaced “Surreal Estates” & by issue #2 I had some Mike Film in it. #7 had a bisected picture thing I contributed & #12 had my ‘resumé’ & an altered version of my “Lidznap” acct. It’s this latter that’s made it into this compilation from earlier issues.

All this fervent networking was beginning to bubble out of the underground into larger circulation & higher visibility. The Book of the SubGenius (1983) was, perhaps, the 1st of these to be of personal importance to me b/c of my inclusion in it. Remarkably, Rev. Ivan Stang made sure that even the most minor contributors, such as myself, got a royalty check. Such was his astounding integrity & the feeling of community & collaboration. “Re/Search” magazine put out its 1st “special book issue” in 1982 focussed on William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, & Throbbing Gristle – followed in 1983 by their “Industrial Culture Handbook”. Despite, or b/c of, the controversial content of such publications, they were widely distributed & eagerly sought after by many people of similar mindset &, as such, had some commercial success.

In the meantime, publications like my “DDC#040.002″, Trevor’s “OVO”, Bruce Andrews & Charles Bernstein’s “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E”, cris cheek’s “RAWZ”, Julien Blaine”s “DOC(K)S”, Rick Sugden’s “HOMEX”, Sheila Gostick & co’s “End Paper”, Judith A. Hoffberg’s “umbrella”, Alan Davies’ “A HUNDRED POSTERS”, the Church of the SubGenius’ “Stark Fist of Removal”, Donna Kossy’s “False Positive”, Linda Frye Burnham’s “High Performance”, Mike Gunderloy’s “Factsheet Five”, John Foster’s “OP”, Monty Cantsin’s “SMILE”, Nenad Bogdanovic’s “Total”, John M. Bennett’s “Lost & Found Times”, Rev. Crowbar’s “Popular Reality”, AMK’s “Hare/Hunter/Field”, Manfred Vançi Stirnemann’s “Work in Progress”, “Light Times”, Katherine Nichols’ “A. C. Gazette”, John Rininger’s “Phosphorusflourish”, Joel Biroco’s “KAOS”, Rupert Wondolowski & Alfred Merchlinsky’s “Shattered Wig Review”, Lloyd Dunn’s “PhotoStatic”, Stephen Perkins’ “Box of Water”, Chris Winkler’s “(S)CRAP”, the San Francisco Cinematheque’s “Cinematograph”, Mlacolm Dickson & Lorna Waite’s “Variant”, Michel Lefebvre’s “SOUS LE MANTEAU”, Michael Amnasan’s “ottotole”, & many, many other (a)periodicals were keeping discourse very lively indeed.

What had previously been underground became increasingly available thru bks that radically broke new ground: Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture (1987), Rev. Ivan Stang’s High Weirdness by Mail (1988), Stewart Home’s The Assault on Culture (1988), Bob Black & Adam Parfrey’s Rants and Incendiary Tracts (1989). One of the publications I’d looked forward to the most was “SEMIOTEXT[E] USA” (1987). I’d been reading ‘SEMIOTEXT[E]” since the 1970s & had always found it to be stunning in its intellectual brilliance. Alas, despite its size & thoroughness, by the time it came out I felt a sense of denouement – as if it had nothing new to teach me – for me, it was already dated. A German friend of mine, Florian Cramer, sd the same thing about the preceding “German Issue”. Of course, that wdn’t've been the case for people less saturated in the underground than myself.

But, of course, not every underground publisher had the desire or the wherewithal to put out a bk & get it distributed. Many of us held onto the notion that interpersonal networking was the most important & continued to mainly put out small publications that were mostly intended to be traded w/ other such publishers. The PERSONAL vs the COMMERCIAL. While publications like Re/Search’s “Incredibly Strange Film” were initially exciting, for people like me, at least, they only represented a faux cutting edge. Any truly incredibly strange film, such as my own, wdn’t be included b/c they’re not dumb enuf, they’re not LCD (Lowest Common Denominator) enuf. To a few of us, w/ little or no commercial aspirations, what was most important was finding & communicating w/ the secluded obscure people who seemed to be trying to free themselves from an oppressive society thru following their imagination w/o becoming herders of (sub-)pop-culture sheep. People who took their egalitarianism seriously.

Now, decades later, the ‘landscape’ of underground communication has changed considerably. Many of us who wd’ve previously used the mails now use the internet. But much of the thrill is gone, for me at least. Instead of getting a tape in the mail, I get Facebook announcements. People ‘friend’ each other more for the quantity of connections than for their quality – just like much of Mail Art, but NOT the mail I participated in. Print-On-Demand has, fortunately, come into existence & it’s financially more feasible for someone like Trevor Blake to put bks out w/o having to cater to sensationalist marketing to make the substantial investment back. As such, now we have oVo 20 JUVEN(a/i)LIA: a bk that wd fit in nicely from an information standpoint w/ the aforementioned bks from the 1980s w/ at least a few people that wdn’t've previously made the editorial cut but who were, nonetheless, highly active.

One of Blake’s strengths is his sincere & long-term communication w/ a variety of very vigorous people – many of whom were important to my own correspondence too. Alas, I have to say that his weaknesses are in design imagination & in proofreading. In my 2pp article alone he & his spellcheck added something like 40+ errors. Back to that later. In general, this bk is a vital addition to further bringing to light underground culture – mostly in the us@.

Trevor’s “Public Domain” & “Disclaimer” present an editorial anti-copyright position: “Dedicators recognize that, once placed in the public domain, the Work may be freely reproduced, distributed, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.” & such an approach is very much in keeping w/ the more radical proponents of freedom of information. The idea is pretty much that the creators of the works propose to pirate whatever’s out there for their own purposes & feel like it’s only fair to reciprocate in kind. Personally, I prefer non-commercial use w/ attribution. If someone’s going to make money off me, I prefer that they share it w/ me. Respectful friendship rather than exploitation.

The 1st paragraph of Blake’s intro claims that “All text and art appearing here was first published in OVO with the exception of the work of Thom Metzger and the work of Ernest Mann.” Alas, that’s inaccurate in my case. My “Lidznap” was published in its correct & complete form in my bk entitled How to Write a Resumé – Volume II: Making a Good First Impression (1st edition: Apathy Press, 1989 – see reviews of the 2nd edition here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2558817.How_to_Write_a_Resum_Volume_II_Making_a_Good_First_Impression_2nd_edition ) – 2 yrs before the OVO #12 that an abridged version later appeared in.

Blake’s intro goes on to mention some of the other publications that I’ve also mentioned above: Re/Search, Factsheet Five, & Apocalypse Culture. As Trevor explains: “OVO is a public record of my interests and inquiries. OVO is where I’ve taught myself how to write, edit and publish. Themed issues of OVO follow what I work to be less ignorant about. Contributors to OVO have nearly always been friends first.” There’s the emphasis on the personal again. His intro concludes w/: “Read with regularity outside your area of interests. Nothing will point out your own ignorance better than attentiveness to those who disagree with you, nothing makes what you know make sense like learning something unrelated to what you know. Take as many chances [as] you are willing to take lumps for. But most of all, get busy.” & it’s this philosophy that makes OVO highly worth reading.

There’s a drawing by Mike Diana at the end of this intro. For those of you not familiar w/ his work I strongly recommend the fantastic VHS release “affliction” edited by underground movie stalwart Mark Hejnar. Mike Diana got burned by the police state more than most of us. Here’s his contributor’s bio: “Mike Diana was born in Geneva New York in 1969. He started drawing at a young age. He is the first artist to receive a criminal conviction for obscenity in the United States. Based on drawings Mike made at the same time as his drawings for OVO, Mike was forbidden from any contact with children under 18, compelled to undergo psychological testing and enroll in a journalistic ethics course, pay a $3,000 fine and perform more than one thousand hours of community service. He was also ordered to cease drawing for personal use. To insure that Mike was not drawing, police were allowed to inspect his house at any time without warning or warrant. He escaped to New York City in 1996.”

Many of the ideas presented here have been far more important to many of us than may often meet the eye. Take Hakim Bey’s statement: “We might now contemplate aesthetic actions which possess some of the resonance of terrorism (or “cruelty,” as Artaud put it) aimed at the destruction of abstractions rather than people, at liberation rather than power, pleasure rather than profit, joy rather than fear. “Poetic Terrorism.” Our chosen images have the potency of darkness – but all images are masks, & behind these masks lie energies we can turn toward light & pleasure.” Well put!

I found Johhny Brainwash’s “Holding Games for Ransom” (published April 2008) to be interesting. It explains an alternative economic model for gamers & others akin to what are now kickstarts. Alternative economic thinking has always been important for people in the underground for various probably obvious reasons: not everyone in the world is by nature likely to ‘succeed’ in the economic conditions of the society they’re born into. “It takes money to make money”, as the saying goes, so if you’re born relatively poor you’re not as likely to ‘work yr way to the top’ as proponents of capitalism might have you believe. If you’re rich enuf to go to a rich university long enuf to get a PhD you’re much more likely to be shit out of the system straight into a position of privilege where it’s taken for granted that you deserve to be regardless of yr actual level of accomplishment.

Since poor people are much more likely to be more desperate than rich people are generally likely to understand, it’s no wonder that people wd seek out an economic system wherein their actual qualities & abilities have some value rather than the often unfair values assigned to them by people in power. Barter is very important. Hence we have “Indie Currency” as outlined in Klint Finley’s “The New Currency War” (OVO 18 Money(April 2008)). For an earlier article on the same subject, see Rita Rodentia’s “Money Schmoney – Alternative Currencies” (Street Rat-Bag #3, October 2000). I learned at least one unexpected thing from Finley’s article: “Pay Pal, eventually burdened with legal problems, banned the use of PayPal for gambling, pornography, and several other uses in 2004.”

Gerry Reith & Thom Metzger were both people I corresponded &/or traded w/. Reith, perhaps isolated more than most in Sheridan, Wyoming, committed suicide. Metzger & I didn’t correspond for long. I think I always figured that it had something to do w/ him becoming a somewhat ‘successful’ novelist. Therefore, it was interesting for me to see things by them in here that I may not’ve been previously familiar w/. However, part of what Reith wrote & what Blake writes later is something that I very much don’t identify w/. Reith 1st: “As anarchists: leafleting, speaking, proselytizing, agitating anarchists, we are continually trying to smooth over the inherent contradictions of trying to motivate people to act while disavowing any responsibility for their choice of action(s).” Blake quoting George Walford: “‘The overwhelming majority of those who have encountered anarchism have shown very clearly that they do not want to do what anarchists want them to do. They prefer to do what they are doing now. We have no reason to expect the others, when they meet anarchism, to respond differently. Can your anarchism accept this? Or do you feel bound to impose (however gently and rationally) your ideas of what it is good for them to do?’”

