Bardamu’s Bookbag: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Journey to the End of the Night and OVO 20: Juven(a/i)lia

Like I promised last week, here are more book reviews.

Remember folks, all of my reviews are archived here. Also remember that if you buy any books through the links in my reviews, I get a commission at no cost to you. In the case of Amazon links, I get a commission even if you buy something other then what I linked to.

On with the show!

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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson

Hopefully, I don’t have to explain why this is a great book, possibly the greatest book in the American canon. It’s funny, honest, riveting and it popularized an entire genre of journalism that everyone tries to emulate. The Doctor is so good, in fact, that he’s the closest I’ve come to a foolproof Idiot Test. This is how it works – anyone who hates Hunter Thompson or is otherwise unable to concede that he was a great writer is usually a moron with nothing worthwhile to say. Over the years, I’ve noticed that people who hate Thompson fall into two categories; prigs who are offended by his “immoral” drug use and un-PC sensibilities (this includes both religious conservatives and prissy SWPL liberals), and middle-aged mediocrities with delusions of grandeur. The latter group typically dismiss the Doctor with faux nonchalance (“Oooh, I’m supposed to be impressed that he snorted coke and nearly got killed driving a convertible into Lake Mead?”) despite the fact that they’ve spent the past decade slaving away in a cubicle, their wives are obese, pill-popping headcases, and the highlight of their lives is fapping to porn on the family computer late at night after the kids are asleep. Swine, the lot of ‘em.

If you’re going to adopt the Hunter Thompson Idiot Test, don’t forget the Tom Wolfe Corollary; anyone who prefers Wolfe to Thompson for any reason whatsoever is as much a moron as the ones who despise him outright. Wolfe is a ripoff artist who did to gonzo journalism what R.E.M. did to indie rock – sanitized it for the benefit of bourgeois cowards who want to appear rebellious without upsetting Mommy and Daddy. It’s fitting that he’s ending his life writing trite Victorian morality smut like I Am Charlotte Simmons. I dream of living in an America where copies of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Right Stuff are torched in bonfires from coast to coast.

Click here to buy Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.

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Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Four years of college taught me that not only does the ivory tower have no idea what makes good literature, they couldn’t care less – they’ll erase truly talented writers from the history books if they wander off the plantation. Case in point: the 20th century’s most reviled and imitated novelist, Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Ask an English professor about Céline and half of them will have no idea who you’re talking about, and the other half will react like you just snapped off a Hitler salute. I still remember how my junior year Early American Lit professor reacted when I told her I was reading Rigadoon - ”Wasn’t Céline a Nazi?”

I may be biased on this front, but Céline is arguably the finest Western novelist of the past hundred years. With the publication of this, his debut novel, in 1931, Leon Trotsky wrote that Céline ”had walked into the pantheon of great literature like a man walks into his living room.” But with the rise of Nazi Germany, Céline made the fatal error of becoming a fascist, and like magic, he was suddenly a non-person in the world of books. Of course, he wasn’t alone in joining the losing team – Ezra Pound gave anti-Semitic propaganda speeches on Italian radio and was arrested for treason when the war ended. But Pound is still taught in the universities while Céline is a leper.

Don’t give me the argument that it’s because of Pound’s influence on literature, because Céline was just as influential if not more. Numerous writers up to the present day have mimicked or outright ripped off the bad doctor, from the good (Bukowski, Miller, Burroughs, Houellebecq) to the awful (Kesey, Heller, Vonnegut). It’s not hard to see why when you pick up Journey to the End of the Night. Like Mark Twain, the first great American novelist, Céline is less of a formal writer than a storyteller - he pulls you into his world as assuredly as your best friend bragging about the crazy adventures he had last night. His prose explodes with energy and life, never shying away from the dirty details, holding you captive in its grotesque grip. So the quality of Céline’s writing has nothing to do with his being blacklisted from the curriculum.

