March 24, 2008
Not the Yellow Brick Road
The title -- "Motherfuckers: The Auschwitz of Oz" -- tells you it's an unusual novel. But it still doesn't prepare you for the story (or the swastika on the cover). Which is why "Horror Panegyric," published today by Savoy Books, works so handily.
As Keith Seward explains in his introductory essay:
Motherfuckers' principals are Meng and Ecker, twins who had been subject to "scientific" experiments by Josef Mengele. After the war they find themselves in northern England, waiting for Lord Horror the way others wait for Godot. Ecker is rational but violent, Meng is a mutant whose huge cock and tits are nothing compared to the mutations of his mind. Not Holocaust survivors in any sense you've ever seen before, Meng and Ecker have adopted the ways of their captors -- the bloodlusts and hates. However, there is nothing paramilitary about them. They're not neo-Nazis or skinheads. They're more like the ultraviolent droogs of A Clockwork Orange, though it is quite possible that the droogs would not feel any affinity in return. Meng and Ecker are even further out in some post-war delirium. Auschwitz, meet Oz.
"Motherfuckers" is the third in a series of novels by the British writing and publishing team David Britton and Michael Butterworth. The other two are "Lord Horror" (now out of print) and "Baptised in the Blood of Millions." They succeed as "satire via hyperbole and excess," Seward writes, by applying to literature what he calls "the Boschian method":
• "time no longer flows in a straight line"
• "history loses its coordinate points and therefore its constancy
• "cause and effect are sundered"
• "space loses its divisions"
• "motion loses its efficacy"
• "gravity loses its inescapability"
• "life loses its phyla"
• "characters mutate"
• "behaviours lose their norms. Or rather, norms are represented not as injunctions but as worst-case scenarios"
• "art loses its conventions"
"Sure, there are writers who 'push the envelope,'" Seward adds. "But Motherfuckers does not just push the envelope. It beats at it with its fists, kicks, bites, and stabs the envelope. No matter how jaded a reader you are, no matter how much you've read your Henry Miller and Marquis de Sade, this is the book that will leave you feeling bad for the envelope. After Motherfuckers, it will never be the same again."
The police in Manchester, England (where Britton and Butterworth are based), didn't appreciate the idea of "satire via hyperbole and excess." Not long after "Lord Horror" was published, in 1989, the pair paid for their provocations in jail time and other forms of harrassment. Half the print run was confiscated, and a judge declared the book obscene, "less for its sex or violence than for anti-semitic ravings put into the mouths of anti-semitic characters," Seward notes. (The fact that the title character of "Lord Horror" is based on the World War II British fascist William Joyce, popularly known as Lord Haw-Haw, apparently failed to strike the judge as relevant.)
Britton went to prison for four months. Instead of discouraging him, the sentence hardened his resolve. It was in prison that he conceived the story of "Motherfuckers."
Here's a taste of it, taken from "Horror Panegyric," which offers excerpts of all three novels:
Fifty years on, Horror had confided to Ecker, Auschwitz would be a recognisable brand name, a mythic character as well-known as Sherlock Holmes or Tarzan. A fortune awaited the author who could bring 'Mr Auschwitz' to life. To recreate the persona of Auschwitz would be an ordained mission. Auschwitz, the holy end-all of life's futile pattern, slinking through the subconscious of humanity, the one archetypal riff common to all nightmares, fuelled on the anvil of Little Richard.In a hundred years, Auschwitz would form its own genre and become the most successfully marketed product in the history of the world, a name as well-known globally as Coca Cola, taking all media under its encompassing umbrella. The camps were the obvious ultimate enclosed world, the desired image of world television, beamed by satellite into each city, town and village, ideal for community soap operas (a story of everyday life on the edge of life), of science fiction time travel (travel back through your life and end it in Auschwitz). In this televised scenario thhe dog-boys loomed large as Heathcliff doomed lovers, the spice of sexy bodice-rippers which thrilled millions of women. Guilt would never stand in the way of commerce ...
Seward calls "Motherfuckers" a masterpiece and compares it to the works of the Marquis de Sade and William S. Burroughs. After reading it myself, I'm inclined to agree. But he prefers not to emphasize "the rectitude of these books" for their moral instruction. "You can read them like the Gospel, if you want, and draw out the lessons," he writes. "But that's not really the point. These are not moral books. They're good books."