Now, I’m an anarchist & the reason why I consider myself to be an anarchist is very simple: I don’t accept rule from others & don’t want to impose rule on others either. Etymologically, it seems simple: “an” = without, “archy” means rule by. This is generally taken to mean ‘rule by someone other than yrself’ since it’s somewhat taken for granted that as an anarchist you think for yrself & take responsibility for yrself. Perhaps something like “esy-o-idios-archy” might be better or just plain “idioarchy” meaning “rule of yrself by yrself”. It seems that potentially etymologically applicable words like autarchy & monarchy are already laden w/ more dictatorial meanings. Anyway, my point here is that one of the things that I like about anarchy is that anyone self-declaring as an anarchist is hypothetically not going to proselytize b/c that wd mean trying to lead someone else & wd, therefore, be antithetical to “w/o rule”. Personally, I detest proselytizing & have no desire to “impose (however gently and rationally) [my] ideas”. So, WHAT THE FUCK?! I don’t even ask my friends whether they’re anarchists much of the time. If they try to proselytize to me chances are they won’t stay friends w/ me for long. I’d just find them too annoying. As such, I find this emphasis on proselytizing above to be very suspect.

Mike Gunderloy’s “The Meta-Network, or, A Battle with Footnotes” was one of the highlights of this “OVO” for me. Gunderloy’s Factsheet Five was the best meta-networking tool I’ve ever encountered & Gunderloy’s ability to write capsule reviews of hundreds or thousands of publications every mnth always struck me as qualifying him to be called “a human encyclopedia” – a compliment I rarely give out. His humorous approach in making this text have the footnotes quickly overwhelm the main text makes it even more enjoyable to me & smacks of parody of academia.

Anonymous’ “23 Sperm Stories 23″ starts off like a dry scientific explanation of sperm & related reproductive elements. However, many people have emphasized the #23 as some sort of significantly recurring # – often w/ occult meaning. As such, the title’s a bit of a giveaway that something other than the dry beginning, wch might just be cut’n'paste from undisclosed sources, might appear – as indeed it does about 6 pages in:

“Reports of alien abduction often include claims of the harvesting of or depositing of sperm. The Christian religion claims that when a sperm cell enters another kind of cell, a soul is created. Casteneda (a 20th Century novelist), claimed that sperm went to the recipient’s brain, causing a pleasant sensation. Bardon (a 20th Century occultist) claimed that retaining sperm in a special container called a condenser could allow the manipulation of energy and magnetic fluid. The Temple of Psychic Youth claimed that placing sperm on paper while concentrating on a desired goal would make that desired goal occur.”

“A majority of the world’s economy, technological progress, art and culture are centered on extracting sperm from one or more human and putting it inside of or in proximity to one or more humans or images. The second most active engine of the world’s economy, technological effort, art and culture is the prevention of these activities. The entire history of humanity can be explained as the dynamics of these two forces.”

For me, this is overemphasis.

“In 1999 a subject in Prague tricked a human into donating sperm to a local sperm bank with the claim this was part of a medical process. The subject actually used the sperm to create two new humans, which the donor human was then required by [law? - word apparently missing here] to financially support”.

I find this last story a bit unbelievable in its current state. I found nothing about it online but I didn’t look very hard either. If the story’s anything but an urban myth I suspect that there’s alot more to it than in this telling. According to this same article, “No human has ever been generated without sperm; sperm is the agent of all life”. According to Wikipedia: “Parthenogenesis (play /ˌpærθənoʊˈdʒɛnəsɪs/) is a form of asexual reproduction where growth and development of embryos occur without fertilization. In plants, parthenogenesis means development of an embryo from an unfertilized egg cell, and is a component process of apomixis.” Even the article itself refutes its claim re sperm: “Scientists at the Reproductive Genetics Institute in Chicago created a means of creating new humans without sperm in 2002.” & “clearly the need to reproduce with sperm is an option and not a requirement.” The point is that while I found “23 Sperm Stories 23″ to be dubious in its logic at times, I still think it’s very interesting.

I found Feral Faun’s “Thoughts on Experimentation” to be somewhat representative of a general thrust of OVO: “I consider the past ten years of my life to be a constant process of experimentation”. This leads me to PM’s “Liberating Wednesday”: “So far people have tried to liberate countries, but the results aren’t very convincing. So why not try to liberate a day of the week?” Great idea! This, in turn, reminds me of Ernest Mann’s “I am wasting less of my time (LIFE) watching, listening to and reading THOUGHT LEADERS, ie, TV, movies, radio, music, newspapers, magazines, and novels.” Wch takes me to Karen Eliot’s (misspelled throughout OVO as “Elliot”) “Operation Negation”: “From 1990 until an undetermined point thereafter there will be an employment of the negation of all forms of work (and play).” In other words, all of these people are trying to look at their life & to experiment w/ it in a liberating way.

Ernest Mann, whose “Little Free Press” publications I once rc’vd frequently, was definitely dedicated to freeing himself: “I spent 22 years of my TIME (life) working as a Wage Slave. [..] I don’t want to do that anymore.” I found this memorial to him online ( http://www.oocities.org/msrrtnewsletter/may96.html#mann ):

“While half mast flags in April marked the death of U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, our thoughts instead were on [a] real people’s hero, Ernest Mann. The 69-year-old editor of what must have been the longest running zine in existence, Little Free Press, was bludgeoned to death in March by his teenage grandson who then took his own life. The two had been living together in a Little Falls, Minnesota, trailer court. Formerly a successful real estate investor, Mann (a.k.a. Larry Johnson), “dropped out” in 1969 to live a contemplative life and promote his quixotic “Priceless Economic System.” Described as “definitely the most idealistic, and arguably the most naive set of pamphlets” (High weirdness by mail, Stang, 1988), Little Free Press has been part crusade, and part autobiography about squirrel trapping, raft building, and grandson raising. Mann first received regional attention in 1978 when Minneapolis Tribune columnist Larry Batson wrote about his quest to promote freedom. By the time the national media noticed him (“A Thoreau of the city,” Christian Science Monitor, May 16, 1990, p.13), he was already widely known throughout the zine network. Mike Gunderloy’s September 1982 edition of Factsheet Five (#4) reviewed Little Free Press #41. Thirteen and a half years later, Mann was still at it, pumping out issue #138 and visualizing “peace on Earth and goodwill.” We were not alone in corresponding with Ernest and wish we hadn’t procrastinated with plans to interview him. Profoundly human, an enjoyer of books and simple pleasures, an anarchist and atheist who never ceased his one-person utopian experiment, he will be missed.”

Walter Alter’s yet-another person in OVO that I corresponded w/ in the ’80s. While I more or less completely disagree w/ his statements such as: “Meeting the necessities of biological survival is a piece of cake; an amoeba can do it.” “Technology is inherently democratizing.” “By visually representing and revealing the interconnectivity of events within a phase and, by extension, of all phases within our universe, technology becomes the most humanitarian of all human endeavors.” “When television is discussed it is always within the parameter of a single screen, much like cinema.” reading his article here made me want to listen to his “Air Bag!” tape that he’d sent me. Alas, I cdn’t find it but in the process of looking I was reminded of just how amazing the hundreds of tapes that I once traded for were. As for cinema being a single screen medium? I’d say: no more or less so than tv. There’re many instances of people experimenting w/ multiple projections. Take, eg, my own:

“Multiple Projections: 1978 to 2009″:

Trevor’s reviews are particularly useful for pointing people in the direction of obscure publications. The 1st of these here is about Mark Mothersbaugh’s 1975 bk entitled My Struggle published in 1978 in an edition of 100. While Blake mentions that “These small thick books have red covers to make them look the same as Chairman Mao’s Book of Quotations”, he fails to mention that “My Struggle” is the English translation of Hitler’s famous autobiography “Mein Kampf”. Also reviewed is a documentary called The Skin Horse “by and about disabled people and their sex lives.” Trevor notes that “Channel 4 (formerly Central Television) commissioned the 1982 film but does not sell it. No one sells it, not legally.” &, again, we have a central concern here for probably many of the OVO contributors: seek out & study obscure & obscured info.

After Trevor’s reviews come his interviews. I have a particular affection for interviews – esp w/ people that mainstream media might find unworthy. As I write in my essay entitled “On the Importance of Personal Archives” (not in OVO): “I’d rather live life fully with friends than vicariously thru the icons. Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous? How about Lifestyles of the Eccentric & Imaginative? Of the Intelligent & Visionary? Of the Friendly & Accessible? These may include the rich & famous but certainly aren’t excluded to them.” Blake’s 1st interview here is w/ a bulimic. Another subject of interest to me. In 1989 I made a movie called “Barfroom” that’s a parody of bulimics made w/ 2 ex-bulimic friends of mine. Another interview is w/ my old friend, long since lost touch w/, Yael Ruth Dragwyla. She discusses “varieties of non-physical travel”. I made a super-8mm film of her in 1986 performing ritual magick.

Perhaps most germane to the theme of underground publishing is Trevor’s interview w/ V. Vale, the co-editor of Re/Search. Vale’s philosophizing provides another good summary of a thread running thru the intentions & experiences of many underground publishers: “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 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 along channels of consumption rather than something creative on your own, something creative and original and obsessive and unique on your own.” BRAVO!!

Alas, at some point I have to critique the treatment that my own article, “Lidznap” rc’vd. Perhaps I shd preface this by explaining that from 1969 on I’ve used meticulously calculated d liberate d viations from conventional writing for encryption purposes, for abbreviation, for ambiguity, & for many other reasons. These d viations are always intended to expand the meaning of my text in a way that conventional writing wdn’t – & are rarely mistakes. The mistakes come along when editors & their machines ‘correct’ my writing – esp my puns, wch are often numerous & highly charged. Hence if I call myself a “psychopathfinder”, eg, some spell check program might ‘correct’ that as a ‘nonexistent’ word. Of course, neologisms have to begin somewhere & I’m an active force in birthing them. Explanations of my systems wd require too much space here. The reader is directed to the “Dos & Dont’s of Dating” & “l;a;n;g;u;a;g;e” chapters of my bk entitled footnotes ( see reviews of that here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2349153.footnotes ).

The original article wd’ve been sent to Trevor around 1987. It’s about an event & a project from 1979. The project involved a phone # that cd be called for somewhat unpredictable results. This phone # spelled TESTES-3. A reporter named Franz Lidz, whose early life has been represented in the Dianne Keaton movie Unstrung Heroes ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstrung_Heroes ), expressed an interest in writing an article about TESTES-3, wch was operated anonymously. He wrote one article before he found out who we were & one after we led him on a wild ride. “Lidznap” is about that wild ride. My original begins w/ the title, followed by this subtitle: “Two Ironic Endings” followed by the section headed “Preface”. That’s followed by a photocopy of Lidz’s 1st article entitled: “For a Good Time Call TESTES-3 – Underground Telephone Network”. That’s followed by page 1 of the 2nd part of my text entitled “Lidznap” wch is followed by 2 relevant photos & the end of my article. Finishing the whole thing is a copy of Lidz’s 2nd article, entitled: “VD-RADIO Goes On The Air”.

