SELECTED CAPTIONS (1)

1) Tawara Toda protecting the dragon's daughter from a millipede.

2) Suma Urabe Suetaka meeting a ghost with an infant.

3) The greedy lady opens a heavy box filled with demons.

4) The cat-ogre Shutendoji surrounded by women.

5) Minamoto Raiko Ason watching a spider.

6) Jiriaya riding a toad.

7) Nikki Danjo Noonori changing into a rat.

8) Shizunome Ohyaku haunted by hungry ghosts.

9) Takagi Umanosuki and a huge she-ghost.

10) "Holiday in Hell"

11) Ranmaru and the walking Sago palm

12) The old witch flies away clutching her arm, severed by Watanabe no Tsuna

13) Sanekata envies the freedom of birds

14) A good woman's ghost praying in a waterfall

15) Kiyomori sees hundreds of skulls at Fukuhara

Captions selected from Demons from the Haunted World

Supernatural art by Yoshitoshi

Edited by Jack Hunter

Shinbaku Books, 2012

MONDAY MORNING

A DISTURBING PRESCRIPTION

On a recent visit to my primary care physician, we had gone over the usuals and gotten to that moment in the appointment when he asks, "Is there anything else?"

There was in fact. Although I am in what I prefer to think of as my late middle years, I can still have the complexion of an emotionally distraught fourteen-year-old. There had been several recent outbreaks, and I was at the tail end of one now. My doctor and I agreed that it could be rosacea, since I had a history of that a decade or more ago. It was mild and he saw no reason to send me to a dermatologist since he could prescribe what they almost would certainly prescribe themselves. If the problem persisted -- you know the drill.

He said that he would write me a prescription for metronidazole, but that he was going to give me the .75% solution rather than the .1% solution officially formulated for rosacea. He said the difference was insignificant, and that the .75% solution was a fraction of the cost. There was just one thing.

He did not want me to be concerned that the box would be labeled "For intravaginal use only. (Not for ophthalmic, dermal, or oral use.)" He said to simply rub a little on my face at bedtime and wash it off in the morning.

When I went to fill the prescription I remembered once being prescribed the children's version of an antacid, again for the considerable savings in price. (Since all these things cost me the same through my prescription program, it is merely a courtesy to my insurer.) I had a problem with the antacid because it was not "age appropriate." After a half hour of phone calls to the doctor and the insurers, I got my orange-flavored soluble tablets. They seemed to do the job well, but as I turned in this new prescription I wondered what questions it might raise. I was filled within minutes.

Yes, I am now using a vaginal gel, applying it directly to my face despite the dire warnings to the contrary that cover the box and the densely worded instruction booklet. Things are going well and there are no side effects.

I don't know the etiquette here, but I do have available a set of five factory-sealed applicators. I have not come up with a use for them, although I have not given it much thought.

For other "disturbing" posts follow the "disturbing" label.

Monday MORNING

A SELECTION OF RAYS AND WEAPONS FROM THE COMICS OF FLETCHER HANKS

 1) HIGHLY ACCELERATED LIGHT WAVES -- chosen method for interplanetary travel by the Super Wizard Stardust

2) ANTI-GRAVITY RAY - self explanatory

3) ATOM SMASHER WITH LONG-RANGE AUTOMATED FINDER -- scary sounding weapon that doesn't work because Stardust unleashes his ---

4) BOOMERANG RAY -- capable or reverse the direction of any other ray

Stardust's sense of justice has a Dantesque quality

5) MAGNETIC RAY -- can attract people as well as metals

6) SUSPENDING RAY -- prevents anything caught by magnetic rays from falling to the ground once magnetic ray is turned off

6) SECRET RAY -- possibly has multiple functions, but Stardust uses it to materialize the skeletons of criminals' victims (scary)

7) JU-JU DRUM -- drum with hypnotic powers used by Org to control giant, flesh-eating spiders

8) SUPER SUPERIORITY BEAM -- used by Fantomah, Mystery Woman of the Jungle, to defeat Org

When Fantomah gets angry she gets ugly

9) SUPER INTERPLANETARY TELEVISION SET -- used by Stardust when spying on criminal activity anywhere in the universe -- comes equipped with a Thought Recorder

10) PANORAMIC CONCENTRATION UNIT -- somehow different the Super Interplanetary Television set (see #9 above)

11) FUSING RAYS -- turns airplanes into blobs of steel

12) CONCENTRATED THOUGHT WAVES -- allow Fantomah, Mystery Woman of the Jungle, to fly (similar to Highly Accelerated Light Waves, see # 1 above.)

