Tag Archives: books

book report: 1900 or the Last President, by Ingersoll Lockwood

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A book I wouldn’t have read, save for Ingersoll Lockwood’s memetic resonance. Briefly put, he wrote children’s books with a hero called Baron Trump, back before the First World War. As Barron Trump (aged 14) now towers over his father, resembling nothing so much as a genetically-enhanced Astartes, it seems increasingly likely that Lockwood had visions of a future where Barron has indeed become a kind of godlike figure.

1900 or The Last President is, by contrast, a rather dry and tedious little book about the dissolution of the United States with a charismatic, well-meaning President who manages to fuck everything up. It has, however, memetic echoes; for example, as the new President, Bryan, is elected:

In less than half an hour, mounted policeman dashed through the streets calling out: “Keep within your houses; close your doors and barricade them. The entire East side is in a state of uproar. Mobs of vast size are organizing under the lead of Anarchists and Socialists, and threaten to plunder and despoil the houses of the rich who have wronged and oppressed them for so many years. Keep within doors. Extinguish all lights.”

There’s also a curious foreshadowing of the recent silver rush (writing in February 2021):

The first year of the Silver Administration was scarcely rounded up, ere there began to be ugly rumours that the Government was no longer able to hold the white metal at a parity with gold. “It is the work of Wall Street,” cried the friends of the President, but wiser heads were shaken in contradiction, for they had watched the sowing of the wind of unreason, and knew only too well that the whirlwind of folly must be reaped in due season.

The country had been literally [sic] submerged by a silver flood which had poured its argent waves into every nook and cranny of the Republic, stimulating human endeavour to most unnatural and harmful vigour. Mad speculation stalked over the land.  […] Every scrap and bit of the white metal that they could lay their hands upon, spoons hallowed by the touch of lips long since closed in death, and cups and tankards from which grand sires had drunken were bundled away to the mints to be coined into “people’s dollars.”

I was also amused by this, very much of its time:

The black man, ever at the heels of his white brother, set to rule over him by an inscrutable decree of nature, came forth too in thousands, chatting and laughing gayly, careless of the why or wherefore of his white brother’s deep concern, and powerless to comprehend it had he so desired.

I plan to read the Baron Trump novels next, which promise to be more engaging, and even more memetically relevant.

book report: the Kybalion

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A classic modern occult work, I would imagine composed in the early 20th Century; many have suspected the author is in fact William Atkinson and having read several of his books I would agree there is a similar style and approach. It begins:

The purpose of this work is not the enunciation of any special philosophy or doctrine, but rather is to give to the students a statement of the Truth that will serve to reconcile the many bits of occult knowledge that they may have acquired, but which are apparently opposed to each other and which often serve to discourage and disgust the beginner in the study. Our intent is not to erect a new Temple of Knowledge, but rather to place in the hands of the student a Master-Key with which he may open the many inner doors in the Temple of Mystery through the main portals he has already entered.

The entire book is written in a stuffy but readable Edwardian mode. It is mostly commentary on seven principles:

1. The principle of mentalism

“The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental.”

2. The principle of correspondence

“As above, so below; as below, so above.” […] This principle embodies the truth that there is always a correspondence between the laws and phenomena of the various planes of being and life.”

3. The principle of vibration

“Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.”

4. The principle of polarity

“Everything is dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.”

5. The principle of rhythm

“Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum-swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates.”

6. The principle of cause and effect

“Every cause has its effect; every effect has its cause; everything happens according to law; chance is but a name for law not recognized; there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the law.”

7. The principle of gender

“Gender is in everything; everything has its masculine and feminine principles; gender manifests on all planes.”

I would describe it as a work of philosophical occultism; there are no practical techniques here. In essence, it treats of cosmic laws, and their manipulation. Hermetic occultism is about transcending our mundane reality, in order to see and be more, and to thus control the lower:

We overcome the lower laws, by applying still higher ones – and in this way only, But we cannot escape Law or rise above it entirely.

Having studied the occult for a decade and more, I found much of it obvious; though I can’t say if that is because the Kybalion’s themes have been so echoed in subsequent works, or because it borrows from earlier works, or both. However, it would be an interesting read for anyone beginning to study the philosophical occult; and even I found much of interest, e.g.