When this was 1st published in OVO #12, it was called “Lidznap: Two Ironic Endings” & Lidz’s 2 articles were removed. Only a cropped version of one of the 2 original photos was left in. Trevor retyped my original, rather than photocopying it & cutting it into a form that wd fit his layout. In this original process, this sentence:

“Given that we considered anonymity to be essential to our functioning as mysterious catalysts & given that we wanted to put emphasis on TESTES-3 as a communally produced participatory phenomenon we reacted cautiously to his request in a way that we thought to be consistent with our principles.”

became:

“Given that we considered anonymity to be essential to our functioning communally produced participatory phenomenon we reacted cautiously to his request in a way that we thought to be consistent with our principles.”

Over a quarter of the sentence is missing: “as mysterious catalysts & given that we wanted to put emphasis on TESTES-3 as a”. Why? B/c in the original that’s an entire line & when Trevor was transcribing his eyes jumped from the preceding line to the following one & missed it altogether! That one mistake alone is enuf to make me cringe but there are many, MANY more. Any mistakes Trevor made in his original typing are then repeated & further compounded by the singularly ‘stupid’ & inflexible spell check program he must use. IMO spell checks shd be disabled in any text program used by any reasonably literate person. They’re mainly designed to be helpful for covering up the mistakes of the barely literate – like college students. Text programs will accept the wrong word if it’s spelled correctly, they’ll also ‘correct’ the types of meaningful d viations that I specialize in.

Hence, if one writes “CD” as an abbreviation for “Compact Disc” it might become “Cd”. If one writes “than” instead of the intended “then” it’ll stay that way. If one writes “4″ as a phonetic abbreviation of “for”, it might get changed. If a proper name is misspelled, it’ll never notice. If one creates a d liberate contraction, it might get changed: “awhile” might become “a while”. The list is endless. tOGGLE cASE is not permitted. Words like “typewriter” & “lawnmower” were once written as “type writer” & “lawn mower” until the 2 words became commonly enuf associated w/ each other to become one word. The intermediary stage is “type-writer” & “lawn-mower”. I often prefer to recognize these contractions as likely to occur in the future & to make them happen NOW. Hence, I write “alotof” instead of “a lot of” b/c “a lot of” is sd so often that it’s basically blended into one word in common speech even tho it’s not usually written that way. THIS IS NOT A MISTAKE ON MY PART but a spell check program will react to it as if it is.

Then there are things like the word “basically” that I’ve just used. This isn’t underlined as a possible mistake in the program I’m typing this in. However, the word “publically” is underlined as a mistake. So what’s the rule? When I was a kid, a rule was that when a word ending in “l” was having “ing” added to it, the “l” was to be doubled. Reading older bks will routinely present this spelling: “travelling”. These days, that’s considered ‘wrong’ & it’s to be spelled “traveling” – no more doubling of the “l”. My point here is that while I actually pay attn to many of these rules & try to either consciously d viate from them or to stay consistent, what’s considered ‘correct’ is actually a mess of irregularities that have no actual grammatical consistency.

I also d liberately do things like put punctuation outside of quotation marks. Yes, yes, I ‘know’ that this isn’t the conventional procedure. I cd give a shit. The people who teach/enforce these conventional procedures are generally doing so by rote, I’m actually thinking about the language. Fancy that! In general, I use punctuation as I imagine myself saying something. Therefore, if I imagine myself pausing, I’ll use a comma (“,”). If I imagine myself not pausing I’ll leave the comma out. SO, in my original article, I wrote “or “line” as we called it”. Trevor ‘corrected’ this by writing it as “or “line,” as we called it” adding punctuation that I didn’t want in there. Not only did he add the comma, he also put it w/in the quotation marks (” “) wch I wd’ve never done. To me, in my much more consistent & logical grammatical world than that enforced by convention, the word “line” shd stay isolated w/in the quotation marks & the comma shd come as a pause after it. Sentence #2 begins: “It was run anonymously” & Trevor changed that to “It was operated anonymously”. & so forth & so on – over 40 changes in toto. “John’s camera flashes added to their already substantially disoriented vision” becomes “John’s camera flashes added to their already substantially distorted vision”. Here “disoriented” is far more accurate b/c Franz was wearing prism glasses that I made that reversed his left-right, etc..

A common problem w/ editors who feel the need to to standardize their visual presentation is that the editors then have to retype all text into their computers. Unless the retyping is done very carefully, wch it rarely is, the result is a mess. Given that I’m a highly literate & careful person, it’s always painful for me to see something credited to me so full of mistakes that I seem very sloppy indeed. Esp given that my d viations are often symbolic, the actual meanings of my article become distorted. Take, eg, this bit from my original: “They’re coming to take me away, hoho, heehee, haha..” – in Trevor’s retyping this becomes “they’re coming to take me away, hoho, heehee, haha…”. 2 seemingly minor changes have been made: the beginning “T” has been made lower case – hence no longer showing that this is the 1st line of a verse of the song; the ellipsis at the end has been changed from having 2 dots (“..”) to the more conventional 3 dots (“…”). In my number symbolism I recognize the conventional 3 dot ellipsis as a symbol of the so-called “Holy Trinity” used, again conventionally, as a symbol of infinity. It’s Christian. I’m an ATHEIST & I detest Christinanity (pun intended, as usual – another word that wd be ‘corrected’ by a spell check program) – as such, I use 2 dots as my symbol of the fade-out &/or infinity. Once again, it’s d liberate! Reading thru this “oVo”, I find a near continual parade of typos. Some people probably don’t care – but to someone like myself, these typos can significantly change the meaning of a text.

Ah, much of what I feel I shd write next is even more difficult. I like Trevor & think that this issue, & others before it, have a significant enuf place in the history of the us@ underground to be worth reading. Still, there’re parts I find myself substantially critical of that I’ll address here. Trevor Blake’s “Trajectory Through Anarchism”, in particular. In this, Trevor traces his development as an anarchist & a post-anarchist starting w/ age 16 & ending w/: “Whatever I am, I an [sic] definitely not an anarchist.”

One phrase that runs thru the article is “imp of the perverse” used as a positive term: “The same imp of the perverse that led me to read about anarchism pricks up his ears when he hears a friend say how concerned he is that another friend is reading Ayn Rand.” “I call up the imp of the perverse to see what other forbidden ideas might be out there.” “2005: The imp of the perverse continues to slip books into my hand”. I can relate to Trevor’s usage of the “imp of the perverse” as meaning his tendency to seek out ‘forbidden’ knowledge. I’ve been calling myself a “blatant pervert” for much the same reason for a long time. However, it might interest readers who don’t already know this, that this phrase probably originated in Edgar Allan Poe’s story of the same name that 1st appeared in Graham’s Magazine in July, 1845, & that Poe says this about it:

“We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss – we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness and dizziness and horror become merged in a cloud of unnameable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the vapor from the bottle out of which arose the genius in the Arabian Nights. But out this our cloud upon the precipice’s edge, there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius or demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. And this fall – this rushing annihilation – for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination – for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire to do it.”

As I mentioned earlier in this review, I find the idea of proselytizing for anarchy to be self-contradictory. Of course, people are self-contradictory all the time. But there’s so much written here about anarchy that I find inaccurate that I want to counterbalance it. This, even tho I’ve often sd things to the effect of “Sometimes I’m an anarchist. If other people say I’m not an anarchist &/or if the common notion of anarchy were to become too oppressive, no biggie, then I’m not an anarchist. 1st & foremost, I’m me.” In other words, let’s not get too attached to labels or let them get too attached to us. To my mind, one of the worst things that can happen to anarchism is for it to become a popular movement that people ‘join’ – not b/c it’s what they feel inside, but b/c they’re conformists & being an anarchist is part & parcel of whatever subculture they’re part of.

Trevor emphasizes his correspondence w/ George Walford, who I’ve never heard of:

“1993: From a letter by George Walford: “You remark the scarcity of ‘real live human being stories’ in anarchist literature. Very perceptive. But it’s not an accident. Anarchism is not about people as we meet them, it’s about abstruse principles and theories (and, even more, about the resistance these encounter). The real human stories appear in the literature at the other end of the range, in the popular romances, thrillers love-songs and — perhaps most of all — in tabloid newspaper stories, which go to extreme lengths to personalize (humanize) political events.”

Whew! Not only do I find Walford to be astoundingly un-self-consciously pompous, I also find his claims to be as far from my own personal experience as they can get. A “scarcity of ‘real live human being stories’ in anarchist literature”? It’s hard for me to imagine how any reader of anarchist literature cd find this to be the case. Arguably the most famous & widely read anarchist bk in English might be Emma Goldman’s Living My Life wch is, of course, an autobiography. Or what about Alexander Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist?

To continue w/ Walford:

“The dilemma of orthodox anarchism cannot be escaped by ‘practical living anarchy’ within present society. We cannot live without taking part in society, paying taxes and supporting capitalism by our consumption, and orthodox anarchism condemns all of this. The attempt to live the anarchist life is a living demonstration of the arid, empty, abstract unreality of orthodox anarchism; it cannot be put into practice, it is virtually nothing but theory.”

Again, I have to strongly disagree. 1st, it IS possible to avoid “paying taxes and supporting capitalism by our consumption” but if one’s born into a capitalist country, it’s certainly hard to do w/in that context. But, for me, that’s besides the point. It’s important to at least be conscious of the ramifications of one’s tax-paying & of one’s consumption. There’s a big difference between the guy who owns the factory that uses slave labor & the person who refuses to buy his product b/c he knows of these conditions. I prefer to be among the latter. I know that trees are destroyed to create bks but I still love & collect & read bks anyway. I have no aspirations to be ‘pure’ or ‘perfect’ but that doesn’t make me any less of an anarchist.

Trevor asks: “Where are the older anarchists in a movement that started in the 19th Century?” Well, he’s 13 yrs younger than me, so I’m one of those “older anarchists” & I’ve met a few older than myself. If one were to go to Barcelona, eg, one wd find much more continuity than one’s likely to find in the us@. Any study of us@ anarchist history will reveal a heavy suppression that led to many deportations & imprisonings. I’ve seen at least one documentary on the Wobblies where the few survivors expressed astonishment that anyone even knew who they were any more. It’s probably safe to say that from 1930 to 1970 this suppression thinned out the number of anarchists extensively. After the Spanish Civil War, members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade didn’t necessarily come back to the US b/c they were either criminalized or just disgusted by the US’s official non-opposition to the rise of Franco. The great player-piano composer, Conlon Nancarrow, eg, moved to Mexico instead. In 1969 or 1970 when I came across the term “anarchist” & realized that that’s what I was, I’d either never met anyone else who’d ever heard of anarchy or might’ve met ONE other such person once. It wasn’t until 6 yrs later that I met another one. Obviously, things have changed – largely as a result of the popularization of anarchy in punk culture.