13) SIMPLIFIED TELEVISION UNIT -- a handheld version of the Super Interplanetary Television Set (See # 9 above)

14) POWERFUL RAY -- undefined weapon; very powerful

15) DISINTEGRATING RAY -- self-explanatory

16) ANTI-SOLAR RAY -- capable of stopping the earth's rotation, thus destroying gravity

Anti-solar ray in action

17) HYDRAULIC BALANCE RAY -- used to keep water on the planet after Anti-Solar ray is deployed ( see # 16 above)

18) ATTRACTOR BEAMS -- used by Stardust to retrieve humans floating away from earth after deployment of anti-solar ray (see # 16 above)

19) THE CONCENTRATOR -- allows Stardust to combine many men into one man

All images and rays are from the comics of Fletcher Hanks, published in the late 1930's and early 1940's, anthologized in I Shall Destroy All Civilized Planets, edited by Paul Karasik. (Fantographics Books, 2007. You can read my review of I Shall Destroy All Civilized Planets here)

MONDAY MORNING

MONDAY MORNING

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: MR. FOX BY HELEN OYEYEMI

  When  I finished Helen Oyeyemi's novel, I immediately turned back to the opening chapter. It wasn't that I had so enjoyed it that I planned to read the whole thing over. I was just trying, although it had been only a matter of a couple of days, to remember how on earth this thing had begun.

In the first chapter, Mr. St. John Fox, who despite his highflown name appears to be the successful author of violent potboilers, receives a visit from Mary Foxe. When he hears her come in, he assumes at first it must be his wife Daphne, a woman we will learn later spends much of her time in her room, depressed and suicidal. Mr. Fox has not seen Mary for six or seven years. He tells her he loves her. They have a brief, odd conversation which ends when Mary says, "You don't love me. You love that." She bares her breasts, lifts her dress up over her crotch, pulls her hair, and slaps herself on the face.

How could I have forgotten such an opening? In my defense I can only say that a lot happens in Oyeyemi's brief novel. In the next pages, Mary appears as an importunate fan and fledgling writer vying for Mr. Fox's attention in an exchange of letters dated 1936. There is another narrative thread involving Mr. Fox and Daphne. There are interpolated stories, apparently the work of Mr. Fox, although a couple may be Mary's and some may appear just for effect. And Mary, by the way, is not a real human being. She is Mr. Fox's muse, a constant cause of Daphne's jealousy, at least until they get to know one another toward the end of the novel.

Novel is probably not the right word here. This is imaginative writing of a very high order, with intertwined themes that may appear as either moments in the characters' lives or the plot lines of additional stories. Animals and spirits interact with the characters in fanciful if dangerous ways. World War One is a memory for some of the characters and World War Two is approaching. Mr. Fox either loves or is obsessed with Mary, and even though he treats her badly he loves his wife as well. Or he thinks he does, He may just be worried he might lose her. I believe her suicide only occurs in one of the "fictional" narratives.

This is not a book for readers fond of narrative closure. You can check out other reader reviews for confirmation. I am with those who wonder just what all this adds up to and what exactly has happened by the end of the story. But Helen Oyeyemi writes a kind of fiction where we have to assume that whatever happens on the page, happens.

(Looking over this review, I think I was overwhelmed by this book. For a more thoughtful, intelligent review, look here )

MonDAY MORNING

SELECTED ENDNOTES (6)

Page 7: 7.155. The epitaph appears in the Anthology in a tract of poems attributed to Isidorus of Aigae, sixth century BCE. The actual century of its composition is uncertain.

Page 11: 7.621. Sardinian celery. Ranculus sardous. According to the American poet Keith Waldrop, "a poisonous herb, whose bitter taste could draw the lips back in a grin or sarcastic snarl, sardonic, like a dog's." See A Windmill Near Calvary, University of Michigan Press, 1968. p 21.

Page 16: Friedlander, no. 135. This appears to be the oldest extant epitaph in elegiac couplets. It's four verses stood on a pillar along the main road running from Athens through the suburb of Sepolia. It seems to date from 575 - 550 BCE.

Page 17: Clairmont, no. 24, plate 12. Another very old example, the lines accompany a gravestone cameo depicting an exuberant horse and its youthful rider (perhaps about to be thrown).

