Author: anitadalton

A Greater Monster by David David Katzman

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book:  A Greater Monster

Author:  David David Katzman

Type of Book: Fiction, experimental, indescribable

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: The reasons are numerous and many.

Availability:  Published by Bedhead Books in 2011, you can get a copy here:

You can also order this book from The Strand.

Comments:  Jesus Christ.  The best way I can begin this book discussion is to dare every single one of you to buy the book and read it.  I add the dare so that your pride forces you to get the book lest you seem the sort person who shies away from a challenge.  I need you to feel your honor is at stake.  However, it will be a dare you will be glad you took.  A Greater Monster is a book you will need to read at least twice, and even then you will be able to pick it up a third, fourth and fifth time and right around page 40 you will feel like you are reading a new book again.  Given that this book has 367 pages, that’s a bargain.  In a sense, you will get a new book every time you read it.  So really, it’s an economical dare.

The best way to describe the book is to call it experimental fiction because after the first 40 pages or so, it defies any traditional narrative.  It’s a drug trip that has a beginning of sorts but no real end.  The protagonist slides from one hallucinogenic experience to another, each itself having no beginning and no real end.  It’s disorienting and peculiar.  But at the end it is a religious experience for the protagonist, a deeply personal descent into the unreal and irreal that make it almost alienating to read.  The protagonist wants this trip into a world that has no meaning – if he doesn’t experience real meaninglessness, his life will become even more meaningless.   And each trip he experiences means only to me what I assign to it because there is no meaning once the trips begin.  Only experience.  A nauseating but ordered beginning turns into the protagonist careening in unordered experiences.

I had to read this book in a manner similar to the way I read House of Leaves.  The first time I read it in bits and pieces.  It’s a dense text and, without any linearity of plot, I don’t recommend reading through it in one attempt the first time you read it.  I honestly don’t know if the book would do you any good reading it all at once.  It would be like experiencing someone else’s delusions.  Before my senior year of high school, I developed pneumonia and had such a high fever I began to hallucinate.  My mother found me in the hallway, waiting in line to go to the bathroom.  Evidently I was convinced Chinese laborers were using the house as a rooming house and we all shared the same toilet.  I could see odors as colors and felt sure there were cows hiding in my room, producing methane gas that manifested as the color orange.  Small blue people ran across my bedsheets, warning me I needed to sit up or I would die.  My books spoke in foreign languages, the mirrors showed me unseen rooms in the house, and when I later told all of this to the doctor, he flat out did not believe me.  My mother told him, with no small amount of anger, that all of that had happened and I still don’t think he believed us.

I hallucinate now with very low fevers and most medical personnel give me the side eye when I report it.  I seldom say anything anymore.  I’ve had a couple of nurses tell me they do the same thing but mostly I know I am not believed.  I used to be offended by it but now I know better.  The fever dreams and hallucinations of one man can never really resonate with others unless they, by chance, had the same fevered dream, the same tendency to hallucinate, the same peculiar mindset.  That sort of cross-over seldom happens and you find yourself wondering how anyone could see a cow’s flatulence. And that’s why you need to read this book in little bits at first.  Otherwise the protagonist’s experiences will become too much as you try to make sense of them.  In smaller bits you won’t try to find the common thread, the element that links all these stories together.  There may be one but because this is not my hallucination, my drug trip, my terrible fever, the thread is elusive at best.

It took me several months to finish this book the first time.  I would back up and try to connect everything I was reading but ultimately that was a loser’s bet.  You just have to read in snippets and when you are finished, let it digest and then read it all in one go.  This book is a bizarre, at times alienating experience and that may sound unappealing but actually it was quite divine.  It was like taking a vacation into someone else’s mind.  It was a violent, unnerving, disjointed trip into utterly foreign fever hallucinations and that experience is enjoyable and frightening and fun if you don’t try to force it to make any linear sense.