Trevor goes on to ask: “And what has anarchism done… ever?” Wow! Such a question amazes me. Anarchist agitating is certainly centrally linked to such things as the 8 hr work day & the 40 hr work wk. Ever heard of “Food Not Bombs”?! It’s a pretty widespread free food program that most big cities, & quite a few small ones, have by now. In Pittsburgh, “Book ‘Em”, a bks-to-prisoners program run by volunteers, was founded by anarchists; “Free Ride”, a bikes project that teaches people how to build & repair bicycles & makes the opportunity available for kids to get a free bike by going thru a similar learning program, was founded by anarchists; “The Big Idea” is the local anarchist info & coffee shop. There are anarchist medics for protests where people take the risk of being attacked by police. There were anarchist volunteers who worked in New Orleans after Katrina. All of these things are typical & all of them are trying to improve society at the level that they can work at w/o having to create hierarchies.

More Walford replying to Blake: “‘Just as …’ in which you blame the personal inadequacies of individual anarchists for the failure of anarchy.” Does Blake do this? If so, I agree w/ Walford that “That does not stand up any better than blaming individual supporters of capitalism for the failures of that system.” I have no expectations of ANY human to be somehow ‘perfect’. However, there’s a higher probability that someone who at least tries to live by a philosophy of Mutual Aid is less likely to fuck me over than someone who believes that Dog Eat Dog is the only way to get what you want. Blaming individuals is a waste of time if one expects individuals to be some sort of ultimate representative of any philosophy. I don’t represent anarchism, I represent myself.

Walford: “Not only can anarchy not be practiced under the state, it can’t even be thought out as an independent social system, in any concrete way, without running into contradictions that, appearing in practice, would wreck the whole world.” Really? What a blowhard! I want to know more about Walford so I look him up online & find that he was a socialist. How many times do anarchists have to point out that Nazism was National Socialism & that Mussolini was a socialist before he created Fascism?! Statements like “anarchy not be practiced under the state” are based on the idea that anarchists are trying to set up a different type of ‘state’ “under the state” & that this won’t work. As an anarchist, I’m simply trying to live as close to my own personal principles as I can. I have no expectations whatsoever that my own individual anarchism is going to be able to function w/ absolute purist integrity w/in any particular social conditions. There will always be factors beyond my control & things that I disagree w/ & that’s just fine. In some respects, such a view of anarchism is ‘moderate’ more than it is ‘left’ or ‘right’ ‘wing’ b/c I think that the more people who live stable & satisfied lives the better off we’ll all be. In other words, I prefer to foster social conditions in wch interpersonal animosity doesn’t reach homicidal proportions. IMO, ANY system is likely to create bad conditions for SOMEONE so I prefer to choose NO SYSTEM AT ALL.

Blake: “1994: I define anarchism as the belief that it is possible and desirable to maintain the world’s population at the current standard of living without government and without a period of transition from the present to an anarchist world.” I, personally, DON’T define anarchism in that way, I just hope it’s more conducive to non-warring social conditions than most social philosophies. HOWEVER, I don’t think that there’s such a thing as an “anarchist world” nor do I want such a thing. I don’t want everyone in the world to be anarchists – just those who want to be.

Trevor’s “The Bonus Army” was one of the most interesting articles for me. It taught me about something that I knew nothing about AND it brought up a familiar historical figure who’s always fascinating: General Smedley Butler: “Butler went on to write the book War is a Racket.” I’d like to read that.

From pp98-100, there’s Blake’s article entitled “Multiple Name Identities”. This is a subject dear to me & one that I have alotof direct experience w/. I’ve always found the term “Multiple Names” to be misleading. I prefer “Collective Identities”. Both refer to the deliberate use of one name by multiple people, often for a common purpose. Blake’s article tells of such names previously unknown to me & claims a few things that I think are inaccurate.

Blake mentions Nicholas Bourbaki, Kenneth Robeson, Stefan Brockhoff, David Agnew, & Van den Budenmayer – none of whom have I ever heard of. THANK YOU TREVOR! To these I might add Ern Malley, an Australian hoax poet identity created by 2 poets who hated modernist poetry in order to parody such poetry & prank a particular editor. Trevor also mentions the children’s bk entitled The Little Engine Who Could & that: “The story is attributed to Watty Piper, which was the house name of publisher Platt & Munk. Many men and women wrote under the name Watty Piper.” To wch I add that this is somewhat common in kid’s bks insofar as publishers create series that they perpetuate far beyond the lifespans of individual authors. Hence we have Hardy Boys stories written by “Franklin W. Dixon” & Tom Swift stories written by “Victor Appleton”, etc..

Blake: “Since 1968, films which the director wishes to distance themselves from are attributed to Alan Smithee.” Many, if not all of these are porn & it’s not just the directors who use the name. People largely use it so they don’t ruin their otherwise more aboveboard professional careers. I made my own movie “Teenagers from Inner Space” under the name Alan Smithee in order to deliberately associate myself w/ the other Smithees.

Blake: “Rrose Sélavy was an artist and model in the 1920s, associated with a number of dadaists.” Trevor shd’ve researched this one a little bit better. Here’s what’s basically common knowledge in the art world as presented on Wikipedia:

“Rrose Sélavy, or Rose Sélavy, was one of the pseudonyms of artist Marcel Duchamp. The name, a pun, sounds like the French phrase “Eros, c’est la vie”, which translates to English as “eros, that’s life”. It has also been read as “arroser la vie” (“to make a toast to life”).”

The collective identities that Blake writes about that I know the most about are those of Monty Cantsin, Karen Eliot, & Luther Blissett. I’ve been all 3 of them at some time or another. Blake spells “Monty” “Monte” at times & “Eliot” “Elliot” at all times so I call attn to those errors. He also presents David Zacks’ version of the origin of Monty Cantsin wch is probably mostly accurate but one shd keep in mind that Zack was a diabetic who was often too much of a space cadet to be always keenly aware of what was going on around him. “Blaster” Al Ackerman’s somewhat different history for such things is helpful for getting a more general feel.

Blake writes: “Stewart Home has written about Karen Elliot, who appeared in 1985: ‘Karen Elliot is a name that refers to an individual human being who can be anyone.’” What Blake seems to fail to understand here is that Home was simply rewriting earlier texts done under the name of someone else explaining Monty Cantsin. This text did not entirely originate w/ Home. Parts of it may’ve been written by him, other parts definitely by others. Essentially, such texts are written by the collective identity that they’re written under. Hence, attribution to Home is both inaccurate in terms of ‘actual’ authorship & in terms of the spirit of the collective identity.

“Stewart Home, in turn, has seen publications under his own name that he did not write.” [..] “including “Anarchism is Stupid: How Luther Blissett Hoaxed Bakunin’s Idiot Children,” “Communism or Masochism? An Appeal to All Revolutionaries Concerning the Rubber Slave Larry O’Hara,” and “An Open Letter to My Avant-Garde Chums by Stewart Home.”" Ha ha! There’s more to this than meets the eye, eh! EG: “Anamorphosis: Stewart Home, Searchlight and the plot to destroy civilization” is credited to “Larry O’Hara” (w/ the quotes around the name), who’s a critic of Home’s, but it was actually Home “who contributes to and edited the pamphlet” (according to Home here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3901990-anamorphosis ). In other words, these faux creditings are part of a prankish interplay of political argument.

All in all, Blake’s article is remarkably thorough. I’d add a few more names: Emmett Grogan ( I highly recommend his bk Ringolevio – a Life Played for Keeps. See its listing on GoodReads here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1069602.Ringolevio ), Bob Jones (who may or may not be a fiction of Stewart’s), David A. Bannister, Jesus Christ, & Shakespeare. Now I don’t really claim that Shakespeare was a collective identity but there have been suggestions to that effect & there is a bk by Ralph L. Tweedale entitled Wasn’t Shakespeare Someone Else? that questions whether Shakespeare was a pen name.

Finally, on this subject, I tell a tale about a university professor friend of mine & of an action undertaken inspired by the Monty Cantsin collective identity. This friend, who I’ll call Monty, was hired to teach English or some such at a university. On the 1st day of class, he had a friend appear as him & teach the class, On the 2nd day of class he had another friend do the same thing. By the 3rd day of class. he actually finally appeared to teach the class. By then, the students didn’t believe him anymore. At least he got them to question more.

&, NOW for the most difficult of Trevor’s articles to critique: “Co-Remoting with the Thunderous”, his article about me. It’s difficult to critique b/c it’s extremely flattering in some ways & lardy knows I’ve had more than enuf hate directed at me to last more than a lifetime so such positivity is much appreciated – but it’s also not necessarily always accurate & it’s probably a little too filled w/ fantasy to be a portrait of a mere human who’s turning into an old man as he writes & who’s slated for mortality along w/ the rest of the meatbags.

The title, “Co-Remoting with the Thunderous”, is a truncated quote from the last line of the 1st edition of my bk Telepathy Receptivity Training (see it on Good Reads here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2598123-telepathy-receptivity-training ). The full phrase is “Dilating with the physical, co-remoting with the thunderous” & I very much like that Trevor used the latter part as his article’s title. All of the phrases in TRT are language thought of by me while half-asleep, usually when waking up. As such, they’re strongly evocative for me w/o being overdominated by conscious intention. That gives such a phrase an interpretive flexibility & Trevor’s use of it plays right into that.

One thing that immediately tickles me about Blake’s article is that he deliberately overuses the name “tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE” in its full form in sentences where the tOGGLE cASE is disruptive. When I originally conceived of the name (or the answer to the question: ‘What’s yr name?’) in 1975, I wrote it lower case so that when it wd appear in sentences it wd cause a sortof cognitive dissonance. EG: We were sitting there & tentatively, a convenience walked into the room. For someone who doesn’t know that “tentatively, a convenience” is a person’s name (originally conceived of as a collective identity by the by), that sentence wd be saying that “tentatively, a convenience walked into the room” – ie: “a convenience” wd be some sort of ambulatory thing capable of walking in a rm? ‘What sort of convenience?’, one might ask, etc.. Trevor’s use of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE seems to play right into that deliberate disorientation possibility.

Blake’s article reveals a truly substantial level of knowledge about some aspects of my ‘work’/play & makes a few mistakes too. Unlike almost everyone else in the world, one thing that Blake understandingly hones in on is my obsession w/ context. The article begins: “There is no context for the man whose name is tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE.” [..] “One of the many publications by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE was titled DDC#040.0 – dewey decimal classification number 0 (generalities) 4 (not used) 0 (no subject) 0 (miscellany)… just as a book with this dewey decimal classification number would stand apart from all other books, so does tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE stand entirely apart from all other people.” Thank you, Trevor – & when I was younger that might’ve been more accurate than it is now as I hurriedly type this before I have to rush off to work.