Page 18: 7.325. Sardanapallus. The epitaph reads well on its own but rests on a complex allusion. In Greek legend, Sardanapallus, the last in the line of thirty kings of Assyria, is emblematic of the scandalous and slothful life. Herodotus, Ctesias, Diodorus Siculus, Aristophanes and others tell his story or allude to him. Aristotle cites him as the lowest category of human existence, the "Life of Enjoyment," suitable only for beasts. In 682 BCE Sardanapallus's capital Ninevah was besieged. Two years into the siege, the Tigris river undermined his palace walls. Rather than live as a captive, he collected his wives and his treasure and set fire to them and himself.

Page 32: 7.248: The epitaph was inscribed on a monument dedicated to all the Greeks who fell while attempting to hold the pass against an invading Persian army at Thermopylae in 480 BCE. The size of the Persian army is exaggerated here ten times or more. The size of the Greek defense, which included about a thousand Spartan slaves, is accurate.

Page 42: 7.268. Minos. A legendary king of Crete, a great lawgiver, he was made a judge in Hades.

Page 65: 7.170. He's sleeping still. The epitaph may have been carved into the base of a stone depicting a woman holding a child.

Page 80: 7. 454. The ancient Greeks considered it barbaric to drink undiluted wine. They had no beer or distilled spirits.

Page 92: 7.545. As this epitaph points out, the road to the Grecian underworld divided into a right-hand path that led good souls down to Elysium and a left-hand path for those less worthy, who went to sufferings in Tartarus. Hades' three judges, Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus, met the dead at the crossroads and passed judgment.

Page 149: 7.744. The epitaph concerns a form of prophecy and fortune telling associated with bulls.

Excerpted from Cut  These Words Into My Stone, Ancient Greek Epitaphs

translated by Michael Wolfe

Johns Hopkins University Press,  2013

MONDAY MORNING

MONDAY MORNING

GLOSSARY (7)

Ahriman. The zoroastrian epitome of evil, a devil; juxtaposed with Ahura Mazda or Ohrmuzd, the epitome of good, though this dualism was toned down somewhat by Ferdowsi, who was Muslim.

A'sha. Poet whose name means "the night blind."

bulbul. A thrush, or oriental bird, sometimes called nightingale of the East, admired for its song.

Jamshed. Legendary Persian king said to have lived for a thousand years and ruled for many hundreds during the golden age; he had command over angels and demons. Near the end of his rule, he sat on a jeweled throne and was raised to the heavens; for this and other kinds of hubris he eventually fell out of favor with the creator.

Laila and Majnun. A tragic Persian love story, along the lines of Romeo and Juliet.

Qais. Bedouin poet  of the seventh century who fell in love with Laila (see above) and became known as Majnun or "madman."

Sanubar. Any cone-bearing tree; a fir. Often used metaphorically in Persian to mean an attractive young person of either sex.

Zal. Legendary Persian warrior. Born albino, he was rejected as an infant for his defect by his father (although they were later reconciled). Rescued by a Phoenix-like bird called the Simurgh, who gave him magic feathers to burn when he needed help. Later on, when his wife Rudaba had difficulties giving birth, the Simurgh instructed Zal to run one of the feathers across her belly, which was how his son Rustum, who would himself become a great warrior, was born.

Selected from the glossary to

Bunting's Persia, translations by Basil Bunting, edited by Don Share

Flood Editions, 2012

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: CENTURIES AGO AND VERY FAST by Rebecca Ore

Yes, it is a terrible cover

I cringe at author events when some one in the audience asks, Where do you get your ideas? But when I read what Ore's novel, or series of linked stories, was going to be about, I admit I wondered, How does someone think up this stuff?

Vel is a 15,000 year old man who never ages past the prime of his young manhood. He is not immortal, since he could die of an injury or by violence, but except for growing a new set of teeth every century or so, he stays both in excellent shape and immune to disease. He is also a traveler in time and space, a skill he discovered by accident but that has proved handy over the millennia. While other clans are starving during hard times in the Pleistoscene, he can run out for pizza or kill an auroch. In 18th century London, he advises his relatives who run the antique business that supports the family: Buy Hogarth. Invest in woolen mills. Snatch up copies of Gulliver's Travels, the anonymous author is really Jonathan Swift.

And he is gay. HIs homosexuality is accepted by his clan. It is neither unusual nor of particular interest. Men like Vel cut down on the competition for women, and Vel and those like him can both hunt with the men and care for children who might otherwise we be strangled at birth as that one-too-many child for a still nursing mother.