The word Positive means something real and strong, as compared with a Negative unreality or weakness. Nothing is further from the real facts of electrical phenomenon. The so-called Negative pole of the battery is really the pole in and by which the generation or production of new forms and energies is manifested. There is nothing “negative” about it. The best scientific authorities now use the word “Cathode” in place of “Negative,” the word Cathode coming from the Greek root meaning “descent; the path of generation, etc.” From the Cathode pole emerge the swarm of electrons or corpuscles; from the same pole emerge those wonderful “rays” which have revolutionized scientific conceptions during the past decade. The Cathode pole is the Mother of all of the strange phenomena which have rendered useless the old textbooks, and which have caused many long accepted theories to be relegated to the scrap-pile of scientific speculation. The Cathode, or Negative Pole, is the Mother Principle of Electrical Phenomena, and of the finest forms of matter as yet known to science.

For the time, pre-WW1, this is an interestingly Taoist insight.

That is, that lack itself generates, by its very lack & vacuum, an enabling suction. Imbalance is the driving force for balance. As in The Four Quartets, the perfect figure is found not in static being but rather in becoming; in the ceaseless motion of death and rebirth, striving and becoming, failure and regeneration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ugc5FZsycAw

book report: Old School by Tobias Wolff

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Another in my run of university/school-themed novels, Tobias Wolff’s Old School is, on the face of it, a rehashing of the standard “working class protagonist gets scholarship to elite institution and observes the rich kids’ lives” trope. The plot centres around a 1960s boarding school, a clique of 6th form budding writers, the school magazine, and guest writers who come to give speeches and “advice”. I really enjoyed the portrayal of these adolescents all trying to write like Hemingway – it’s inconceivable today, even in an elite institution; even at my (elite) university, the English Lit students were almost completely uninterested in reading, let alone in learning how to think or write.

Wolff really captures the sense of excitement some feel with novels; that great literature is wisdom literature. Although Wolff demeaned himself by jumping aboard the “Trump is literally Hitler!” train, one can forgive him because he has a Beowulf ‘stache and a great face, like an old rain-worn statue, and after all Old School is partly about the disjunction between the writer as man and the writer as book.

Look at that ‘stache. That’s a ‘stache that means business.

I especially relished the description of Robert Frost and Ayn Rand visiting the school; Rand is simply ghastly, strident & self-mythological for all her insight & intellect. There’s also a fine portrayal of the schoolmasters, their life bonded to the school and the pupils; their difficulty in forming a self separate from their role as teacher. The narrative control is impressive, the focus mostly on the boy protagonist and his peers, but then effortlessly flickering onto the teachers; for example, a teacher who quits the school:

In former times Arch had supposed that his sense of being a distinctive and valuable man proceeded from his own qualities, and that they would sustain him in that confidence wherever he happened to be. He’d never imagined that this surety was conferred on him by others, by their knowing and cherishing him. But so it was. Unrecognised, he had become a ghost, even to himself.

I was forearmed against the book by the surname, “Wolff”. I wearily imagined a kind of Philip Roth “look at how Jewish I am!” exercise, but while the protagonist’s Jewish background drives the plot & character development, it’s not too obtrusive, or not obnoxiously so. I was reminded, subtly, of The Great Gatsby, another story about a (presumably) Jewish parvenu and self-mythologiser in WASP-world. The subtleness is the thing here – I probably wouldn’t have noticed Gatsby is most likely Jewish were I not in the habit of Noticing; and likewise with Wolff’s novel, the narrator doesn’t really think of himself as Jewish, so only experiences a mild sense of friction, of unbelonging in the WASPy school – but that mild friction generates, as it were, a pearl. Deception, illusion, a metamorphic & chameleon self, is so central to the protagonist’s Jewish being, that his very attempt to articulate his unbelonging becomes deceit: he plagiarises another Jewish writer’s short story because it so clearly expresses his own unease and pretense; pretending to be another pretender, to confess his pretense. All too circumvoluted and frankly Jewish for the Anglo-Saxons, it’s perfect matter for a novel.

book report: Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

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A Christmas book for this old dog. There aren’t many modern books I would look forward to, as most of my favourite writers have died; Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was a great read and resonated curiously with my own preoccupations, 15 years ago (English magic). JS & Mr N is a strange beast indeed, a Fantasy work set in Georgian England during the Napoleonic wars, and written in very passable Jane Austen; I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who loves the Game of Thrones books, but it would also probably irritate those who sneer at anything lower than Henry James.