Continue Reading “A Greater Monster by David David Katzman”

Harry Houdini Will Have His Revenge on Michael and Debi Pearl

This post originally appeared on Houdini's Revenge

Book:  To Train Up a Child

Authors:  Michael and Debi Pearl of No Greater Joy Ministries

Type of Book:  Instruction manual for beating children

Availability:  Not linking to it.  You don’t want to buy it.  If you do want to buy it, I will not abet such a bad decision.

Comments:  This is one of the wickedest books I have ever read and, given who I am and what I read, that is saying a lot.  This is a book so vile, written by a man so degenerate, that there is literally no way for a moral person to discuss it with anything approaching neutrality.  It is a book written solely with the intent of breaking the wills of small children, beating them into submission, and it has become a text used by witless Christian parents to beat their “willful” children to death.  And Michael Pearl is okay with that because he says those parents didn’t beat their children with love in their hearts or they wouldn’t have struck their children repeatedly with plumbing line until their muscles broke down and clogged their kidneys with biological debris, killing them.

This book is deeply problematic beyond just the content, which we will get to in a moment.  This book upsets me so much because though I am an atheist, I know excellent and fine Christians.  My grandfather was one.  He would have rebuked a man like Michael Pearl and if Pearl beat a child or a dog with a piece of wood, a belt, or plumbing line in front of him, Pearl would have found out what it is like to be at the mercy of a larger, angry man.  That is not because my grandfather was some sort of vengeance seeker.  Far from it.  He was not a man who looked for fights.  He would have rebuked Pearl because genuine believers cannot stomach the harms done by True Believers.  Many Christians today have the same reactions to the Westboro Baptist Church.  This book is so deeply problematic because in fundamentalist, legalistic circles, people use this book in the place of their own judgement as Christians, parents and decent human beings.

This is not a condemnation of Christianity.  It is a condemnation of Christians who use Michael and Debi Pearl’s disgusting book of abuse, a book so profoundly horrible that if it was used against prisoners it would be illegal and if it was used on POWs it would be considered war crimes.   So if you want to defend Christianity, don’t do it here.  Christianity is not what is being discussed here.  What is being discussed here is child abuse in the name of Michael Pearl, not God or Jesus, and the way that unthinking faith leads people to do terrible things.

The purpose of To Train Up a Child is to use Amish horse training methods on children, and even then the Amish would likely turn their backs on Pearl if they knew how their methods of taming wild animals were used on children.

Don’t get lost in the details.  Pearl in Chapter One lays out a bunch of explanations of how it is that he is not disciplining children, but rather continually training them so he does not have to discipline them.  He uses Proverbs 22:6 as his rationale:

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

Fair enough, but when “training” consists of pulling a nursing infant’s hair, hitting them continually, deliberately putting them in harm’s way to show them they must obey all commands, even those that make zero sense on any rational level, hitting them if they do not obey quickly enough for your satisfaction, what you are doing is brainwashing your child to follow your demented ideas, not any sort of Godly path.  Mindless, shattered, fearful automatons will never depart from the path you put them on.

Michael Pearl (and I refer to him mostly because even though his wife is a co-author, the book is written by him in first person, his wife referred to in the third person) gives a lot of lip service about how one must be calm when beating one’s children.  But as he says that a parent must be calm when training their children, he also goes on to say many times that a child must be trained until they are submissive or broken (he actually uses that word).  He recommends a course of whippings wherein the whippings continue until the child submits.  So as he gives lip service to the notion that a parent must have their head clear when engaging in his training methods, he also insists that training continue – sessions of whippings – until the adult feels the child is broken. The child’s physical welfare is never a part of the parent’s clear mind.  In a way, a clear and “Godly” minded person doing this to a child reeks of sheer sadism.

Why should you “train” your children?  To make them blindly obedient in all situations, of course.

Training is the conditioning of the child’s mind before the crisis arises.  It is preparation for future, instant, unquestioning obedience.

