Happy Pride everyone, in San Francisco and points beyond. No, I’m not there (at SF Pride), I’m afraid. I’m at Temple Fine Coffee and Tea, seeking caffeine and kibble. As in, consuming the former and tryna bring home the latter. But rest assured, even from 85 miles away I’ll spend the next 6 days tryina get that unh-chah-unh-chah-unh-chah-unh-chah rhythm outta my head. Somebody play some Tchaikovsky for me?
My erotic noir story “Hell on Wheels,” which was produced last year by the BBC, will be available for the Kindle within the next 24 hours or so for a “bargain price.” Just thought you might like to know.
Brian Herne’s White Hunters purports to be a history of “white hunters” in Africa — the term “white hunter” meaning a professional hunter, not just a Caucasian one. Sadly, it’s basically a collection of name-droppy anecdotes, with no intelligent synthesis whatsoever.
The book might be a reasonable road map to further studies on the subject, being a catalog of western hunters who worked in Africa. But this isn’t history. This is a series of book reports. It consists entirely of anecdotes culled from the memoirs of hunters, travelers and tourists, and brings nothing new to the table. There is no true synthesis whatsoever. The author occasionally tosses in an “As was typical in the African millieu of the time…” or “At the time, it was uncommon for…” but there is virtually no commentary or evaluation. It’s like he sat down with a bunch of memoirs and typed out the weirdest bits. In fact, it comes across like he didn’t retype, but clipped this stuff from Gutenberg and then paraphrased it. That seems likely, because of how intolerably long some of the anecdotes go on, long after it’s become clear they’re nothing more than anecdotes.
This approach is no more effective here than it was in Victor Ostrovsky’s By Way of Deception, which I detested even more. Herne has done a much better job than Ostrovsky of relying on first-hand, supported accounts, and in qualifying them where they might be less than factual. But then, the events related in Herne’s book are less critical in the details, since they’re presented as “rousing good tales.” I found them both rousing and good in quantities of one or two…as an entire book, they’re neither.
It’s a shame, too, because the topic of white hunters in Africa could be given a very interesting approach that incorporated synthesis of the times. Unfortunately, “the times” would have to be defined, which Herne doesn’t bother to do. The book’s marketing implies we’re talking about Victorian and Edwardian hunters, but then Herne careens all over the 20th century, even into the modern era. Huh? If he was going to do that, he should have written AN ACTUAL HISTORY of white hunting in Africa, instead of a series of anecdotes. Otherwise, he should have stuck with one general era or a couple of them, and drawn parallels that help define the times. Instead, he just blathered on indefinitely, unable to pick out the unifying threads in what he’d written (or perhaps had his research assistants read for him).
In the social sciences, I am fond of saying, the plural of anecdote is not data. And the plural of anecdote is also not “history.” In this case, the plural of anecdote is “mind-bending boredom.” Sorry.
I just found out my story “What Vacations Are For” will be in Rachel Kramer Bussel‘s anthology Best Bondage Erotica 2013, with a foreword by Graydancer.
Needless to say, I’m thrilled, even if I will be appearing alongside the nefarious likes of my far less talented competitor, N.T. Morley. The rest of the company, I’m sure, will more than make up for it.
Some say bondage is the ultimate intimacy. Once you have allowed yourself to fully explore your fantasies of giving in and surrendering to pleasure, you may find you need a firm but gentle hand to guide you. Let Best Bondage Erotica 2013 be your guidebook of everything BDSM. Editrix Rachel Kramer Bussel and her writers put it all out on the page in stories using everything from silk ties rope to shiny cuffs, blindfolds, wires and everything you can imagine and MORE. Best Bondage Erotica 2013 offers erotic insight for newbies and experienced players alike. These stories of forbidden desires and sexual fantasies, penned by the “masters and mistresses” of the genre, will shock, scintillate, and mesmerize.
[Link.]
Release date is December 11, 2012.
The great indie film “Once,” starring Irish singer-songwriter Glen Hansard and his collaborator Czech singer-songwriter Marketa Irglova, was apparently turned into a Broadway musical. I missed the whole thing. Fall asleep for one damn minute in this world and by the time you wake up, there’s some new Facetweet Tumblepress shit munching up the airwaves, Live Journal is owned by the Russians, Friendster is huge in the Philippines and your phone cashes checks.
Anyway, “Once” won the Best Musical Tony this year. Above, the cast performs at the awards ceremony. Keep an eye out for some major cello-fu; seriously, I didn’t even know you could pull shit like that with a cello strapped to your pievault. Way to go, cello dude.
