I apologize to the readers; things got busy, than existential, than depressing. I'm sitting down and writing this, although I don't have a ton to say, going on the principle of something is better than nothing. So, here goes:
The real Sput Sputnik
The Sex Magicians Chapter Three: Who will guard the guardians? p. 23-33
This chapter's quote-title is famously from Juvenal and received more ubiquity after being the inspiration for Watchmen's title. I personally believe that the title must refer to Tarantella Serpentine's ministrations to the beleagured Dr. Prong that occur in this chapter. Having Tarantella make her debut in the most explicitly pornographic chapter of our slim volume so far is appropriate since the scene that introduces her in Illuminatus! is likewise explicitly pornographic. Her routine with Dr. Prong can be seen as a repurposing of her scene with George Dorn. These scenes seem to be something along the lines of Wilson's ideal of a sexual scenario designed for the purpose of male titillation and pleasure.
Note that Wilson's sex scenes are almost always drawn out in ways that the atmosphere can be heightened before the moment of climax. This is not only decent advice for regular sexual activity, but is one of the most fundamental principles of sex magic. Energized enthusiasm and all that shit. Wilson also seemed to have predicted live sex cams as he often incorporates women masturbating in front of men as a way to increase pleasure, as in this scene, or as a way of torture- as happens to the captive Sigismundo in The Widow's Son.
Other Wilsonian tricks we see in this chapter include his interplay of political beliefs between two characters that he doesn't seem to endorse entirely. The younger, liberal-minded Foxx seems naive and unserious while the more conservative, older Dr. Heyman is a square who banks on the accomplishments of his youth. (Or positioning of his youth since Prong notes he simply worked with Kinsey.) We have bits of self-reference where Wilson denigrates his own plotting and incorporates a quotation from one of his own essays. I had suggested to Rasa that the essay be included in this book, but he probably decided it wasn't relevant enough. It would probably fit better into a collection of essays by Wilson on general culture and entertainment. (Also, if anyone can enlighten me to the meaning of the aufgehoben of the Freudian Id, I'd greatly appreciate it. Everything I found had to do with Hegel, and I find Hegel quite impenetrable.)
I guess this is as good as time as any to review Fernando Poo; I appreciate the fact that information is so much more readily available today, as I imagine many readers probably weren't sure if Fernando Poo existed when the first book came out. Fernando Poo was actually known as Fernando Po for much of its pre-modern and modern history, named after the Portuguese explorer who was the first European to "discover" the island. It is actually only rendered as "Fernando Poo" in Spanish. Fernao do Po named the island Formosa Flora and it has been known as Bioko since 1979.
The Sex Magicians Chapter Four: Why is a duck? p. 34-39
As far as I can tell, the chapter's title is derived from the famous Marx Brothers routine, but that is more properly "Why a duck?" and I can't tell exactly what it would pertain to in this chapter.
However, what I can observe is that in this chapter we have a character that closely resembles one of Wilson's "real life" personas in Josh Dill and we can probably glean some of his actual opinions of working at Playboy as well as his opinion of Hugh Hefner. Just like Sput Sputnik, Wilson has said that Hefner tried, and sometimes succeeded, in being something of a legendary figure in the Playboy offices- however, Sput's ridiculousness might hint at how well Wilson thought that worked for him.
The list of interview subjects shows some of the mercurial contempt that Hefner had a habit of uttering and therefore nixing ideas that Wilson found compelling. Spiro Agnew is too controversial, Ezra Pound uninteresting because he's a poet and of course there are his hilarious invectives against the imagined Attorney General. I have a feeling that the Attorney General in mind while Wilson wrote this scene was Watergate crook John Mitchell, although by the time of publication the AG was the short-tenured Elliot Richardson. Two scenes in this chapter were extraordinarily striking to me when I first read the novel years ago: the hypothetical effects of hashish and a scene that brought tears of laughter to my eyes. I still love the orgasmic repetition of Dr. Spock's name and the punchline that I've made the title of this week's (and last week's, and the one for the week before...) post and think it is one of Wilson's best fictional vignettes.