The last quality I would want in any human being is unquestioning obedience but Pearl insists this is to make a child happy because obedient children who have limits are happier.   There is truth in this – children with boundaries live happier lives, but Pearl does not teach boundaries.  In fact, as I will discuss, he doesn’t even permit them in his home.  He insists his children are the best examples of his methods being sound, but when we are finished discussing this book, I will discuss Pearl’s children, one of whom is living a hardscrabble life, engaging in bizarre prophetic visions, barely able to feed her children because her shattered mind and blind obedience made her prey to a man like her father.

People may find this hard to believe, but Pearl advocates beating children when they are infants. Here’s what Pearl did when his babies were able to crawl:

Place an appealing object where they can reach it, maybe in a “No-No” corner or on the apple juice table (another name for the coffee table).  When they spy it and make a dive for it, in a calm voice say, “No, don’t touch that.”  Since they are already familiar with the word “No,” they will likely pause, look at you in wonder, and then turn around and grab it.  Switch their hand once and simultaneously say, “No.”

Pearl says to switch lightly but when you have an implement in your hand to strike an infant, I posit you, the adult, may have little idea what it feels like to have your hand “switched.”  On his site Pearl says to test the implement on yourself but given that he recommends repeated whipping sessions, the adult can easily lose track of how hard he or she is hitting.

Continue Reading “Harry Houdini Will Have His Revenge on Michael and Debi Pearl”

The Bizarro Story of I by Wol-vriey

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: The Bizarro Story of I

Author: Wol-vriey

Type of Book: Fiction, bizarro

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: There are many reasons…

Availability: Published by Bizarro Press in 2011, you can get a copy here:

Comments: This book may not be the best bizarro book I have ever read, but it employs one of the best mindfucks that I’ve encountered in this genre. And it’s amazingly simple. The protagonist is named I and the book uses a third person narrative. That really is a pretty simple device, but it forces the reader to pay attention because if your mind wanders the slightest, you find yourself reading a first person novel. But it’s not a first person novel. And you will lose track of that several times as you read this book.

It’s such a strange way to write a book yet so perfect I’m surprised I haven’t seen this before.

Here’s a quick synopsis, as well as anyone can summarize a book like this: I is married to a woman called Anorexia, who is the secret daughter and heir to a kingdom run by horrible, body-building weirdos called the Steroid Cowbiys. She is kidnapped one day and I goes on a quest to find her. He loses his mouth early on and is forced to type out his end of the conversations he has. The plot, like the name trope, is simple – man goes in search of his lady-love, who is in peril. As with all bizarro, the bizarro is in the details. There’s almost an Alice in Wonderland thing going on in this book. I genuinely do not have a chance in hell of explaining the details of this book with anything approaching brevity – they are just that involved and bizarre. I meets a weird little mouse thing called Chocolate Mousse, who corners the market on rat poison and warehouses it so it can’t be used to kill him. I meets a weird fish-woman hybrid called Girlzilla who helps him but also proves to be a bit strange in her own right. He does battle with the family of body-building weirdos and sort of saves his wife but his quest doesn’t end the way you would think. And of course, there is a whole lot more to it than that, but just think of it as a love quest sprinkled with characters that would have deeply disturbed Lewis Carroll.

This book is horribly edited. It would not have made my ten error cut off, but I had read it before I made that declaration, hence this review. But this was also one of the first books released by Bizarro Press. More recent offerings show a vast improvement in regards to editing. But still, this book has a lot of errors. I have to mention it because that’s just who I am. But those who tend not to notice these sorts of things are unlikely to find this book any worse than any other bizarro offering. Just getting this out of the way so I can discuss the rest of the book to my satisfaction.

The use of “I” as a name really is quite interesting because it forces the reader to interact deeply with the text. It reads completely naturally but in the middle of sentences I found myself wondering who the “I” referred to and remembered, “Oh yeah, it’s the protagonist’s name.” In a third person narrative, it should be all the clearer that all those mentions of “I” are referring to the title character but even as I read the last pages, I still had difficulty remembering that simple fact. 