Nope, the reason why Pound is still loved and Céline is hated is because the latter was honest. Like all popular hacks, Pound was a better entrepreneur than a writer, a charmer who knew how to say all the right things at all the right times. Like the trendy lefties who lined up to root for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War while they were disemboweling Catholic priests, Pound converted to fascism because he thought they were the winning side, then staged a public repentance to avoid having to face a firing squad. Céline, the poor sincere bastard, never surrendered to the jeering hordes. An open supporter of the Vichy regime and author of anti-Semitic pamphlets, Céline wore his convictions on his sleeve even when public opinion shifted against them. He went to the grave without apologizing for or recanting anything he’d ever written.

But more than that, Céline is persona non grata in the literary world because he alone confronted the nihilism and emptiness of the post-WWI West. Oh sure, Fitzgerald and Hemingway wrote about the aimlessness of the Lost Generation, but they were strictly amateur hour, bedtime stories for the kids. Céline was dead serious. His books were glorified accounts of his own life, with the boring bits taken out and new details added in. In Journey to the End of the Night, he grabs you by the back of the neck, shoves your face in it and doesn’t let go.

Journey begins with Céline’s protagonist, Ferdinand Bardamu, shooting the breeze with his buddy in 1910′s Paris. Bardamu joins in a passing military parade to mock his patriotic countrymen, and ends up being drafted into the war. Deserting the front lines, he flees into the jungles of French colonial Africa to escape punishment. Bardamu’s bizarre odyssey takes him all the way to New York City, Detroit to work for Ford and fall in love with a prostitute, and finally back to France where he establishes a medical practice caring for poor Parisians who are always looking for ways to cheat him. Along the way, he is continuously dogged by Robinson, an off-and-on-again friend whose own escapades never end happily.

By Célinean standards, Journey is mild stuff, a gateway drug for his later nihilism. As is the nature of geniuses, however, even his less-exemplary works are miles ahead of everyone else. The translation by Ralph Manheim does a fantastic job of preserving the unpretentiousness and humor of the original French, as shown by the excerpt where Bardamu runs into a communal toilet in New York:

Men among men, all free and easy, they laughed and joked and cheered one another on, it made me think of a football game. The first thing you did when you got there was take off your jacket, as if in preparation for strenuous exercise. This was a rite and shirtsleeves were the uniform.

In that state of undress, belching and worse, gesticulating like lunatics, they settled down in the fecal grotto. The new arrivals were assailed with a thousand revolting jokes while descending the stairs from the street, but they all seemed delighted.

The morose aloofness of the men on the street above was equaled only by the air of liberation and rejoicing that came over them at the prospect of emptying their bowels in tumultuous company.

The splotched and spotted doors to the cabins hung loose, wrenched from their hinges. Some customers went from one cell to another for a little chat, those waiting for an empty seat smoked heavy cigars and slapped the backs of the obstinately toiling occupants, who sat there straining with their heads between their hands. Some groaned like wounded men or women in labor. The constipated were threatened with ingenious tortures.

Of course, a true artist like Ezra Pound would never have written about something as plebeian and low-class as the sight of Americans straining to shit in a public restroom. But that was the reality of post-WWI West – it was Shit World, everywhere, and Céline chronicled it like no writer before or after. In a way, I’m thankful that “respectable” people don’t dare touch Céline – it makes it easier for me to separate the wheat from the chaff. It’s the reverse of the Hunter Thompson Idiot Test – anyone who likes Céline is usually intelligent and worth paying attention to, even if I disagree with them.

One thing that annoys me about this edition of Journey is the glossary. Céline’s writing was steeped in the vernacular of interwar France, and he frequently employed wordplay that doesn’t accurately translate into English. For example, in an early part of the book where Bardamu is recovering in an army hospital, he shares a room with a Sergeant Branledore, whose name is derived from branler, the French verb “to masturbate.” Instead of using footnotes, this edition forces you to flip to the back of the book whenever you come across an asterisked term. But this is a minor ding and won’t stop you from enjoying yourself.

Click here to buy Journey to the End of the Night.

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OVO 20: Juven(a/i)lia by Trevor Blake

This is a best-of collection of articles and artwork from OVO, a zine founded and edited by friend of the blog Trevor Blake, “a public record of [his] interests and inquiries.” It’s interesting, it’s weird, and I don’t entirely know what to make of it. I guess it’s because I’m too young to appreciate it – I was barely out of diapers when Trevor was printing up the early editions of OVO on his pal’s company’s copiers in the eighties. To someone of the Internet Era, where narcissistic self-expression is just a couple of mouse clicks away, the effort and dedication involved in compiling an entire magazine, from writing and gathering the material to binding the physical copies and mailing them out, is difficult to relate to.