Hansard and Irglova are great and “Once” is well worth checking out if you like melancholy, beautiful, highly atmospheric and melodic folk-pop.
Here are Hansard and Irglova performing what is to me the most beautiful song from the film, “Falling Slowly,” live at Amoeba Records (I think it’s the one on Haight Street, but it could be Berkeley) in 2007:
Jemaine Stardust
In honor of the 40th anniversary of the 40th anniversary of the release of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, witness Brett’s “frEAKy dREAm” from the Flight of the Conchords episode “Bowie’s In Space.” That’s some New Zealand comedy so good that it almost killed me when I first saw it.
Do they really like Bowie down under, man?
Where better?
In addition to Bret’s freaky dream, don’t miss the brilliant “Bowie’s in Space/Bowie2Bowie” medley from the same episode.
A few choice lyrics:
Isn’t it cold out in space, Bowie?
Do you want to borrow my jumper, Bowie?
Does the space cold make your nipples go pointy, Bowie?
Do you use your pointy nipples as telescopic antennae to transmit data back to Earth?
Bet you do, you freaky old bastard you
Hey Bowie, do you have one really funky sequined space suit?
Or do you have several ch-changes?
Do you smoke grass out in space, Bowie?
Or do they smoke Astroturf?
My good friend and fellow tawdry-taste glam-spammer Alex S. Johnson alerted me (as did several other sources) that yesterday, June 6, was the 40th anniversary of the release of David Bowie’s classic The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
This was one of my favorite albums when I was in the second half of high school and made a huge mark on my psychological (some would say “psychiatric”) development. Tell me straight, man, does that maybe explain some of those freaky danced-up spikers, man, like the quick fly rule jewels, the sky high rude games, and the heart stain spy game commanders on the wrapper taste folly flies of the monkey train?
Ever since those days, I’ve always subscribed to Bowie’s philosophy that if you can’t think of a phrase, let the streets make it up for you…or better yet, you make it up for them. In his world, it appears to have been the underground clubs of London. In mine, it’s the sewer-street sand castles and dreamy speaks of Squeesville, bubbled-up tight through a jigger of game-taming sting teasers.
Language-fu has always been one of my favorite sports, man, and Bowie did it as well as any freaked-out scribbly wibbler stale-nailed to the jeezy mudgang. I’m pretty sure the drugs really helped. In lasting tribute to Ziggy, I’m also sometimes tempted to lick my guitar.
Today, Ziggy Stardust the album remains eminently listenable, packed with happy earworms that burrow into my brain.
Happy anniversary, Zig, and don’t stay a stranger, man.
This came to me via Paul Goat Allen, who describes it (accurately) as “irreverent.” This is NOT SAFE FOR WORK, nor presumably for the rather conservative Mr. Bradbury.
But it’s just so $@$*@$*ing catchy.
By Way of Deception: The Making of a Mossad Officer, Victor Ostrovsky’s groundbreaking book on the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, came out in 1990. I’ve been sort of half-assedly planning on reading it ever since, and finally got around to it recently.
Unfortunately, it was a huge disappointment. The main problem is that the author doesn’t differentiate between his own experiences and things he’s reporting from other sources; it becomes fairly obvious when you’re reading it that most of the material is lifted — whether from rumor, innuendo, scuttlebutt or legitimate reporting in other sources, I don’t have the foggiest idea, because Ostrovsky’s got all the citation chops of a fourth-rate potboiler, not a serious academic or political book. It comes across as hearsay garbage. What’s more, while Ostrovsky may have broken some news at the time of first publication, there’s nothing in here that was the least bit shocking to me; much of it felt INCREDIBLY repetitious, especially in the first half.
Pretty much everything interesting is confined to the first half, where Ostrovsky discusses his training in Mossad operations; there, the details of spycraft are FASCINATING. Had the book been half as long, I would have given it 4 stars, probably. Had it been three-quarters as long, maybe three stars. But after the halfway mark, Ostrovsky just drones on and on and on and on with the same bland scandals that are basically hearsay. It ends up sounding like “Shooting the shit with the Mossad.” He he seems to be reporting most of these stories either unreferenced or taken from mainstream news stories, but damned if I can tell which is which.