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Media Criticism: The Arrest of Varg Vikernes

This post originally appeared on Houdini's Revenge

One of the goals of Houdini’s Revenge is to look critically at how we receive information and come to believe what it is we believe.  Because of the way information is disseminated these days, we can no longer expect to read the news and know that we are reading the truth.  But it’s worse than that because these days we can’t even be sure that media outlets are even making an attempt to investigate what they are reporting to the public.  When dozens of websites republish the same initial report, if that initial report is completely wrong, by the time any errors are noted, the story is already all over the world and repeated without reflection.

On July 16, a friend on my Facebook left me a comment telling me that he had thought of me when he read Boing Boing!  I have a lot of strange irons in busy fires, so I had to go comb the site to see what he meant.  Within a minute, all was explained.  Xeni Jardin had posted a blurb that referred to an AFP article about the French police arresting Varg Vikernes.   This is the entire news blurb from Jacques Clement’s AFP article, link to article in quote:

Kristian Vikernes, a Norwegian neo-Nazi black metal musician and convicted killer who goes by the name of “Varg,” has been arrested in France over suspicions that he was planning a “major terrorist act.” He is reported to be linked to Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik, and he once stabbed a fellow musician to death, and set fire to several churches in the early 1990s.

Regardless of what anyone thinks of Vikernes’ politics, social beliefs or his past, we should all be extremely concerned that this news blurb from AFP that became the backbone of dozens and dozens of articles that reported this story has two major problems in just two sentences.  The first is that Varg Vikernes has not been known as “Kristian” in almost two decades.  Calling him “Kristian Vikernes” and mentioning he goes by “Varg” is like writing an article about “Thomas Mapother IV” and mentioning he goes by Tom Cruise.  I have no idea why AFP made the decision to make that strange distinction, but it set the tone for what was to come in the second sentence.

The second sentence is a hoot.  Varg Vikernes was “reported to be linked to” Anders Behring Breivik?  Ten minutes on Google would have made it impossible for any reporter worth a tinker’s damn to support such an accusation.  If nothing else, it would have made for far better reporting to have at least investigated what Varg had said about Breivik before they had run articles about his arrest.  Perhaps they could have added Varg’s own words from his websites as a counterpoint to the charges against him.  Perhaps Clement could have, you know, reported instead of vomiting up the vomiting up some official reports and adding some sly insinuations to spice up his article. 

Continue Reading “Media Criticism: The Arrest of Varg Vikernes”

TV Snorted My Brain by Bradley Sands

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: TV Snorted My Brain

Author: Bradley Sands

Type of Book: Fiction, bizarro

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It’s a retelling of the Arthurian myths using a sullen teenager, a sleazy wrestler, and a mystical television remote.

Availability: Published by LegumeMan books in 2012, you can get a copy here:

Comments:  This is a book you will either love or hate.  I don’t think there can be much gray area.  The reason for this is because this book relies on a teenaged narrator, a particularly stupid teenaged narrator whose brain is given to repetition.  Lots of repetition.  I suspect a real teenager would find this book interminable.  But if you can remember yourself when you were annoying as the day was long, yammering about ANARCHY and hating everyone around you because they were norms, you may find Artie Pendragon as funny as I did.

This book is a retelling of the King Arthur story using ridiculous suburban schmoes in the place of heroic figures.  Excalibur is a remote control and Camelot is inside a television.  When Artie’s father dies and his mother marries his uncle, no one can work the television until one night Artie uses the Excalibur 3000 to navigate the TV and his entire family finds themselves sucked into a netherworld wherein actors really are inside the television.  Artie has to engage in a struggle against his stepfather and little sister as he hunts for the Holy Grail.  Can he save the land in the television?  Can he achieve his goal of anarchy?  Can he get his wife back from his stepfather and take his place as the rightful ruler?  Will his struggles be so silly that it makes the mythos of Arthur seem like little more than the backdrop to a Bill and Ted film?  The only question I will answer for you is the last one and I think you know what the answer is.