It also made a great, surprisingly unpozzed TV drama:

Her later & related short story collection, The Ladies of Grace Adieu, was surprisingly excellent, but Clarke is far from a prolific author and so I was astounded & pleased to hear of Piranesi. Where the Jonathan Strange world was, if you like, Fantasy filtered through Jane Austen, Piranesi is somewhat Borgesian but quite often reminded me of my own short stories –  although Clarke is a little older than me, we hail from a similar part of England and so perhaps there was something in the air. Piranesi is a curious meeting of genres – an allegorical fable at the beginning, later it became more concretely-grounded in an everyday, quasi-plausible reality, while never sinking to the mundane. As it opens, the main character is almost totally alone in a vast stone building of great halls & staircases, full of statues and floods. The lower halls are permanently underwater, and clouds form in the upper halls; fish and birds abound. The narrator, Piranesi, wanders these halls in his own routines & understanding; I say “his” but I was sure he was a she until his gender was specifically mentioned. He survives on fish soups; he avoids the floods; he takes care of skeletons he has found among the alcoves, regarding them as other people who just happen to be dead. As the novel progresses, he encounters others, strange visitors to his halls.

The prose is unflashy and pleasing:

In my mind are all the tides, their seasons, their ebbs and their flows. In my mind are all the halls, the endless procession of them, the intricate pathways. When this world becomes too much for me, when I grow tired of the noise and the dirt and the people, I close my eyes and I name a particular vestibule to myself; then I name a hall. I imagine I am walking the path from the vestibule to the hall. I note with precision the doors I must pass through, the rights and lefts that I must take, the statues on the walls that I must pass. 

As I began reading the book, I was alone in a vast stone building of great antiquity, free to wander the halls and staircases without a mask, for there were none to meet – not even ghosts, for the thousands who have died here, over the centuries, died at peace; there are statues but also bookshelves and paintings and sofas, a pingpong table, a kitchen, a stove; and, mercifully, no floods; and so the book had a special significance for me, constructing my own private rituals and order amidst a Piranesian world:

Il pozzo, tavola XIII dalle “Carceri d’invenzione” di Giovanni Battista Piranesi
(Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Roma – ANSA)

book report: Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld

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One of my “I didn’t finish the book” reviews, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep. Like a lot of these university/school novels, the dirt poor protagonist has won a scholarship to an elite institution where all the other pupils can trace their family back to the Mayflower. I wouldn’t say it’s a bad book by any means, I just found myself unable to engage with it so gave up about 10% of the way in. It felt inauthentic and a bit too creative-writery to me, a common failing of most modern novels; for example Donna Tartt’s The Secret History also felt like something of a creative writing exercise, albeit one that had burst through the constraints & niceties of its apparent origin. Prep just felt lame, formulaic, everything you would expect from a modern, successful novel: carefully attuned to the needs & phobias of New York publishing, and unilluminated by even a flicker of real passion or creativity or intelligence – at least in the first 10%, which was as far as I got before I decided I’d be more intellectually nourished by Baldur’s Gate 2.

 

book report: Last Call, by Tim Powers

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My first Tim Powers book was the great Declare. I like European history and spy thrillers and Fantasy, so for me Declare was like Alan Furst’s Dark Star, impregnated by The Dark is Rising. Alas, everything else of his I’ve read has been interesting & well-written, but unengaging – at least for me.

Last Call is one of the unengaging reads, for me. As far as I could tell, it’s about a guy who lost his soul in a poker game, to his father, who blinded him with a Tarot card when he was a small boy, and now he’s in Las Vegas with a Greek neighbour who has a huge moustache, and his sister, who is also Isis, trying to do something to play poker with his father again, and win this time. It’s occasionally difficult to follow, as the father figure has several identities so I often thought “who is this, again?” and also I found it a big of a slog so read it in pieces over several weeks, forgetting parts of the plot en route.

It is however well-reviewed elsewhere, and not a bad book by any means. I like this kind of magic realism, where instead of an outright Fantasy world of dragons & whatnot, you have the modern world in all its mundane grime & absurdity, overlaid with strange magics. In this, it resembles Twin Peaks, the last season of which was also partly set in Las Vegas. Powers is good at this, e.g. the edifices of gambling:

Leon had suspected for years that the mannequins in the built-to-be-bombed houses out at Yucca Flats in the 1950s had been, unknown even to the technicians who had set them up, sacrifices to the gods of chaos that were about to be invoked by the detonation of the atomic bomb, and it had seemed to him, too, that the multitude of statues around Las Vegas, from the stone Arabs in front of the Sahara on the Strip to the towering figure of Vegas Vic over the Pioneer Club on Fremont Street, exposed constantly to the sun and the rain, were offerings to the random patterns of the weather, another manifestation of the chaos gods. Chaos and randomness, after all, in the form of gambling, were the patron saints of the city, and had to be appeased.