As for his longevity -- most of the clan die young so there are not many elders to comment on Vel's preternatural youth. For a time at least. And for the first 13,000 or more years of his life, the fact that he is "magic" is considered a blessing by his clan. Remember those take out pizzas and fresh auroch steaks. And I admire Ore for not attempting to explain her absurd but enjoyable premise. What explanation would not be either hopelessly convoluted or silly. And just slow things down. How many genre writers today would see Vel as the potential protagonist of a series of bloated 800 page novels? Ore wraps things up in 150 pages.

The narrative incorporates mammoth hunts, the Stonewall riots, sodomy laws in 18th century London, various brief episodes from other time periods, and Vel's present-day, long-term relationship with Thomas, a local policeman in Somerset, where Vel's family maintains an ancestral home. Some of the story concerns the practicalities of Vel's situation -- he has realized that he can only reappear as his own nephew so many times and thank God New Jersey, in the 1960's doesn't require photo I.D.'s for a driver's license. Ore can be very funny with other almost throwaway details, such as Vel's introduction of modern-day lube to medieval sodomites. They are too pleased to ask questions

But the central narrative of Vel's relationship with Thomas is sexually robust and realistic, as Thomas comes to terms with the fact that he will age while Vel stays young. "..I wanted him to remember me in 10,000 years," Thomas confesses. But he realizes that Vel must have worked out the mechanism for moving on to other lovers when those times arise. The final scene, involving Thomas's death, is moving and complex.

In a brief afterwards, Ore describes the book as a form of slash fiction, that branch of fan fiction that imagines same sex relations between established characters; i.e., Capt. Kirk/Mr. Spock (boring), Starsky/Hutch (who hadn't already guessed?). She says that she did not want to go the popular route of starting a YA series, and since she had written some pornography in the past, this story line presented itself. (Had some of the sex scenes here been her first foray into pornography, she would have proven herself a natural at it.)

But this is not slash fiction proper. These are not established characters and the millennia-spanning time frame places the book in another genre. I am not sure what that genre might be, but Ore has made it her own. She titles her afterwards, "Slash is for Girls," and her publisher is a feminist press from Seattle . Apparently the market for slash fiction is girls, and it is unlikely that straight male readers are going to respond too enthusiastically to the more graphic moments in this book. (See other reader reviews for further details.) But in Centuries Ago and Very Fast Ore plays an excellent game of physical detail and heady ideas. It deserves a wide audience.

(Follow the Highly Recommended label for more highly recommended reading.)

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MONDAY MORNING

SOME MONSTERS (12): THE WYVERN

Wyvern speared by angels, Liber Floridus, 1448

A smallish winged dragon usually with a serpent's tail. In some legends they fell to earth and burrowed into the ground to guard treasure. They were very aggressive and often used in heraldry. There is some speculation that they were based on very early discoveries of fossilized pterosaurs.

GREAT MOMENTS IN THE CORRUPTION OF YOUTH (2): TOO MUCH HORROR BUSINESS

I love the title of this book. It sounds like something my grandmother would have said around the time I was ten years old and she had noticed my copies of Famous Monsters of Filmland, or the Aurora model kits for Frankenstein's Monster and Dracula, or heard me whining that my parents wouldn't let me go see I Was a Teenage Werewolf. (My parent's had inconsistent rules.) My grandmother would have looked around and said, "When is Dee going to get over all this horror business." And the answer to that, of course, is never. It takes hold around the age of seven or eight and doesn't let go.

This horror fascination is possibly the only thing I have in common with Kirk Hammett, who is ten years my junior but still got hooked around the same biological age. Hammett went on to be the lead guitarist for Metallica, and he has chosen to use some fraction of his disposable income on collecting horror memorabilia in a big way. Too Much Horror Business catalogues his collection of movie posters, toys, movie props, and art. A part of me has to work pretty hard to keep the quotation marks off the word art in the preceding sentence, but he was in a position to buy the original Basil Gogos paintings that became the most famous covers of Famous Monsters of Filmland. Those are cool things to have. He also has a portrait of Bela Lugozi painted in Geza Kende. A little internet research shows that Hammett paid just over $86,000 for the portrait. (Assuming he bought it in auction in 2004.) Kende was a totally forgettable artist, but that price seems about right for something with this kind of special interest. 

In his introduction, Hammett states that he did not want the book to be at all academic, and to insure that he decided to compose the text from his own responses to interview questions. He does an excellent job, coming off as a knowledgeable fanboy with a genuine appreciation of material ranging from 1920's movie posters inspired by German Expressionism to a wallet picturing the Phantom of the Opera in its original packaging!.