As I mentioned earlier, this book is told from the perspective of an irritating and somewhat uninteresting teenager, a teenager upon whom fate has thrust greatness of sorts.   Through showing examples of Artie’s thought processes, I can demonstrate how simple and repetitive he is and, in my opinion, utterly hilarious.  Here’s a scene wherein he is watching his younger sister playing in a soccer game:

I sit in a folding beach chair on the sidelines, watching my little sister play out on the field.  The chair is uncomfortable.  A strip of polyester fabric is poking me in the ass.  I do not like to be poked in the ass.  But it is worth being poked in the ass.  It is a really great pee wee soccer game.  It is total anarchy, super-retardo anarchy awesomeness.  It is the most anarchist thing on Earth.

Oh wait, I forgot about riots in the streets.

But riots in the streets don’t have little girls picking up clumps of grass out of the ground instead of defending their goal, little girls chasing butterflies instead of the ball, little girls tripping over the ball, little girls kicking the ball into the wrong goal, little girls calling their opponents cuntbags, little girls screaming as they run away from the ball.

Riots in the streets don’t have soccer moms.  Riots on the streets don’t have soccer dads.  Riots on the streets don’t have riots between soccer moms and soccer dads over pee wee soccer games.  Riots in the streets are over real world issues.  Real world issues are fucking lame.

I say it out loud, “Real world issues are fucking lame.”

This is a long quote but I throw it out here because it’s a litmus test.  If you find this particular style of writing annoying, you will want to stop reading here and give this book a miss.  But if you find this strangely charming and exactly like the tiresome kid you sat next to in health class, the one who scrawled Anarchy! symbols all over his Trapper Keeper and quoted Metallica lyrics back before they “sold out” and totally did not give a fuck, you’ll enjoy the rest of this book.  And this really is the bulk of the book – the Arthurian myth as filtered through the mind and life of a kid who will remind you a bit of Dermott from The Venture Brothers.  There are the usual fantastic elements that accompany bizarro books but this book is quite simple in its execution – teenage dirtbag as King Arthur.  And because it is so simple, I think the best way to show how great this book is is by quoting passages.

Continue Reading “TV Snorted My Brain by Bradley Sands”

What, now?

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

I’ve been slacking off over here lately but this time I have a good excuse!  I swear!

I got sucked into a Munchausen by Internet/malingering/faker scandal and decided to launch a website looking into the situation because it is just that interesting. Since the early 2000s, a woman called Christina Iver-B* has been using various online ruses to prey on people for both attention and money.  I encountered her in an online watchdog group that kept an eye on misogynist, fundamentalist, evangelical religious movements, some of which I can comfortably call cults.  A plucky young woman called Ruth started discussing her flight from her ATI/Gothardite family and the many problems she faced as she tried to work her way back into conventional society, while begging for money because her life just never got on track.

Except she wasn’t a refugee from a violent, cruel, repressive religious family.  She’s a mother of four in her late 30s who has so many online identities that I have been researching for three weeks now and am certain there are many I don’t know yet.

This was completely up my alley and while it sucked up a lot of my time, it’s also invigorated my desire to write so now that I’ve got my crap together I hope to have more content up here.  Check back tomorrow for a discussion of a Bradley Sands book, as well as several other bizarro before I start transitioning into less genre-oriented odd books.

If you are interested in online scams, here’s my site looking into the mess Chris Izer-B* has caused.   If you are unfamiliar with this situation, you will need to read from the beginning.  Otherwise, see you tomorrow!