Still, this is a great little collection of oddities, ranging from poetry to short stories to investigative journalism on offbeat subjects. They include “Holding Games for Ransom,” about how one tabletop game creator found a way to keep online piracy from cutting into his profits; “A Pit Stop Along the Inward Journey,” a stream-of-consciousness tale beginning with white guilt and ending with madness; and “23 Sperm Stories 23,” the longest article in the book, on just about every aspect of sperm, from its discovery, its function, and its future. Of particular interest to us in the manosphere are “Warbucks Intra-Family Communique” and “Becoming More Free” by Ernest Mann. The former is a satirical article on the emptiness and mindlessness of American consumerism; the latter is on how Mann unplugged himself from the Matrix of American culture:

I am wasting less of my time (LIFE) watching, listening to and reading THOUGHT LEADERS, ie, TV, movies, radio, music, newspapers, magazines and novels. These are like spectator sports. They cause me to live life vicariously, ie, second-hand, not real, only in fantasy. These mind conditioners are subtly designed to create not only fear and anger emotions but also create feelings of guilt and inadequacy. These feeling stifle growth and keep one securely in one’s rut. And of course the more visible purpose of the media is to create the desire to acquire (BUY! BUY! BUY!) and keep up with the Joneses. ‘Buying’ uses up my savings. I spent 22 years of my TIME (life) working as a Wage Slave. I helped perpetuate the status quo, ie a world of 98.6% Slaves and less than 1% Elite (Billionaires). I don’t wish to do that any more.

But the real prize is Trevor’s own writings, comprising the second half of the book. They include book reviews (including an exhaustive review of one of my favorites, L.A. Rollins’ Myth of Natural Rights), interviews with such diverse individuals as a bulimia sufferer and an expert on out-of-body experiences/bilocation, and my favorite, “Trajectory Through Anarchism,” in which Trevor tracks the evolution of his political beliefs:

1996: Feeling free of anarchism and a little burned by what I now see was my own hooded thinking, I call up the imp of the perverse to see what other forbidden ideas might be out there. Ayn Rand is suggested, and I read her works. Having already shed one hood I’m less inclined to put another one on, and I do not become an Objectivist.  But moving through Objectivism brings libertarian thinking to my attention. It’s something about the sovereignty of the individual… but I’ve walked down that path already and don’t sign on as a libertarian either.

Like The eXile, OVO 20 comes in a 8 1/2 by 11 inch size, to fit artwork and cartoons on the pages – I was particularly amused by “Attack of the Giant Killer Sperm.” One minor issue I have with the design is that all paragraphs in OVO 20 are punctuated with bullet points. I suppose they’re there to make the book look distinctive, but I found them mildly distracting, fooling my eyes into thinking I was reading a series of lists instead of articles.

Still, if you want to take an excursion into the bizarre and come back a little more enlightened, OV0 20 is a fun and informative read. If you’re still not convinced, Trevor maintains a free online archive of all OVO articles here. He also has some words of wisdom for aspiring writers and publishers:

…First and most important, get busy. Your time is already diminished by work and mortality, and neither of those situations is going to improve. Keep a printed copy of what you make and write down the date of when you made it. Large bodies of work and the pleasure they bring are made a few small pieces at a time. Learn about the history of what interests you. Novelty is rare and not always of value for being novel. Your friends are not being documented right now and you are the one who can do a good job with that. Read with regularity outside your area of interests. Nothing will point out your own ignorance and error better than attentiveness to those who disagree with you, nothing makes what you know make sense like learning something unrelated to what you know. Take as many chances as you are willing to take the lumps for.

But most of all, get busy.

Click here, then type “ovo 20″ (without quotes) in the search bar to buy OVO 20: Juven(a/i)lia.

Tagged as: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson, Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, OVO 20: Juven(a/i)lia, Trevor Blake