The toys and masks are the most interesting part of the collection. There are pages and pages of movie posters, but the abundance mostly marks the decline of poster design from the silent era to the present day. Perhaps in eighty years, the poster for Hellraiser will be as definitive of its day as Hammett's posters of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari seem to be of theirs, but somehow I doubt it. 

Back to the toys. Here the difference in Hammett's and my age really shows, because while I remained devoted to horror films, I was too old to care about Groovie Goolies or a board game based on Alien. But seeing them now is a kick.

Photographs of Hammett appear throughout the book. In several he performs on the custom guitars he has had made from monster poster images. In another he poses with his young sons surrounded by skulls and models including Frankenstein's monster, Robbie the Robot, and Ray Harryhausen Cyclops from Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. Father and sons snarl and make monster hands for the camera. The corruption of youth proceeds apace. 

MONDAY MORNING

PHILIP K. DICKATHON (23): COUNTER CLOCK WORLD

This is the first Philip K. Dick novel I have read in seven months, and I have to say -- it felt like coming home.

The Dickian weirdness begins on page one. A policeman patrolling a rundown cemetery hears a familiar sound. A recently revived corpse calls out from her grave, "My name is Mrs. Tilly M. Benton, and I want to get out. Can anyone hear me?"

Dick published Counter Clock World in 1968 and set it in the near future of 1998. But in this world, the Hobart Phase has been operating since 1986. Time is going in reverse. The dead are returning to life, and the lucky ones are rescued in time by vitarium operators, those who dig up the "old born," get them healthy, and then sell them off to the highest bidder. This is usually a family member willing to care for an aged relative who will now, like everyone else on earth, start the process of becoming younger. (Unclaimed old borns become wards of the state.)

Right. The Hobart Phase. That thing where time starts running in reverse. Dick, as is usually the case, cannot be bothered by all the details of such a preposterous notion, at least not to the extent that it might slow down the story. He gives us the bits he finds funniest, most notably the fact that eating has become disgorging, an act done in private. Meanwhile everyone expects at least a daily dose of sogum. They look forward to it like it was cocktail hour and sometimes make a date to meet at sogum palaces. "Sogum," although it sounds like a combination energy drink and drug, is clearly something to do with excrement, and for once we can be glad Dick spares us the details.

But all the implications of a world truly running in reverse are not Dick's concern, and don't let it be yours either or you will never make it through the novel. His plot surrounds the resurrection of a religious leader who the novel's main character, Sebastian Hermes, proprietor of Cup of Hermes Vitarium, realizes will be a hot property on the resale market. What he doesn't expect is the world of dangerous intrigues having the Anarch Peak on hand will expose him to. Rome wants him; the current leader of the Udites, Peak's religion, wants him; and, the librarians and erads, whose job is to keep eliminating knowledge and art that could not yet have existed, they want him bad. They suspect, with good reason as it turns out, that Peak will have insights to the afterlife that other of the old born have not been able to articulate.

Dick's puts his rather flat characters through a plot that spans only a couple of days but is filled with lies, bomb threats, assaults, a little adultery, and some soul searching. This is Dick's most overtly religious novel, although it is hard to know exactly what he is thinking about when it comes to the religious implications of the plot. But he shares that sense of muddle-headedness with his lead character.

Religion, Sebastian thought wearily. More ins and outs, more angles, than ordinary commerce. The casuistry had already gone beyond him. He gave up.

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MONDAY MORNING

SOME MONSTERS (11): A GIANT GROUND SPIDER AND OTHERS

Raiko hunted demons in Kyoto. The giant ground spider has put the guards asleep and wants to catch our delirious hero. He manages to draw his sword and will seriously injure the monster. Please notice the web at the background.

Greedy old woman chose the heavy box 

An old woman could choose between a small and a large basket. The small one contained gems. She selected the big box and greedily opened it. Awful creatures appeared. She has fallen and will be swallowed.

Images by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi

from New Forms of 36 Ghosts

MONDAY MORNING

GRAND MASTERS OF SCIENCE FICTION: HARLAN ELLISON

Ellison in middle age

This was my first and is likely to be my only encounter with the writing of Harlan Ellison. It's not as though I didn't know what I letting myself in for. Ellison's reputation as an old crank, which he wears a a badge of honor, precedes him. I have watched Dreams with Sharp Teeth, the 2008 documentary on him and actually rather enjoyed it. (It might have been very late at night) But this anthology dates from the mid-1970's, so he was at most a forty-year-old crank. Old cranks can have undeniable charm and even a sense of gravitas about them. In his forties, Ellison comes off as an overaged college student with a weighty chip on his shouler who has just discovered that the world is neither fair nor very nice and goddammit he's going to tell it like it fucking is. 