What really made me feel burned, though, is that after a badly-paced second half that LITERALLY PUT ME TO SLEEP ON TWO SEPARATE OCCASIONS WHILE I STRUGGLED THROUGH IT, Ostrovsky tries to wrap it all up with a sort of vapid statement of his moral rectitude. He references an old joke that the worst thing a Mossad officer can say to another Mossad officer is “I hope I read about you in the papers.” He suggests that maybe it takes the light of public inquiry to change the Mossad’s ways.
Yeah…it all seems so quaint, post-9/11, post-Gulf II, post-Afghan War, post-globalization, following Europe’s mounting financial collapse…if the Mossad, or Israel in general, could be induced to change its ways by journalism, unfortunately Ostrovsky isn’t the one to do it, because his thinking and his reporting is too fragmented, confusing, and unclear.
If you’re interested in spycraft, read the first half of the book and skip the rest.
In keeping with a piece of advice from Ray Bradbury that has been making the rounds, in which he suggests that writers must have a slightly creepy love affair with books, I say emphatically that this week I am creepily in love with books about Sudan.
Today, I am particularly in love with Three Empires On the Nile, a brilliant, dry, inspiring and horrifying account of the colonial hijinx that led to the grotesque mismanagement of both Egypt and Sudan in the last part of the 19th century.
The book touches on the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire and the ascendency of British imperialism, with a cast of characters that includes a parade of colonial notables including Gladstone, Gordon, Kitchener and the corrupt pseudo-monarchs of the disintegrating Egyptian vassal state.
Its second half is concerned almost entirely with the rise and fall of the Mahdist State in what is today South Sudan; the bookends of the movement’s rise and fall were the massacres at Khartoum (1885), which saw the death of Charles Gordon, and Omdurman (1898), presided over by Lord Kitchener.
Expanding its scope to include the Egyptian, Ottoman, French, Belgian, and British politics of the time, Three Empires on the Nile is brutally sarcastic toward both Colonialism and Islamism in the way that only 100 years of hindsight can provide.
Filled with colonial pratfalls and oodles of Stupid Prime Minister Tricks, it’s a riveting study in Victorian politics as well as a solid piece of historical adventure horror…oh, and it’s also a history book, not a thriller. Then again, can’t it kind of be both? Hellz yeah, if you’re a Colonialism geek like me.
The 21st-century end of the Mahdist story, incidentally, is the Muslim Brotherhood, which descended directly from the Islamism that created that group and therefore ultimately Al Qaeda, and the coup that led to Sudan becoming the very first Sunni state governed by Sharia law.
But wait, there’s more; the British expeditions into southern Sudan were originally prompted by the slave trade, which was an atrocity perpetrated primarily by northern, lighter-skinned Arabic-speaking Muslim Sudanese against the southern tribal peoples, primarily Christian and animist.
Sound familiar? Why, yes, yes in fact, the racial, ethnic and religious factors that drove the slave trade in Gordon’s time are precisely what drive it today, along with the mass slaughter of Sudanese blacks by government-supported forces, including both Sudanese government troups and Arabic-speaking Janjaweed militias in Darfur and what is now South Sudan. (South Sudan seceded last year — successfully, apparently, with international help).
But what makes this book so enjoyable is the evident disgust it heaps on the political animals of Victorian England and the arrogant and criminal disregard they showed both for their own heroes (Gordon) and their subject peoples. Concerned with resources and markets, not people, Colonialists of this era often wrapped themselves in the mantle of humanitarianism in order to royally fuck shit up. I have no doubt that at times, they believed they had the best of intentions. Of course, the other side of the coin is the frank corruption and ineffectiveness of the Egyptian and Ottoman states — or, even more so, King Leopold, who never had any good intentions for his private corporate rule over the Congo.
The title is, I believe — like all the best history book titles — a double-entendre; “Three Empires on the Nile” could be the British, Ottoman and French Empires…or it could be the British Empire, the Mahdi State and the Egyptian Empire, which may rightly be called that insofar as its conquest of Sudan was, in the minds of its leaders, explicit imperial expansion. Corruption and Egypt’s dependence on Britain meant that it could never become a real empire — but one doesn’t need to read very deeply to see the similarities between atrocities of every flavor, and the irrelevance of all good intentions in doing anything more than justifying self-interest.
The book’s very last line says it all: “Today, the price of a child slave in Khartoum is $35.”
Three cheers for Gordon and Kitchener and Gladstone. Three cheers for Muhammad Ahmad, self-proclaimed messianic redeemer of the Islamic faith, and Isma’il Pasha, Khedive of Egypt. Now somebody stick a fork in our ass and turn us over, we’re done.