 

Course correction

This post originally appeared on Houdini's Revenge

When I launched this site, I wanted it to be a place wherein the conspiracy theory and paranormal books I discussed on my odd books site could exist in their own little realm. When I discussed a book on a conspiracy theory, I kept my discussion to the book and it was difficult for some commenters because they would want to discuss the whole of the theory rather than the book. It seemed unfair to limit discussion, so I decided to split my sites up.

I never intended to engage in continual investigation into and potential debunking of current conspiracies. But I got comments from people who asked me to look into specific sites pushing Boston Bombing conspiracy theories, I looked into them and before I knew it, I was veering far off course. I really prefer looking into books and specific theories to investigating every little detail about every conspiracy theory that comes up. I prefer specificity and the finite, it seems.

overwhelmed
This picture of me was drawn in real-time. My pony tail was a mess.

This has become a problem because as I have investigated three specific elements of the Boston bombing – the carjacking, the Watertown shootout, and the capture of Dzhokhar in the boat – I have three entries that add up to over 75,000 words of text, and I am not even finished. And I don’t know if I will ever be finished because I’m still not finished reading all the sources online discussing these three topics. Trying to write coherently on a continually moving topic is tiresome and if I wanted to write this much on the topic, I would just write a book already.

When Anders Behring Breivik went on his rampage, I spent two months reading his interminable manifesto and wrote about 50,000 words on it, but when you can focus on one document and discuss it rather than the entirety of the rampage, for me it makes for a far more entertaining article for the reader and a far more interesting experience for me. As of right now, all the research I am doing into whether or not the panel in a specific boat could be written on with anything but a Sharpie is… well, it’s not that interesting to me and since I don’t know what writing instrument Dzhokhar used, or even of the writing really exists, all that research may be for naught.

So I am course correcting. I want to get back to this site being about books and documents and the occasional foray into discussing very interesting conspiracy sites. And I will still be debunking when necessary. I will just be debunking in a very specific manner.

whargarbl
A perfect encapsulation of 60% of the comments I receive on this site.

One problem I have, however, is that my initial impulse to permit people to talk about every element of a conspiracy may not be feasible, or at least it may not be feasible with the readership I have now. We’ll see, but if I continue to get angry lunatic whargarbl in the place of reasoned comments that understand that a book discussion is not the same as an overarching theory on everything that ever happened in the history of time, I may have to adjust that, as well. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

So stay tuned: I will be discussing two fascinating books about people missing in National Parks written by a Bigfoot researcher and former police officer named David Paulides and some less fascinating but very sappy paranormal books from Llewellyn. And oh yeah, I am tackling Michael Pearl, child beater in the name of God. You’re definitely gonna want to stick around for that.

A Town Called Suckhole by David Barbee

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book:  A Town Called Suckhole

Author:  David Barbee

Type of Book:  Fiction, bizarro

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Dude…

Availability:  Published by Eraserhead Press in 2011, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Poor David Barbee. He has the decidedly bad luck to have his book come up for review when I am bizarro-ed out. I don’t think I can be as enthusiastic about this book as I would have had I not been reading so much bizarro that not even the strangest bizarro trope seems the least odd or outre anymore. But even as I am thisclose to eliminating bizarro from my reading diet until I can enjoy it again, I can say that I found Barbee’s novel amusing. I have a fondness for southern-culture-on-the-skids and this book totally delivers on that front.

Excuse me as I try to summarize this book, because it’s pretty heavy, plot-wise: Suckhole is a degenerate Southern town. It’s pretty much The Hills Have Eyes, Two Thousand Maniacs! and The Dukes of Hazzard with a dash of Matlock if Matlock was a genetically mutated abomination. It’s white trash, Mad Max and the Land the Civil War Forgot. So it’s going to be nasty and offensive. Sheriff Jesco Ray Bledskoe becomes the law in Suckhole upon his father’s death/murder. Suckhole’s denizens have been falling victim to a killer and what with the Hell-Yeah Heritage Jamboree coming up, he has to find the killer and quickly. Because he is an inbred simpleton, Bledskoe knows he must get help to solve these murders so he finds a horrifying mutation named Dexter Spikes ,who is the only creature smart enough to be of any use to him. Together, these two characters explore a really foul, post-apocalyptic landscape to find a killer. There are subplots with feral children that seem to hark back to Children of the Corn and there are succubi that are out to thwart Bledskoe and Spikes, but mostly you want to focus on the sheriff and his strange buddy-cop configuration.

