Barbary Shore

Have you checked out BarbaryShore.com? The website of an august local publisher called, well, Barbary Shore, this is your one stop shop for books by local authors — including the writing of Vincent Scotti Eirene, Jesse Hicks, Matt Stroud, and yours truly. What are you waiting for?

Filed under: books

Agrippa (a book of the dead)

Agrippa is a poem and a work of art in its own right, the text being a semi-autobiographical poem by William Gibson and the artwork being its mode of transmission: most famously, the poem itself was included on a 3.5-inch floppy disk programmed to erase itself after the first playback. The book that the disk accompanied was printed with photosensitive chemicals that were meant to eventually fade away. This is not unlike Mémoires by the Situationists Debord and Jorn, which featured a sandpaper cover, designed to devour any books that were unlucky enough to share shelf space with it!

As Gibson himself put it, around the time that the poem came out: “It starts around 1919 and moves up to today, or possibly beyond. If it works, it makes the reader uncomfortably aware of how much we tend to accept the contemporary media version of the past. You can see it in Westerns, the way the ‘mise-en-scene’ and the collars on cowboys change through time. It’s never really the past; it’s always a version of your own time.”

UC Santa Barbara has compiled a tremendous online archive for Agrippa (a book of the dead), containing scans of both editions of the book, the poem itself, video of the poem running on an Apple IIe (rather, an Apple IIe emulator), and an insane amount of archival documentation (essays, interviews, source images, letters, press releases and more).

[check out the online archive of Agrippa (a book of the dead): here.]

[check out "Books of Warfare: The Collaboration between Guy Debord & Asger Jorn from 1957-1959": here.]

Filed under: I am going to Mad Mex after this post, William Gibson, authors, books , a book of the dead, agrippa, Asger Jorn, cyberpunk, cyberspace, Guy Debord, Situationist International, william gibson

Rebellion, Revolution & Religiousness

[Osho: I hope that you can appreciate the fact that I have purposely chosen the silliest picture I could find of him!]

from Rebellion, Revolution & Religiousness:

Revolutions in the past have happened all around the world, but no revolution has succeeded in doing what it promised. It promised equality, without understanding the psychology of human individuality. Each human individual is so unique that to force them to equality is not going to make people happy, but utterly miserable.

I also love the idea of equality, but in a totally different way. My idea of equality is equal opportunity for all to be unequal, equal opportunity for all to be unique and themselves. Certainly they will be different from each other, and a society which does not have variety and differences is a very poor society. Variety brings beauty, richness, color.

But it has not yet dawned on the millions around the world that revolution has not helped, and they still go on thinking in terms of revolution. They have not understood anything from the history of man.

It is said that history repeats itself. I say it is not history that repeats itself; it only seems to repeat itself because man is absolutely unconscious and he goes on doing the same thing again and again without learning anything, without becoming mature, alert, and aware.

When all the revolutions have failed, some new door should be opened. There is no point in again and again changing the powerful into the powerless and the powerless into the powerful; this is a circle that goes on moving.

I don’t preach revolution. I am utterly against revolution. I say unto you that my word for the future, and for those who are intelligent enough in the present, is rebellion.

Filed under: I am a 14 year old girl, books, dead.

The Art Heist Gag Gang

note: My new novel, the Art Heist Gag Gang, will be out soon… in the meantime, I have decided to post the Introduction here…

Your author is an artiste, “of the most peculiar sort,” as William Gibson once wrote… or was that William Blake?

In this, a most peculiar memoir, Joseph L. “Lenny” Flatley demonstrates what can happen when our best and brightest minds are unable to follow their True Will. This is the natural end result of “trickle down” economics. The lack of options for our youth is but one sad instance of the neglect that is the birthright of so many of America’s youngest citizens. Not knowing any real empowerment, they turn to crime, they turn to drugs. But the artistic drive resides in all of us, regardless of class or race. The author of the book you are currently reading found no legitimate channels for his artistic impulse so he became an “existential outlaw,” of sorts.

I had dinner with Lenny not too long ago. Knowing that I only deal in cash, he brought my fee for this introduction in small bills, in a plain brown grocery bag. This sort of thing happens more often than you would think at Manhattan’s ‘21′ Club, but then again you are not a former U.S. Attorney General.

“What is it?” I asked Lenny, when it looked like he had about finished his Pan Seared Monkfish (prepared with a delicious Shallot and Parsley). “All this time, what is it that you were really looking for?”

He thought for a bit.

We tried the tiramisu.

And then his answer came, in one word.

“Love.”

Ramsey Clark
New York City
November, 2006

Filed under: As advertised on Myspace, books

There’s no such thing as hypnosis…

Hiding at home (like I do every St. Patrick’s Day) I decided to catch up on some reading I had been meaning to get around to. Thanks to my newfound skill of speed reading I should be able to finish about twenty-seven books this afternoon.

The first on my list was Stephen Heller’s Monsters and magical sticks : there’s no such thing as hypnosis? Opening it up randomly, I found this in the introduction by Robert Anton Wilson:

Filed under: Fnord., books, erin go braless

What do you think?

some examples of literary greatness.

I am almost done with the first draft of my novel, and I need a title.  I am currently trying to decide between one of these two… what do you think?

• My Prostate!
• Retarded Nietzsche.

Filed under: books