To read Seward's entire essay, go here.
Posted by jherman at 2:43 PM
March 22, 2008
A View from the Top
Things are going so well in Iraq that, as the headline says, "Pentagon Urges Delay in U.S. Troop Reductions in Iraq." Or as retired four-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey said the other day at the Council on Foreign Relations, "If you look at the totality of our experience in Iraq, it's been a major disaster. There's no two ways about it."
(You've heard that before, of course. There's also McCain's way -- a k a the BananaRepublican way.)
Here's something else McCaffrey said that I'm sure you've heard: Things are going so well that "the Maliki government right now" is "largely dysfunctional. To wit -- if you went to any one of Iraq's provinces and asked, 'Is there a federal government that is dominant in electrical energy, the oil business, health, education, security?' The answer would be, 'No.'" But this, he added, is "not to imply the country is in chaos." After all, things are going so well.
"The change in Iraq is like night and day," McCaffrey said. "The violence is down enormously. It's gone from bordering on the edge of all-out civil war to completely different circumstances." How different? Well, there are six million people in Baghdad, "all of them armed."
Here's another way to say how swell it's going:
There's "still massive unemployment. Our allies are leaving." And "there is a complete lack of political domestic support to continue the war." (I think he meant political support in the U.S., minus McCain and Joe Lieberman et al.)
So Jane Arraf, the former CNN Baghdad Bureau Chief, asked, "What do you think Iraq is going to look like in five years?'
"I don't know," McCaffrey said. "I think it's hard to imagine that anyone thinks an all-out civil war to settle the political struggle is a good outcome. I think there's a fear on the part of the Iraqi leadership that all-out civil war will be a blood bath that'll yield Pol Pot's Cambodia." That's how really well things are going.
"The problem," he added, is whether "the Constitution we issued them [is] appropriate for that people and this time. I think there's a good argument that it isn't. So I'd be unsurprised if two years from now there isn't some hotshot two-star general as head of government in Iraq, and I'm not so sure that wouldn't serve the interests of the Iraqi people and their neighbors as well as some of the alternatives."
Which is to say that things are going really really well.
Consider this: "The Sunnis figured out that we're leaving -- and by the way, we are leaving in the next 36 months," he said. Many have become our paid allies for the moment. There are "80,000 primarily Sunni insurgents that we're paying $300 a month to guard their own village[s], their own neighborhood[s], and that has defused an awful lot of the violent insurgency struggle that we are trying to dominate." This comes to $24 million a month for bribes to the tribes. Nearly $300 mil a year. Chickenfeed.
Some more good news: "Your Air Force -- our principal fighter aircraft, probably a quarter of them are down now -- F-15s -- and will never fly again. And the tanker fleet is broken. If you want to have a global air force, there's no sense in buying one unless you buy the tanker fleet to sustain it. Our airlift assets are being ground down by overuse and no resources. Our C-5A aircraft are busted. They're over." Also, "we now have 124,000 contractors in Iraq. They're doing all our retail [and] wholesale logistics. Damn near. They're doing all of our long-haul communications. ... We've been forced to go to contractors to carry out absolutely what our military functions [are]."
But here's what McCaffrey called the truly "good news": Not only has the current Secretary of Defense Bill Gates "restored sanity to the national security process," but the U.S. commander in Iraq is a superhero straight out of the comics: "David Petraeus, personally, I think may be the most talented person I ever met in my life. ... He looks like a movie star. He can jump over high hedges in a single bound. A doctorate from Princeton. He likes being in the public eye. And our U.S. Ambassador there, Ryan Crocker, is as good as he is."
If that's not proof that things are going really, really, really well in Iraq, then McCaffrey is a monkey's uncle. Meanwhile, the even better good news is that when you look at the worldwide terrorist picture, "the Saudi royal family is no longer funding Al Qaeda."
We do have a leetle problem, though. The threat from Al Qaeda "has morphed," he said. "If you asked me to identify the capital of terrorism, I'd be more likely to say London than Damascus and more likely to say Paris and Hamburg than Teheran." And he predicts, "in the first term of the next administration there will be an attack on the U.S."