Trevor writes: “Re/Search magazine requested a photograph of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s tattoos for their ‘Modern Primitive’ issue, but the photographs were not used. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE does not fit the profile for a modern primitive. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has not modified tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s body to attach it more firmly to a tribal past – tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has propelled it forward to a sixth-finger future.” Thank you for writing that Trevor! It’s particularly perspicacious in a way that few, or no, other writers about myself & my projects have ever succeeded w/! For those for whom the sixth-finger reference makes no sense: I was once interviewed for a BalTimOre newspaper & I sd: “Normality is what cuts off your sixth finger & your tail” by wch I meant that normality suppresses extraordinary characteristics that might be useful but that are ‘abnormal’. 6 fingers, eg, wd be great for finger-picking for guitarists. The newspaper changed the quote to: “Normality is what cuts off your sixth finger & you fail”. Re/Search quoted me correctly in the back of their “Modern Primitives” issue. Thank you, V. Vale.

I don’t know why my foto was excluded from the Re/Search “Modern Primitives” issue. I sent a foto of my head getting its 3D brain tattoo. A drawing of a brain was inked on there 1st & the tattooist was following that. It may’ve looked like it was faked. It wasn’t. In my experience, I’m usually just a little bit off from what people are looking for when they’re looking for trend-setters. I try to sabotage trends in advance, I like to do things that I know are too complex & ‘uncool’ for conformists to want to have anything to do w/ them. “Modern Primitives”, despite how great so much of the body modification in it is, spawned a slew of cheap imitations. Piercings & tattoos suddenly became ever-so-much ‘hipper’. What a shame. I’ve still never met anyone else w/ a 3D tattoo like mine, tho.

So much of what Trevor Blake writes about here is stuff that I have long stories about. There’s certainly much more to the 6 fingers biz. Trevor notes that I’ve “appeared in public wearing a shirt that reveals [my] chest. It is not a normal chest, but one with six small sow-like teats.” The story behind that is that my fashion model friend (who I haven’t seen in decades – are you out there somewhere?), Eugenie Vincent, did an ad for jeans where she had a 6 titted chest modeled after her own breasts made, maybe by the same person who made the original Planet of the Apes masks or some such, & then she wore it over her own bare chest while in a doggie position overlooking a set of Rome. This was supposed to be a reference to the legend of the she-wolf who suckled Romulus & Remus – the mythical founders of Rome. As it turned out, the 6 tits & her position on all fours proved controversial & the ad either wasn’t used at all or it was only used in limited environments. Then Eugenie was kind enuf to give the faux teats to me & I sewed them onto a similarly colored short-sleeve sweat shirt that I used in performances in 1986.

Trevor explains that I “fashioned a suit of clothes made from zippers, which can be unzipped into a single. long strip.” Not quite, but close. I made pants in 1984 & a jacket in 1988 & the jacket’s arms can be unzipped as a long zipper. In 1989, on my 36th birthday, I washed these clothes & dried them & recorded the process so that I cd make an audio piece called “Drying Clothes Made Entirely of Zippers” wch was then used as part of “The Cassette Mythos Audio Alchemy CD/K7″. For decades I’ve heard “Man, you could make alotof money selling those!” to wch I usually explain that I prefer to be the only one wearing them. 20 yrs or so later I’ve heard of artists making dresses using only zippers but I’ve still never seen a jacket or pants. They’re much harder to sew & I did it by hand.

Trevor also writes that I “made a frightening suit of long-hair wigs of many colors and fashions, and shoulder bags of giant globes”. Regarding the former: the wigs are all pretty similar, I call it my “Hir Sute” or “Hair Suit”. Regarding the latter, it was actually my friend John Sheehan, under the name of Monty Cantsin, who took a moon globe & turned it into “NEOIST T.OREISTER Luggage” for me. It delights me that Trevor references things such as my 12 moustaches haircut or my use of false eyelashes as displaced facial ornamentation.

But, I have to disagree w/ his “Forbidden only by economic circumstance from actual genetic engineering” insofar as I’m quite happy w/ the genetic cards I’ve been dealt.

Trevor mentions that “One film shows tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE in a dog mask, walking on the hands and knees through the streets of London serving as a guide dog for his blind companion.” That film can now be witnessed on YouTube ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM92UGWzMPM ).

Over the decades I’ve sent thousands of things to over 1,400 people thru the mail & I don’t know of anyone other than Trevor Blake to ever so thoroughly compile the info in these into an article. THANK YOU. Despite the various mistakes, this is still truer to the spirit of my activities than most other articles. Importantly, Trevor writes:

“The most common mistake made by those attempting to classify tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE is that he is an ‘artist,’ tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE understands art and has created art , but he is not an artist. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has used paint, film, video, sound and words in his research, but the process of the research and the results are science. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s attention to detail, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s willingness to carry out the research far beyond any hope of personal gain or safety, and the quality of his documentation, give credence to the title tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE gives tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE: mad scientist.”

Furthermore, he writes: “No fringe group will accept tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE – neither will any reputable institution. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has petitioned the international museum of the extreme, Ripley’s Believe it or Not, to exhibit tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE. So far, they have refused.” Well.. considering that I’m a Saint in the Church of the SubGenius, I think it’s more a matter of as long as I’m a member of a group they stay lunatic fringe. As for Ripley’s? I approached them in the late 1970s & we actually had some dialog. They were friendly & open. Why my being put on display never happened I don’t remember anymore. It’s possible I just didn’t pursue it enuf. I remember some Ripley’s representative being open enuf to ask me about logistical requirements.

“for the most part tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has invented (that is, created from discarded or stolen items) the majority of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s life support systems.” Actually, I’ve worked – banal tho that is. What hasn’t been banal is convincing people to employ me, eg, in 1987 when I had my head shaved & w/ a 3D brain tattoo on it. Things have changed alot since then & it’s been people like me who’ve changed it. As for “tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE seems exceptionally unable to assimilate into normal society”? Well, for better or worse, I’ve spent my whole life being what a friend of mine calls a “Daffy Diplomat”. In other words, while “normal society” & I aren’t likely to ever mate, I have to interface w/ it all the time. I get pd to do things for other people, I pay the bills, that sort of thing. Other than that, I certainly don’t want to “assimilate”! “Normal society” is a tomb for the imagination.

As for my ‘bad reputation’ as a person prone to “violent tantrums and theft” & “indifference to others and cruelty”? Nah, I’m one of the most honest people I’ve ever known & I’m hardly indifferent or cruel. In fact, if I were ever even remotely as cruel as most people have been to me the world wd have to look out. Finally, Blake writes: “after an unsuccessful experiment in creating a book and record store (called NORMALS), tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has left Baltimore”. Normal’s is actually quite successful as a store & has existed now for 22 yrs. Here’s a link to their website: http://www.normals.com/

All in all, typos or no, this is an excellent bk. Blake’s strong point is his personality as a seeker & oVo is his Lost & Found.

OVO 20 JUVEN(a/i)LIA

112 pages, 8.5 x 11, $10.00

The best of OVO 1987 – 2011. Walter Alter, Dmitry Babenko, Hakim Bey, Trevor Blake, Johnny Brainwash, Chris C. Cilla, Cunnichant Night Owl, Mike Diana, Yael Ruth Dragwyla, James Ellis, Karen Elliot, Feral Faun, Klint Finley, Richard Ford, Chris Gross, Mike Gunderloy, Ginger Hutton, Ian MacEwan, Ernest Mann, Melissa, Thom Metzger, Jennifer Murrian, PM, Gerry Reith, James V. Scianna, Stuart Swezey, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, V. Vale.

[Free] [Purchase]

Review by Ferdinand Bardamu: “To someone of the Internet Era, where narcissistic self-expression is just a couple of mouse clicks away, the effort and dedication involved in compiling an entire magazine, from writing and gathering the material to binding the physical copies and mailing them out, is difficult to relate to. Still, this is a great little collection of oddities, ranging from poetry to short stories to investigative journalism on offbeat subjects.”

Trevor Blake: Introduction
Mike Diana: Read OVO
Hakim Bey: Salon Apocalypse
Hakim Bey: Evil Eye
Hakim Bey: Intellectual S/M is the Fascism of the Eighties
Hakim Bey: Ringing Denunciation of Surrealism
Johnny Brainwash: Holding Games for Ransom
Gerry Reith: Letter from the Graveyard Shift
Cunnichant Night Owl: Lunalogue
Thom Metzger: The Hypmogoogoopizin’ Man
Thom Metzger: Wad Rules
Richard Ford: Bellowing Forth and Brandishing
James Ellis: Mayhem
Mike Gunderloy: The Meta-Network
James V. Scianna: A Pit Stop Along the Inward Journey
Chris Cilla: Sperm Trek
Anonymous: 23 Sperm Stories 23
Mike Diana: Attack of the Giant Killer Sperm
Feral Faun: Thoughts on Experimentation
tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE: Lidznap
Chris Gross: Three Letters
James Ellis: Control
Klint Finley: The New Currency War
PM: Liberating Wednesday
Ernest Mann: Warbucks Intra-Family Communique
Ernest Mann: Becoming More Free
Karen Elliot: Operation Negation
Walter Alter: Little Wally’s Reader (Lights = Camera = Action / Densest? / The List of Recalibrations)
Chris Cilla: Apple / Pineapple
Review: My Struggle by Mark Mothersbaugh
Review: The Skin Horse by Nabil Shaban
Review: The Myth of Natural Rights by L. A. Rollins
Interview: Melissa
Interview: Stuart Swezey
Interview: Ginger Hutton
Interview: Yael Ruth Dragwyla
Interview: Jennifer Murrian
Interview: V. Vale
Trevor Blake: Tape Fragmentation
Trevor Blake: Magnetic Poetry
Trevor Blake: Saturn Return
Trevor Blake: New Superstition from a Dream
Trevor Blake: Mutants First
Trevor Blake: Science is Anti-Authoritarian
Trevor Blake: Tipping Points
Trevor Blake: Cursed Object
Trevor Blake: Trajectory Through Anarchism
James Ellis: Suffering
Trevor Blake: The Bonus Army
Trevor Blake: Multiple Name Identities
Trevor Blake: Co-Remoting with the Thunderous
Trevor Blake: Ecclesiastes 9:10
About the Contributors

… or assemble your own anthology from what I think of as the best few dozen articles or from all 19,000+ articles.

This article by Michael Byrne uses (with my consent) a photograph I took in July 2009 regarding a home-made swamp cooler I blogged about in August 2009.