I dislike so much about this book I hardly now where to begin, although the title, the subtitle, and the jacket copy seem like a good place. (I read a book club hardback edition.) A book published today with the title Approaching Obliviion could be a screed by Glenn Beck or any number of right wing hand wringers who lament the disappearance of an America they think existed sometime sixty years ago. Hyperbole swings both ways. Ellison caps it off with a subtitle, Road Signs on the Treadmill Toward Tomorrow, a phrase that evokes a self-pitying Jeremiah. Then there is the predictably slavish praise of the promotional copy on the book's inside flaps. Apparently the New York Times once described Ellison as "relentlessly honest," a fact relentlessly repeated in almost everything you read about him. Buried on the back flap is this irrelevant and irritating nugget. "[Ellsion} created a series called Starlost and walked away from $93,000 in profits when the producers departed from his original concept." Mr. Ellison, you are a pillar of integrity. I assume he did accept payment for the episode of The Flying Nun he wrote in 1968. It actually sounds pretty good, a kinky mix that has Sister Bertrille crash-landing on a desert island and patching up the relationship between the shipwrecked lovers she finds there.  I really did read this book and can say about its eleven stories. But I have forgotten to mention one more indigestible nugget of pretension that comes before the stories themselves. Ellison titles his introduction, "Reaping the Whirlwind." Maybe I should have replaced Jeremiah with Hosea in my earlier comment. 

Fiction can be "of its day" or even dated and still be if not very compelling at least an interesting window into its time. But Ellison's diatribes and experiments with transgressive material are too easily targeting a disenfranchised readership eager to accept as radical anything that spices its politics with sex and anger. "Erotophobia" is a neither very funny nor very dirty dirty joke that could have seemed the height of sophistication for those reading the issue of Penthouse in which it first appeared. In "Knox" right-wing groups are sponsoring a race war that is dragging into its conflict people who seem incapable of resisting its violent allure. When it turns out aliens are involved, readers of the original story in Crawdaddy were no doubt nodding their heads and thinking, yeah, dude, I knew it was something like that. "Catman" is an enjoyably weird far future tale that makes little sense but ends in an act of misogynistic incest that is more puzzling that shocking.

Enough. I hated just about everything about Approaching Oblivion, and as I said up top I doubt I will be searching out more Ellison. (Although I have been told that the Dangerous Visionsanthologies are good if you skip Ellison's introductions to each story.) Strangely his book I am most drawn to is a nonfiction anthology An Edge in my Voice. This is the publisher's description.

At the beginning of the 1980's Harlan Ellison agreed to do a regular column for the LA WEEKLY on the condition that they publish whatever he wrote, without revising it or suggesting rewrites.

This is trumpeted as though the editors of LA Weekly considered Ellison on a level with Samuel Johnson or Andre Malraux. I suspect they just knew his name could shift a few papers, and those publications are always hurting for editorial staff.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: IF YOU WON'T READ THEN WHY SHOULD I WRITE by Jarret Kobek

Vince Neil

This slender black paperback comes with no forward, preface, introduction, or author's note. There is a table of contents to let you know that what is on its way involves a panoply of America's most excruciating media whores, the actors, musicians, and TMZ regulars who trot their anything but private lives before the cameras of paparazzi, reality TV producers, and their friends iPhones. This is the leaked sex tape as burgeoning art form, the drug-fueled or drunken tirade as the spoken word art of the 21st century. Narrow black inserts list the featured celebrity's legal history, and in case you have trouble keeping up incident by incident a final section analyzes and graphs the sorry state of the American justice system when it comes handling those who drink and drug their way into the courtroom on charges ranging from street brawls to vehicular homicide.

Laurence Fishburne's Daughter

I am old enough not to know who some of these people are, but I was equally intrigued by the fact that I already knew so much about so many of them. They may sound like idiots, they probably are idiots, but similar transcriptions of You Tube tapes of solid middle class Americans watching their young children or pets play cute for the camera would probably be just as incoherent and inane. In such cases, however, I assume their would be fewer run ins with the law

Amy Fisher Today

Jason Shaw: A Model

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