I found the characters utterly uninteresting, flat, American and kind of pointless, but I suspect that’s just a personal reaction. As I get older my tastes become narrower & more violent. I’ll probably try at least one other Powers novel, in case it captures some of Declare’s, well, power.

book report, Calm Before The Storm (Dave Hayes/Praying Medic)

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Well, I came across Praying Medic aka Dave Hayes through my own Q researches, and decided to buy his first Q Chronicles book when I needed to add costs to get free Amazon postage on some booze. It’s a good read, self-published but very well-edited: I am normally irritated by typos and bad grammar in new, mainstream-published books, so Hayes’ book is testament to how much one can achieve with one or two pair of eyes, sans an expensive media machine.

Hayes writes much as he speaks, in a clear, intelligent, approachable style. The book is divided into chapters, e.g. “Admiral Rogers and No Such Agency”, “Huma and HUMA”, “The Clinton Foundation.” He’s clearly done his research, even as he carefully simplifies it into manageable chunks. It’s hard to isolate anything especially quotable, as it’s all much of a muchness, that is, lucid & no more complicated than it needs to be. 

I would definitely recommend it for anyone new or reasonably new to Q. Even I, who have followed Q since early 2018, found new things to contemplate, so I dare say anyone save an utter Q-savant would benefit from the book. Hayes avoids anything too nutty (even if it is true) so it would also make a good gift for normies who are beginning to ask questions but don’t want the full Lizard People experience.

book report, Black Swan (Nassim Taleb)

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A book I’ve heard about for at least a decade, but only now got down to reading after my Kindle broke and I decided to get into my many many unread paper books. It’s a great read, albeit one best taken in small doses; you certainly could read the whole thing in a few afternoons but it’s better to read a few pages then think, I think.

Taleb’s central point seems to be that our humanly-devised models of reality cannot predict everything, and we can’t even determine the limits of our competence; so we don’t know what we can’t predict – at the best, we can assume there are things we can’t predict, which stand on the margins of our science like sea serpents drawn on maps – here be dragons, Hic sunt dracones on the Hunt-Lenox globe.

It is therefore imprudent to build systems which will fail too heavily upon contact with the unexpected.

Taleb’s style is not for everyone. He leads to philosophical points through personal anecdotes, usually about unshaven, hairy-handed working men from the 2nd or 3rd-world who can barely read but are smarter than all the Harvard PhDs; there are several anecdotes about Taleb at conferences where he outrages academics with his blunt manner & wisdom. I don’t really mind the near-constant sense of Taleb’s ego, as he has the ballsiness, achievement, and intellect to justify a certain self-satisfaction; I merely withdraw from his worldliness, his lack of a spiritual dimension. He’s an exemplar of Rene Guenon’s Reign of Quantity, a man who sees everything in quantitative terms; thus missing the element of Fate.

There is nonetheless a great deal to enjoy, many passages I marked, e.g. :

In real life you do not know the odds; you need to discover them, and the sources of uncertainty are not defined.

and

The notion of future mixed with chance, not a deterministic extension of your perception of the past, is a mental operation that our mind cannot perform. 

and

Likewise, do not try to predict precise Black Swans – it tends to make you more vulnerable to the ones you did not predict.

Taleb’s worldview is alien to my own; he’s one of these rootless cosmopolitans who lives in major cities – could live nowhere else – even as he talks about his ancestral hometown as the source of his wisdom and clarity. He would probably regard anyone who prefers to be rooted among his folk as a provincial loser and a racist, as if for all his intelligence he cannot quite bear to scrutinise the magic R word (or he doesn’t want to forfeit his conferences and interview requests and literary celebrity).