Aristotle held with Plato that we possess a faculty, intellectual intuition, by which we can visualize essences and find out which definition is the correct one, and many modern essentialists have repeated this doctrine. Other philosophers, following Kant, maintain that we do not possess anything of the sort. My opinion is that we can readily admit that we possess something which may be described as ‘intellectual intuition;’ or more precisely, that certain of our intellectual experiences may be thus described. Everybody who ‘understands’ an idea, or a point of view, or an arithmetical method, for instance, multiplication, in the sense that he has ‘got the feel of it,’ might be said to understand that thing intuitively; and there are countless intellectual experiences of that kind. But I would insist, on the other hand, that these experiences, important as they may be for our scientific endeavours, can never serve to establish the truth of any idea or theory, however strongly somebody may feel, intuitively, that it must be true, or that it is ‘self-evident.’ Such intuitions cannot even serve as an argument, although they may encourage us to look for arguments. For somebody else may have just as strong an intuition that the same theory is false. The way of science is paved with discarded theories which were once declared self-evident; Francis Bacon, for example, sneered at those who denied the self-evident truth that the sun and the stars rotated round the earth, which was obviously at rest. Intuition undoubtedly plays a great part in the life of a scientist, just as it does in the life of a poet. It leads him to his discoveries. But it may also lead him to his failures. And it always remains his private affair, as it were. Science does not ask how he has got his ideas, it is only interested in arguments that can be tested by everybody.

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

Trevor Blake: Orrery. Cardboard, glue, string, tape. 13 November 2010.

There is no context for the man whose name is tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE calls himself a mad scientist, a neoist, a SubGenius – Tim Ore, Karen Elliot, Monte Cantsin – a krononaut. One of the many publications by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE was titled DCC#040.0 – dewey decimal classification number 0 (generalities) 4 (not used) 0 (no subject) 0 (miscellany)… just as a book with this dewey decimal classification number would stand entirely apart from all the other books, so does tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE stand entirely apart from all other people.

Re/Search magazine requested a photograph of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s tattoos for their ‘Modern Primitive’ issue, but the photographs were not used. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE does not fit the profile for a modern primitive. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has not modified tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s body to attach it more firmly to a tribal past – tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has propelled it forward to a sixth-finger future. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s earlier tattoos consisted of a red and green brain over the greater part of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s head (creating the 3-D effect of actually seeing into his skull), crossed thigh bones over tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s chest and a DNA coil from navel to penis. Later, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE made a tattoo index of the various scars on tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s body. Using white ink, the scars were numbered according to when they were received and created a representational icon to go next to it (a tree on the forehead, razor on the right arm, window shade on the left thigh, etc.). tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has appeared in public wearing a shirt that reveals his chest. It is not a normal chest, but one with six small sow-like teats. Forbidden only by economic circumstance from actual advanced genetic engineering, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has advanced tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s evolution in other ways.

tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE does not look like anyone else. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE fashioned a suit of clothes made from zippers, which can be unzipped into a single, long strip. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE made a frightening suit of long-hair wigs of many colors and fashions, and shoulder bags of giant globes with leather shoulder straps and hinged openings. With the understanding that ‘mustaches make a man,’ tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE shaved twelve mustaches onto tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s head to be twelve times a man (or twelve times more accessible to normals). At another point, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE shaved a ring of hair from the top of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s head, in front of one ear, under the chin, behind the other ear (by gluing hair behind the ear) and back up to the top of the head: the effect was someone with their face on sideways. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has worn displaced false eyelashes and adhesive stickers instead of ‘clothes,’ peanut butter instead of makeup.

tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE does not live like anyone else. His home defies convention. For extended periods of time the majority of what would normally be open space in tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s room was occupied by eight-foot diameter weather balloons; to navigate, one had to work around them. I had the rare opportunity to visit his laboratory in 1987. The front door opened to the back of a metal shelf, forcing one to walk sideways along a wall to enter the room. And to enter the room, one had to walk across his bed which was lying on the floor. Inside the room were shelves and drawers and cabinets full of experiments, documentation and equipment, all cobbled together from the least expensive of sources.

The biological processes of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE do not appear to be fully human. For five months as a teenager tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE did not bathe, brush the hair or clean the teeth, urinated outside whenever possible and often refrained from wiping the anus after elimination. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has been a ‘professional asshole’ in medical schools, serving as a model in genital / rectal examinations, and taken untested drugs for pay during medical trials. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has been known to ingest toxins and receive profound physical injuries without apparent long-term damage. No child co-created by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE is known to have survived.

Perhaps because tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE is more, less or other than human, t tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has demonstrated on several well-documented occasions the ability to interact with animals to a degree suggesting a special affiliation with them. One film shows tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE in a dog mask, walking on the hands and knees through the streets of London serving as a guide dog for a blind companion. When the two board a bus, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE is not charged a fee – tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has, in the context of the bus, become what tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE appears to be. A videotape from the same European expedition has a nude tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE wearing a ‘Donald Duck’ mask to increase the animal appearance as tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE communes with seals on the coast of Scotland. These otherwise timid animals appear entirely at ease near tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE; they are intimidated by the camera operator more than the animal / scientist.

tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE is a magician, but of no previous school. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has demonstrated, time and again, that with only an application of thought and effort the marvelous can erupt in the mundane. In December 1979 tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE and several collaborators took two boxes of live crabs to a shopping mall in Baltimore, Maryland, where Santa Claus was meeting children. Prior to arrival they had tied the arms and legs of plastic babies to the crabs’ backs. They released the crabs around Santa’s cottage and stood back, watching the reaction of the crowd that gathered around the confused and weak crabs. “I’m glad someone’s doing this,” a woman was heard to say. The introduction of a random / magical element into the mundane world of Santa’s cottage at a shopping mall brought forth an even more random, even more magical response. The wizard gave a public demonstration of powers, and spontaneously a member of the crowd found herself ‘understanding’ it more, perhaps, than the wizard himself.

Mathematics has been advanced by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE. Using stencils, tentatively a convenience initiated ‘folk math’ on the walls of public buildings in Baltimore. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE engineered a perpetual pataphysical calendar, and has performed music on synthesizers by reading the parameters of a patch created by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE (the mathematical information holding more potential for the listener than its application). Grammar and diction have also been accelerated by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE: here is an example of his own script:

i 1st met gayle at a halloween party in t he apt building turned commune
in wch she resided in wash d c wch was temporarily housing
a suggestion box i made t he ntrance 2 wch was made
from a simulated cunt made from rubber.
t he friend i’d given t he suggestion box 2
was wearing a dildo on his head like a unicorn horn
& gayle (wearing a black leotard) was sucking on it.
later t ha t nite i wsa playing w/ a computer connected keyboard & CRT
when gale came in2 t he room w/ an approximately 8″ in diameter
frozen wad of actual bulls’ eyes
& placed them next 2 t he keyboard at wch i was seated.
i was impressed.
t he computer room had a couch in it
& i later learned t ha t some1 had spent t he nite in t he room
w/out having noticed t he eyeballs
& upon awakening in t he morning 2 find them no longer frozen
& scattered about on t he floor of t he small room
ran screaming in terror thruout t he commune..

tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE injects humor into his reports by revealing the hidden laughter in words – the becomes ‘tee hee,’ that becomes ‘tee ha (t).’ tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has transmitted information via telephone, television, radio, audio and video cassette, vinyl and computer – no medium is outside the parameter of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, but the use each medium is put it is always at the parameter of its abilities.

The most common mistake made by those attempting to classify tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE is that he is an ‘artist.’ tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE understands art and has created art, but he is not an artist. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has used paint, film, video, sound and words in his research, but the process of the research and its results are science. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s attention to detail, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s willingness to carry out the research far beyond any hope of personal gain or safety, and the quality of his documentation, give credence to the title tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE gives tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE: mad scientist.

Over the course of sixteen years, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE wrote down the word and phrases that appeared in the mind of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE while half-asleep. The resulting text was gathered into a book titled ‘telepathy receptivity training,’ and includes

blinkey modeling
i can’t see washing my hands in cake
something backwards, you have to have one of those things and two of everything
i call upon the rules and the grey moving sand…

For sixteen years work, the results are only ten pages of large-typeface text – not unlike the notebook of a botanist who searches for plants so exotic they are found only once in a lifetime. Few artists would be willing to present such a small return for so many years work, while any scientist would be proud of such dedication.

Another of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s projects is ‘mike film.’ In the late 1970s tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE conceived of a way to transmute a certain number of artifacts he had created into a context easier to transport and store and which lent itself readily to further research by others. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE made a Super-8 film of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s possessions, processed the film, gave away or destroyed tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s possessions, and proceeded to cut the cells of the film into individual photographs… approximately 46,800 photographs. The ‘mike film’ (mike as an abbreviation for microscopic and suggestive of microfilm) was then bundled in small packets and distributed to individuals and organizations all over the world. The recipients were then encouraged to distribute the film in the most creative way they knew, document the distribution and return the results to tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE. Every few years tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE publishes a ‘mike film distribution form’ which serves as a scientific journal on the dissemination of mike film. Mike film has been deposited in art brut museums, launched from balloons, consumed, worn as pasties, hidden in national monuments, smuggled into prisons and dropped in the ocean. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE dreams (with advance knowledge of the future?) of an archaeologist discovering mike film and examining it under a microscope.

No fringe group will accept tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE – neither will any reputable institution. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has petitioned the international museum of the extreme, Ripley’s Believe it or Not, to exhibit tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE. So far, they have refused. A very small amount of advance funding or sales has supported tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s research, but for the most part tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has invented (that is, created from discarded or stolen items) the majority of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s life support systems.

What evidence is there that tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE comes from the future? tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has in the past affiliated himself with the Krononautic Society, an international and informal society of time travelers. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE seems exceptionally unable to assimilate into normal society while being entirely familiar with its customs – and yet year after year, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE survives and continues the research without funding, a steady income, and sometimes without a home. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has exhibited the ability to change tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE and tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s environment in ways that appear magical but are in fact based on a superior technology of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE own creation.

tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE is outside normal definitions of benevolence and wickedness, although tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE does have a highly articulated definition of both as applied to tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE. There have been reports of violent tantrums and theft by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, of indifference to others and cruelty. It is difficult to evaluate the behavior of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE by any but tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s own standards.

tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE lived in Baltimore for many years: after an unsuccessful experiment in creating a book and record store (called NORMALS), tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has left Baltimore and is currently in perpetual transit in North America. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has been spotted in several cities, each time sending out a progress report just before the circumstances of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s residence are suddenly altered (sometimes by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s design, other times by a host’s intolerance of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s experiments). While the rest of us advance backwards towards the future, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE is simply returning from whence he came. What will happen when the present and the future intersect, and the world of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE and our world become one?

- 1997, previously unpublished.

See also:
OVO 12 Science (November 1991)
OVO 7 Information (October 1989)
OVO 2 (July 1987)

1. There are no ultimate sources of knowledge. Every source, every suggestion, is welcome; but every source, every suggestion, is also open to critical examination. As long as we are not dealing with historical matters, we usually examine the asserted facts themselves, rather than investigate the sources of our information.