Why so? Because it's going so well.
Posted by jherman at 1:58 PM
March 19, 2008
Five Years Later
Words won't do:
Postscript: Now have a look at Bearing Witness. As a friend says, "Won't see thees on CNN or FUX news."
Posted by jherman at 9:37 AM
March 15, 2008
Putting Him Where He Belongs
I couldn't be there for his speech to the financial bigwigs, but Gail Collins was. Her column this morning shows yet again that the President With His Head Up His Ass is well named. She writes:
The president squinched his face and bit his lip and seemed too antsy to stand still. As he searched for the name of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia ("the king, uh, the king of Saudi") and made guy-fun of one of the questioners ("Who picked Gigot?"), you had to wonder what the international financial community makes of a country whose president could show up to talk economics in the middle of a liquidity crisis and kind of flop around the stage as if he was emcee at the Iowa Republican Pig Roast.
The column is also charming proof that Collins must be a fan of the 1940 screwball comedy "His Girl Friday" and Walter J. Burns, the editor of The Morning Post, who orders an underling in the newsroom, "Take the President's speech and run it on the funny page."
Burns has plenty of gems like that. Here's another: "Now, listen, Duffy -- I want you to tear out the whole front page... That's what I said -- the whole front page! Never mind the European war! We've got something a whole lot bigger than that."
Posted by jherman at 8:48 AM
March 7, 2008
Take the What Train?
Some folks in Montreal want to name a busy subway station for the late great jazz pianist Oscar Peterson in the Montreal nabe where he was born and raised, The Globe and Mail reports.
But zehr eez a leetle problem: The station is already named for Lionel-Adolphe Groulx, a locally famous Quebec priest notable for his xenophobic racism (a k a "nationalistic" beliefs).
Not to worry. A McGill University professor suggests that the station name be shared. He favors "paying homage to both men" (you read that right) with the hyphenated name Station Oscar Peterson-Lionel Groulx.
"Yes, there is a disagreeable underside to the man -- the anti-Semitism, the fascist sympathies," the prof concedes, referring to Groulx of course. But he tells the paper, "I feel uncomfortable about erasing his impact from Quebec history." (If only.) And the prof adds, "We could enjoy the pleasure of an interesting meeting of two important historical figures." (You read that right, too.)
"Yeah," says a friend of mine, a Montreal native who fled the city long ago. "For an allegedly enlightened society, a great number of hardcore fascist bastids is still well entrenched there. I theenk, senor, Kweebek could be considered der Österreich of N. America."
Postscript: Rename the station? Forget it.
Posted by jherman at 9:25 AM
March 6, 2008
Blog Miscellany
A reader from Oregon writes, "Help us, we who check your blog regularly!! Please add something -- ANYTHING!!!! I forget about it being there and then get my special dose of heavy metal speed before I can mute the chaos! -- Your loving fans in the thousands ..."
OK, you asked for it. Here's anything:
A reader from Yurp writes, "Ach!! The Blinding Titties! I'm wearing a string of garlic around my neck now which I clutch feverishly whenever they appear ... and I'm stuffing chunks of garlic in my ears whenever I get hit by the Torture Hit Parade (Actually, I luuuuv it ... Our kraut secretary of the interior, by the way, has "The History of Torture" on his coffee table...) ... Nader: Isn't he, in effect, saying that those of his Florida voters who would have switched to Gore in the case of his abstinence would have given Al a fat lead? However, math is not my forte ... P.S. The Ladykiller rides again...He is now wreaking havoc in Paris ... Sauve qui peut ..."
And another from the Southwest boondocks: "Have you seen this? The mind boggles at possibilities in the hands of neo-quizzers. 'twould make water boarding obsolete, not ta mench human cattle prod ta line 'em up ... Forget da arbeit macht frei signs."
Then yesterday there was David Brooks to the grammar born: "I'm far from the biggest Hillary-lover on the planet, but her resilience and courage is moving." Which brought this reply: "Brooks listens far too much to his hero, the President With His Head Up His Ass. They is fucking stupid."
And finally, shades of James Gilray:
Posted by jherman at 8:49 AM