There is a slight sense of emptiness about his great intellect and learning – I want to ask, what is all this for? why be so smart? just to make more money? But that’s also testament to his greatness – were he a mediocre pop-science writer, the question would not arise.

understanding misunderstanding

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I was reading Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan on my balcony, in the few hours of direct sunlight I can enjoy,

and found myself repeatedly baffled by his mathematical/statistical explanations. To be fair, Taleb provides warning notes like “the non-mathematical reader can skip to the end of this section”, however he also strives to make it explicable enough to the layman.

Each time my brain came up short, I read on with disengaged gears for a while, then realised I hadn’t taken anything in, and paused. I then went back and re-read, to identify and analyse my mental breaking point. It was always a term that Taleb hadn’t defined and a layman couldn’t possible figure out from the context. I realised I couldn’t make head nor tails of it and just read on to the next patch of firm ground.

I would estimate my IQ as firmly midwit, i.e. about 105-110. I have neither aptitude for, nor interest in, logic or mathematics or abstractions. My cognitive resources are definitely limited, in relation to my ambitions & interests; however, I often outperform people who are clearly smarter than me, I think because of some ingrained habits of thought & study: one of which is, when perplexed, to ask Why don’t I understand? What don’t I understand?

There is a great difference between casting the book aside, and analysing the specific point of difficulty. For example, with Plato my problem is broader, more general: I just don’t get his point, as often there is no point, just Socrates babbling and leering about wisdom at some adolescent boy, and the reader is supposed to be positively struck by it all. With Taleb, it’s always just a question of terminology.

I would recommend the exercise of questioning one’s own cognitive limits: for one thing, instead of feeling utterly retarded, one can identify a specific difficulty; and for another, it most likely sharpens whatever intellect one has.

book report: The Hounds of the Morrigan

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Pat O’Shea’s children’s classic, The Hounds of the Morrigan, published in 1985 after 13 years of writing and presumably rewriting and editing and authorial hardship. I read it a few times in my teenage years and revisited it over Christmas, to my benefit.

It’s a very good if not perfect or great work. Although its publication date coincides with the glut of´80s D & D Fantasy novels, it’s a very different beast: it could have been written in the 1950s, where it is set, in a barely-modern Ireland suffused with mystery and superstition and Gaelic divinities. The story is episodic and at times unsatisfying, as two Irish children basically hop from one mythic difficulty to another, each time helped out by Gaelic deities. However, it’s only unsatisfying if you’re reading it as a modern novel; if you read it as a typical fairy tale it’s perfectly enjoyable and indeed meritorious. It is a gorillion times better than the one drearily bearable Harry Potter book I endured. There are many fine mythic notes, e.g. as the children are being pursued by the eponymous hounds, they are warned to walk but never run if the hounds are within sight:

‘Hunting is one thing; catching is another thing entirely. You have a long way to go and you have started gently. Don’t think it is easy not to run. You are only thinking it’s easy because you have never been hunted by a beast of prey.’

‘Beast of prey?’ Pidge echoed with a shiver. ‘Are we prey?’

‘Not unless you run. Only if you run. You will be followed but not hunted, do you understand? You may run but never within sight of the hounds.‘

This explained for me something of Vox Day’s attitude. There are also some nice observations of human nature:

When a person lives in the country where the population is sparse, he doesn’t get much chance to study things like sneers. With so few people about, the one sneer of the week could well be happening in the far side of the parish and he’d miss it if he wasn’t there. On the other hand, there could even be six sneers per hour at the farm a half a mile away and he wouldn’t get the chance to see them. For as sure as anything, the ones who are good at sneering, become best at smiling when a visitor arrives.

I have had recent opportunity to observe Millennial/Gen X Irish and they are definitely different to the English; there is a certain fey note, an anarchic strain even as they are all seemingly one world government New World Order fans and think the EU and George Soros are the best things since sliced bread. It is sad to think that even now Ireland is being colonized by Arabs, Pakistanis, and negroes, and that (given birth rates) the country will be wholly non-white in a hundred years, the progressive Open Borders/Soros agenda having utterly destroyed the Irish beyond the wildest dreams of Oliver Cromwell – and that the Irish are happily acquiescent, indeed joyful about their extermination.

However, I also wondered if the mythic forms of e.g. the Morrigan and Cuchulain are so deep and so old that they will eventually reassert themselves. There is something intractable about the Irish myths, that I wonder if a mere generation or two of liberal degeneracy is enough to eradicate them; will the children or grandchildren of the current Sorosian retards be fighting a race war under the banner of the old Gaelic gods, cursing their idle, liberal forebears?