2. The proper questions of epistemology are not actually concerned with sources at all; rather, we ask whether an assertion is true – that is to say, whether it agrees with the facts. In connection with this critical examination of the truth, all kinds of arguments may be brought to bear. One of the most important procedures is to take a critical attitude towards our own theories and, in particular, to look for contradictions between our theories and observations.

3. Tradition is – apart from inborn knowledge – by far the most important source of our knowledge.

4. The fact that most of the sources of our knowledge are traditional demonstrates that opposition to tradition, that is to say, antitraditionalism, is of no importance. But this fact must not be held to support traditionalism; for every bit, however small, of our traditional knowledge (and even of our inborn knowledge) is open to critical examination and may be overthrown if need be. Nevertheless, without tradition, knowledge would be impossible.

5. Knowledge cannot start from nothing – from the tabula rasa – nor yet from observation. The advance of our knowledge consists in the modification and the correction of earlier knowledge. Of course it is sometimes possible to take a step forward through an observation or through a chance discovery; but the significance of an observation or of a discovery generally depends upon whether it enables us to modify existing theories.

6. Neither observation nor reason is an authority. Other sources, such as intellectual intuition and intellectual imagination, are most important, but they are also unreliable: they may show us things with the utmost clarity and yet mislead us. They are the main sources of our theories and are therefore indispensable; but the vast majority of our theories are false. The most important function of observation and logical thought, but also of intellectual intuition and imagination, is to help us in the critical examination of those bold theories which we need in order to delve into the unknown.

7. Clarity is an intellectual value in itself; exactness and precision, however, are not. Absolute precision is unattainable; and there is no point in trying to be more precise than our problem demands. The idea that we must define our concepts to make them ‘precise’ or even to give them a ‘meaning” is misleading. Every definition must make use of defining concepts; and so we can never ultimately avoid working with undefined concepts. Problems connected with the meaning or the definition of words are unimportant. Indeed, these purely verbal problems are tiresome: they should be avoided at all costs.

8. Every solution of a problem creates new unsolved problems. The harder the original problem and the bolder the attempt to solve it, the more interesting these new problems are. The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, clear and well-defined will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. The main source of our ignorance lies in the fact that our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

We get an idea of the vastness of our ignorance when we contemplate the vastness of the heavens. It is true that the size of the universe is not the deepest cause of our ignorance; but it is nevertheless one of its causes.

I believe that it is worthwhile trying to discover more about the world, even if this only teaches us how little we know. It might do us good to remember from time to time that, while differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal. If we thus admit that there is no authority beyond the reach of criticism to be found within the whole province of our knowledge, however far we may have penetrated into the unknown, then we can retain, without risk of dogmatism, the idea that truth itself is beyond all human authority Indeed, we are not only able to retain this idea we must retain it. For without it there can be no objective standards of scientific inquiry; no criticism of our conjectured solutions, no groping for the unknown, and no quest for knowledge.

Lecture delivered to the University of Salsburg 27 July 1979.  From In Search of a Better World. London: Routledge 1984.

But are there ultimate explanations? The doctrine which I have called ‘essentialism’ amounts to the view that science must seek ultimate explanations in terms of essences: if we can explain the behaviour of a thing in terms of its essence – of its essential properties – then no further question can be raised, and none need be raised (except perhaps the theological question of the Creator of the essences). Thus Descartes believed that he had explained physics in terms of the essence of a physical body which, he taught, was extension; and some Newtonians, following Roger Cotes, believed that the essence of matter was its inertia and its power to attract other matter, and that Newton’s theory could be derived from, and thus ultimately explained by, these essential properties of all matter. Newton himself was of a different opinion. It was a hypothesis concerning the ultimate or essentialist causal explanation of gravity itself which he had in mind when he wrote in the Scholium generale at the end of the Principia: ‘So far I have explained the phenomena… by the force of gravity, but I have not yet ascertained the cause of gravity itself… and I do not arbitrarily [or ad hoc] invent hypotheses.’

I do not believe in the essentialist doctrine of ultimate explanation. In the past, critics of this doctrine have been, as a rule, instrumentalists: they interpreted scientific theories as nothing but instruments for prediction, without any explanatory power. I do not agree with them either. But there is a third possibility, a ‘third view’, as I have called it. It has been well described as a ‘modified essentialism’ – with emphasis upon the word ‘modified’.

This ‘third view’ which I uphold modifies essentialism in a radical manner. First of all, I reject the idea of an ultimate explanation: I maintain that every explanation may be further explained, by a theory or conjecture of a higher degree of universality. There can be no explanation which is not in need of a further explanation, for none can be a self-explanatory description of an essence (such as an essentialist definition of body, as suggested by Descartes). Secondly, I reject all what-is questions: questions asking what a thing is, what is its essence, or its true nature. For we must give up the view, characteristic of essentialism, that in every single thing there is an essence, an inherent nature or principle (such as the spirit of wine in wine), which necessarily causes it to be what it is, and thus to act as it does. This animistic view explains nothing; but it has led essentialists (like Newton) to shun relational properties, such as gravity, and to believe, on grounds felt to be a priori valid, that a satisfactory explanation must be in terms of inherent properties (as opposed to relational properties). The third and last modification of essentialism is this. We must give up the view, closely connected with animism (and characteristic of Aristotle as opposed to Plato), that it is the essential properties inherent in each individual or singular thing which may be appealed to as the explanation of this thing’s behaviour. For this view completely fails to throw any light whatever on the question why different individual things should behave in like manner. If it is said, ‘because their essences are alike’, the new question arises: why should there not be as many different essences as there are different things?

Plato tried to solve precisely this problem by saying that like individual things are the offspring, and thus copies, of the same original ‘Form’, which is therefore something ‘outside’ and ‘prior’ and ‘superior’ to the various individual things; and indeed, we have as yet no better theory of likeness. Even today, we appeal to their common origin if we wish to explain the likeness of two men, or of a bird and a fish, or of two beds, or two motor cars, or two languages, or two legal procedures; that is to say, we explain similarity in the main genetically; and if we make a metaphysical system out of this, it is liable to become a historicist philosophy. Plato’s solution was rejected by Aristotle; but since Aristotle’s version of essentialism does not contain even a hint of a solution, it seems that he never quite grasped the problem.

By choosing explanations in terms of universal laws of nature, we offer a solution to precisely this last (Platonic) problem. For we conceive all individual things, and all singular facts, to be subject to these laws. The laws (which in their turn are in need of further explanation) thus explain regularities or similarities of individual things or singular facts or events. And these laws are not inherent in the singular things. (Nor are they Platonic ideas outside the world.) Laws of nature are conceived, rather, as (conjectural) descriptions of the structural properties of nature – of our world itself.

Here then is the similarity between my own view (the ‘third view’) and essentialism; although I do not think that we can ever describe, by our universal laws, an ultimate essence of the world, I do not doubt that we may seek to probe deeper and deeper into the structure of our world or, as we might say, into properties of the world that are more and more essential, or of greater and greater depth.

Every time we proceed to explain some conjectural law or theory by a new conjectural theory of a higher degree of universality, we are discovering more about the world, trying to penetrate deeper into its secrets. And every time we succeed in falsifying a theory of this kind, we make a new important discovery. For these falsifications are most important. They teach us the unexpected; and they reassure us that, although our theories are made by ourselves, although they are our own inventions, they are none the less genuine assertions about the world; for they can clash with something we never made.

From Ratio, December 1957.  Reprinted in Objective Knowledge.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986

The above does not reflect the intention of OVO, and in fact stands opposite to it. The above is provided to feed the presuppositions of those who will not actually read this issue of OVO. Any review of this issue that quotes the words above is likely to have been written by someone who never read beyond them to learn what OVO actually states. This issue of OVO has a purpose, but the likelihood that it will be misrepresented is great enough that a clear statement of what the purpose is not is in order.

OVO does not advocate the criminalization of Christianity. Existing criminal law suffices to address what is harmful, and law is among the least appropriate means of addressing what is merely mistaken. Christians deserve equal sanction by the law, and voluntary and informed activities among consenting adults (including religion) should not be outlawed.
OVO does not advocate the murder of Christians except in self-defense. Because of the potential for legal error, capital punishment is immoral in all cases. War and murder are immoral in all cases except in self-defense. Except in self-defense, it is always immoral to kill (including killing Christians).

OVO does not advocate the replacement of the Christian God with another God, a Goddess, a pantheon of deities, nature worship, or similar substitution. OVO does not advocate worship, be it of the Christian God or any other. To any reader who uses OVO to build up their own superstition: your faith is equally contemptible.

OVO does not criticize Christianity because it does not understand it. Many years research went into this issue, and along the way misunderstandings about Christianity (whether in its favor or against it) were abandoned. OVO criticizes Christianity not because it does not understand it, but because it is worthy of criticism.

OVO does not criticize Christianity because the editor had a traumatic experience with Christianity. The editor had a generally positive experience with Christianity while growing up and has Christian friends today. It is a silent admission of defeat that Christians use this psychological, secular explanation for why someone might criticize their superstition. The editor came to reject Christianity the old fashioned way: by reading the Bible.

OVO is not critical of Christianity because the editor is possessed by Satan, demons or evil spirits. Such ghosts have never existed.

OVO does not criticize Christianity because it is a socialist publication. OVO is not a socialist publication.

OVO does not criticize Christianity because Christianity is false. Christianity is false, but that is not in itself sufficient reason to advocate that it wither away. There are many non-fiction books, films, plays, poems and recordings that are also false but serve to inspire humanity. But these false stories do not claim to be true, are not taught to impressionable children as true, and are not used to support legislation that meddles in the affairs of non-Christians. No one is arguing that the epics of Homer be taught as history; no one is legislating that Aesop’s fables be posted in courtrooms. These stories, though false, serve to inspire those who seek them out and are rightly preserved. It is the secular power of Christianity that is the problem, not merely its falsehood. Christianity does not attempt to identify and lessen its falsehoods: it revels in them as ‘tests of faith.’ Christianity is holding back science and art, culture and philosophy, tools that actually can and actually have improved humanity’s lot in an indifferent Universe.

OVO does not criticize Christianity because it is a good religion perverted to bad ends. It is much more the case that a few good people (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, perhaps) have perverted the bad religion of Christianity to good ends. All the good done in the name of Christianity could and does occur through entirely secular means. What remains distinctly Christian if such duplication of labor is removed? Threats of eternal damnation, denial of the pleasures and wonders of this short life, confusion and deception. When Christianity has supported individual rights it has done so only after a ‘revelation’ that (a) goes against its own history and (b) miraculously is in harmony with contemporary public opinion. For example, many Christians opposed slavery in the United States; but many more supported slavery and did so for much longer. Even today the Bible contains many passages supporting slavery and not one passage condemning it. Christianity is a slave religion, a misogynist religion, a queer-killing religion, a nonsense religion, but good people keep twisting their bad faith to good ends. Wouldn’t it be better to just do good deeds without wasted efforts to placate an invisible monster that lives in the sky?