Despite not being wholly “into” extra bizarre bizarro at the moment, I was still very pleasantly surprised to see how Barbee’s writing has progressed. His NBAS book, Carnageland, was a good first attempt, but it had its problems. A Town Called Suckhole has its problems too, but far fewer, and the narrative in the book is far cleverer and absorbing. It’s nice to be able to see a writer’s style and skill improve from book to book. Barbee has definitely shown himself interested in the craft of creating a good book, as well as creating a good bizarro book.

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Boston Marathon Conspiracy Theories: The Shooting of Sean Collier

This post originally appeared on Houdini's Revenge

The post-bombing activities of April 18-19 were strange. Deeply weird. The actions of the Tsarnaev brothers, when verifiable, made no sense and the shooting of MIT police officer Sean Collier made so little sense that is has fueled a lot of speculation that the Tsarnaev brothers were not responsible for his murder at all.  The narrative of the murder of Sean Collier feeds a lot of “Dzhokhar Was Framed” theories and is almost a wholly separate conspiracy theory unto itself.

Increasingly, with the exception of the usual conspiracy theory suspects, I really do think the cause of all of the conspiracies created about the Boston bombings and the subsequent mayhem can be summed up in two statements:

1)  The FBI has yet again permitted an act of terrorism to occur in the USA due to another complete breakdown in intelligence gathering and sharing, and their investigative choices after the Boston bombing have raised more questions than they have answered.  I suspect the FBI has always been this much a mess but before the Internet it was harder for the average citizen to analyze their various errors.

2)  The mainstream media in the English-speaking world is mostly a disgrace.  I suspect that mainstream journalism has always been this much a mess but before the Internet it was harder for the average citizen to analyze their various errors.

Any analysis of how Sean Collier was shot to death can only come about by exploring the story with those two statements in mind.  Worse, given that this is yet another instance wherein the American public has to take the FBI’s word for it that there is proof the Tsarnaev brothers were involved in an atrocious activity, the discussion of Sean Collier has an unfortunate “second verse, same as the first” ring to it.   The FBI says they have proof, and more on that in a bit, but even if they have proof, the path to such proof is filled with detours that make it hard to put much faith in the idea that we will ever see anything about this case clearly.  As much as I urge everyone to have patience, to wait to see what the prosecution has in store for Dzhokhar, to wait to see what the FBI or the US Attorney General’s Office may eventually choose to share with us, I can see all too clearly why it is so many people are unwilling to wait.  Just the media idiocy with the Collier case alone is conspiracy fodder.

Continue Reading “Boston Marathon Conspiracy Theories: The Shooting of Sean Collier”

Godspeed, Iain

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Iain Banks lost his battle with gall bladder cancer today.  The Wasp Factory is one of the books most frequently mentioned to me as a book I should discuss on this site and it is an odd/sick book classic, a piece of dark genius.   Banks was an author who was truly sui generis and I hope when my time comes, I am able to go with the same black humor Banks showed at the end.

I felt a strange kinship with Banks because I know so few people in real life who never feel lonely.  He was raised an only child in a bookish home and as a result, he grew into an adult who never needed company because he was never at loose ends with himself and he didn’t feel the aching loneliness that seems so much a part of the lives of many people.  It’s a gift from the Universe to be given the sort of personality wherein one seldom if ever feels boredom or isolation from others.

Banks’ writing as Iain M. Banks informed a lot of how it is that I look at odd books.  It’s deeply saddening that he is gone.