OVO does not criticize Christianity to criticize individual Christians. It is often the case that an attack on a person’s unconsidered beliefs is perceived as an attack on their person. If a person’s beliefs are profoundly unconsidered, to merely state that one holds differing beliefs is perceived as an attack. For example, Christians who see other superstitions get equal time in the eyes of the law sometimes complain that their freedom of religion is under attack. Those who hold considered beliefs are secure when challenged and (hopefully) willing to admit error. Those who hold unconsidered beliefs, who repeat what they have been told without deliberation, are more likely to confuse who they are with what they believe. Christianity, like all religions, encourages strong belief but also encourages a lack of consideration. Posturing, bullying and stubbornness are substitutes for consideration of belief among most Christians.

OVO does not criticize Christianity because its claims contradict the evidence of our senses, science, history, archeology, astronomy, mathematics, common sense and the like. It is true that Christianity is incompatible with all of these, but science progresses by way of challenges to all our claims. If Christianity challenges the evidence of our senses, all the better: let the challenges be considered and considered again. If the Bible contradicts science, science can be tested to see if the Bible has a better explanation for reality. Where the Bible holds true, the Bible holds true. Where the Bible is found to be false, it should either be re-written or re-classified as folk tales. Resolving contradictions between the Bible and the evidence of our senses can be of value to us all, and so the contradictions between the Bible and the evidence of our senses are not in themselves why the Bible should be criticized. Internal contradictions in the Bible, and holding on to falsehood when falsehood has been identified, are worthy of the greatest of criticisms.

OVO does not criticize Christianity as an argument for atheism. The editor is preparing an argument for atheism that is distinct from this argument against Christianity.

OVO does not criticize Christianity because Jesus Christ was a good person whose followers have gone astray, or because we do not have the secret teachings of Jesus, or because Jesus was a complex person with both good and bad qualities. Jesus never existed.

In 1991, the editor published A Call to Heresy on a BBS in Knoxville, Tennessee USA. The document found its way onto BBS’ around the world as well as other formats, including an Internet domain in Hong Kong and a CD-ROM of public domain texts published by Palm Computers. Various editions of the text can be found on the Internet today. Some of the research done for that text has found a new home here in OVO 16 AntiChrist.

OVO criticizes the Bible. Some Christians say that it is an error to overly attend to what the Bible says, and one should rely on the Bible as inspiration rather than fact. But the Bible itself makes claims of perfection, and so taking it at its word in claims of perfection are as justified as any other perspective; perhaps more justified than some ‘inspired’ interpretations. If any interpretation of the Bible is as good as any other, then Christians in no way can distance themselves from the worst among them. Having failed to amend the contradictions, atrocities and absurdities in the Bible with over two thousand years to do so, it is reasonable to conclude that the Bible is considered factual among Christians. Some Christians (called Dominionists or Fundamentalists or Conservatives or the Christian Right) are explicit in their claim that the Bible is factual, while the rest hold it to be factual but requiring ‘interpretation’ (often by way of asking the reader to simply ignore parts of the Bible).

But this issue of OVO does not limit itself to criticisms of the Bible. The Roman Catholic Church claims a history pre-dating the Bible. Martin Luther, founder of Protestant Christianity, wrote inspired texts. The Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints and the Watchtower Society claim to have Christian revelations in modern times. All of these Christians are well deserving of criticism and contempt.

There are a set number of responses offered by Christians when confronted with their own beliefs. The first and most common is to be told that these Bible verses have been taken out of context. It is claimed that the verses surrounding these quotes give them a meaning other than their apparent meaning. If this is the case it will be easy to demonstrate; full citations for each quote are given throughout. The reader is encouraged to read the Bible. There is no more sure path to rejecting Christianity than understanding it. Some claim that the contexts of the times change how we should understand the Bible. But does the Bible say it is relevant only until the time of Job (the last time God speaks directly to humanity), or does it claim to be relevant to all times? Some claim that one translation of the Bible offers a more accurate account than another, but existing fragmentary early Christian texts contain their own contradictions, atrocities and absurdities.

The second common reply made by Christians when confronted with their own beliefs is that the Bible, God, Jesus and the rest are not to be understood by reason in the way math or science is. Christianity is to be understood by faith, by the heart, by the spirit, by the soul. Therefore any apparent contradictions, atrocities or absurdities should be ignored because those are all ‘reason’ and not ‘faith.’ But there is no ‘alternative to reason’ as faith is said to be. One can hope, one can wish, one can pretend and ignore, one can scream or run away or kill one’s critics, but none of these are alternatives to reason. Even if there were an alternative to reason, how is the ‘feeling’ that Christianity is true (and all other religions false) different from the ‘feeling’ that Islam is true (and all other religions are false)? Why is it that Christian ‘feelings’ are so regional – does God not inspire such ‘feelings’ everywhere equally? Why don’t children have that ‘feeling’ until an adult tells them to say they do, and why do adults spend so much effort making sure that ‘feeling’ is planted in children?

All religions claim to be the only true religion. Even the ecumenical religions claim to be the only true religion, by claiming that the non-ecumenical religions are false. But since all religions contradict each other at most only one can be the only true religion. Since all religions by definition put themselves outside what can be demonstrated as true, it would be unjust to establish any religion as secular law because the likelihood of error would be too great. Suppose Mithrism became the law of the United States when actually it was Ah Pook that was the real living God? Those countries that have a legal assumption of atheism serve freedom the most. At times this has been the case in the United States, where OVO originates. Christianity threatens the legal presupposition of atheism in the USA, necessitating this issue of OVO. Christianity is the superstition behind the US support of Israel, the war in Iraq, lack of access to Plan B and a vaccine for two strains of cancer-causing HPV, the removal of science from public education, the ongoing imprisonment of the West Memphis Three (among others), blue laws, laws forbidding atheists from holding elected office and more. Reform from within should occur in Christianity. Civil discourse should occur between Christians and non-Christians. But should Christianity elect to ignore the opportunities of positive reinforcement, let it learn the sting of negative reinforcement. OVO is not reforming Christianity from within, nor is it a civil discourse. It is an attack – using only Christianity’s own beliefs as weapons. When Mithrism or the faithful of Ah Pook establish their superstition as law in the USA, they will be equally worthy of criticism. Readers in countries where Islam or Judaism are the majority superstition are encouraged to make similar efforts.

This issue of OVO advocates the withering away of Christianity through reason and scorn. Reason alone withers Christianity to a hostile party guest that has long overstayed his welcome; scorn provide us with laughter and satisfaction as we show him to the door. Perhaps reason alone, or reason and compassion, might be a more noble endeavor. But any belief that cannot withstand a little mockery is perhaps not worth holding in the first place.

Subject religious organizations to the same requirements as secular non-profit organizations: demonstrate they perform a quantifiable public good to receive tax-exempt status. Do not donate any funds, labor or resources to Christian organizations: there are secular equivalents to any Christian organization for those who seek to aid others. Do not vote for politicians who make their Christianity a part of their platform. Oppose ‘faith based’ funding and theocratic laws. Learn more about Christianity than the Christians themselves. Confront Christians with their own claims and history.

OVO is fortunate to originate in the United States, where Christianity and other superstitions may be legally practiced and criticized. The United Kingdom, Holland, Sweden, Italy, Turkey, Norway, Canada and other countries forbid criticism of religion as a form of ‘hate crime,’ while China, North Korea and other countries forbid religion as a form of ‘thought crime.’ In the United States religion may be both practiced and criticized – for now. If Christianity continues to become the state religion of the United States, this may not be the case much longer.

OVO is a tool kit to disabuse the reader of Christianity.

(from OVO 16 ANTICHRIST January 2006)

36 ≠ 29
And the uttermost cities of the tribe of the children of Judah toward the coast of Edom southward were Kabzeel, and Eder, and Jagur, and Kinah, and Dimonah, and Adadah, and Kedesh, and Hazor, and Ithnan, Ziph, and Telem, and Bealoth, and Hazor, Hadattah, and Kerioth, and Hezron, which is Hazor, Amam, and Shema, and Moladah, and Hazargaddah, and Heshmon, and Bethpalet, and Hazarshual, and Beersheba, and Bizjothjah, Baalah, and Iim, and Azem, and Eltolad, and Chesil, and Hormah, and Ziklag, and Madmannah, and Sansannah, and Lebaoth, and Shilhim, and Ain, and Rimmon: all the cities are twenty and nine, with their villages. – Joshua 15:21-32

15 ≠ 14
And in the valley, Eshtaol, and Zoreah, and Ashnah, and Zanoah, and Engannim, Tappuah, and Enam, Jarmuth, and Adullam, Socoh, and Azekah, and Sharaim, and Adithaim, and Gederah, and Gederothaim; fourteen cities with their villages. – Joshua 15:33-36

14 ≠ 13
And they had in their inheritance Beersheba, and Sheba, and Moladah, and Hazarshual, and Balah, and Azem, and Eltolad, and Bethul, and Hormah, and Ziklag, and Bethmarcaboth, and Hazarsusah, and Bethlebaoth, and Sharuhen; thirteen cities and their villages. – Joshua 19:2-6

31.4 ≠ 30
And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about. – 1 Kings 7:23

5 ≠ 6
And the sons of Shemaiah; Hattush, and Igeal, and Bariah, and Neariah, and Shaphat, six. – 1 Chronicles 3:22

8 ≠ 5
And the sons of Pedaiah were, Zerubbabel, and Shimei: and the sons of Zerubbabel; Meshullam, and Hananiah, and Shelomith their sister: and Hashubah, and Ohel, and Berechiah, and Hasadiah, Jushabhesed, five. – 1 Chronicles 3:19-20

5 ≠ 6
Of Jeduthun: the sons of Jeduthun; Gedaliah, and Zeri, and Jeshaiah, Hashabiah, and Mattithiah, six, under the hands of their father Jeduthun, who prophesied with a harp, to give thanks and to praise the LORD. – 1 Chronicles 25:3

31.4 ≠ 30
Also he made a molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round in compass, and five cubits the height thereof; and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about. – 2 Chronicles 4:2

2,499 ≠ 5,400
And this is the number of them: thirty chargers of gold, a thousand chargers of silver, nine and twenty knives, thirty basons of gold, silver basons of a second sort four hundred and ten, and other vessels a thousand. All the vessels of gold and of silver were five thousand and four hundred. All these did Sheshbazzar bring up with them of the captivity that were brought up from Babylon unto Jerusalem. – Ezra 1:9-11

(from OVO 16 ANTICHRIST January 2006)