Sorry, friends- I pulled my back Sunday and was out of commision until yesterday. Been playing catch up at work. I'm hunting up a new post right now. I have to host trivia tonight, so I'm aiming for tomorrow. Until then, Happy All Hallow's Eve Eve.
The Sex Magicians Chapter 2: "Are you drinking the water or the wave?" p. 14-22
The week's chapter's title comes from John Fowles' The Magus, a book that seemed to tap into some of the zeitgeist of the Sixties and which is referenced by Wilson a few times over the course of his corpus. So, even if the line is older than that, I'm betting Fowles' novel is the source. I've never read John Fowles' The Magus because I ended up with a copy of it instead of a copy of Francis Barrett's The Magus, which was a little harder to find in those days, and that really pissed me off. (I did, rest assured, secure a lovely copy of Barrett's The Magus.) Perhaps because the phrase doesn't come up as the old chestnut that gives Chapter 1 its vaguely masturbatory title, I read into this one a little bit more. I think it is a reference to Markoff Chaney's existential fit of pique, of course, but I also think it might be a bit of a message whose transmission seems uncannily timely. But it's been a long day, so I might just be loopy and overly reactive to my fancies.
Before getting into all that, there are some points about details in the chapter I'd like to cover. Naturally, this chapter has a few instances of language that is no longer acceptable; I'm going to stop making this note after this post as it will get repetitive and I don't have any brilliant commentary that I think would add anything aside from acknowledgement. So bringing this up time and again would be like circulating through a party, saying "hi" to someone and nothing else each time you orbit-pass. If I think of some two cents about something further in the book, you know I'll add it. It is also interesting but ultimately somewhat pointless to ponder over the cross-pollination between this novel and The Illuminatus! Trilogy; are all the similar elements just altered bits borrowed from Illuminatus!'s manuscript or did any of the ideas spring forth here and were then worked into the fabled Trilogy? Wilson always claimed that the book was more-or-less completed by the end of '69 and that he and Shea were forced to cut hundreds of pages before publication, so...who knows?
It wouldn't be surprising for there to have been pornographic tarot decks floating around during the 70s, but after some light research I couldn't find anything published before 1981. While it is very probable I just didn't look deep enough into the Internet, I can also see where such a tarot deck would have been a very small publishing affair. Michelle Olley talks about how this book itself would have been a small publication and only sold "below the shelf" in what few shops that stocked it, so it is quite possible that there were tarot decks that were gloriously nude, but they might be lost to history, attics or to assiduous collectors. It should also be kept in mind that tarot was nowhere near the industry it is today, where there is a veritable cornucopia of pornographic tarot decks to choose from (although most of them use the Caspar Milquetoast euphemism of "erotic tarot"); even Crowley and Harris' masterwork Thoth Tarot wasn't published until 1969. At first I thought that Wilson was having Markoff Chaney lay out a Tree of Life spread because of his contemporaneous reading habits, but I'm now convinced it was the author giving his character a more expansive tableau.
Now I'm going to read too much into a character in a porn novel.
Wilson repeatedly describes Chaney's campaign against the world as "surrealist" and accordingly his second signage assault upon regularity is reminiscent of Andre Breton's placard at the first Surrealist gallery: "DADA IS NOT DEAD. WATCH YOUR OVERCOAT." Markoff Chaney's life sounds miserable- consumed with hatred, in some ways his short stature is a pun on being a "small man." Now Wilson, in a way that can seem both empathetic and stereotypical, has Chaney's considerable chip forming because of the height of his shoulders, and you can see that he has put parts of himself into his antihero. The idea of a world of graphs, regularity, petty authority and bureacracy is incredibly frustrating and the push forward towards a joyless world where people are numbers hasn't been fun, by any stretch. In some ways Chaney's crusade is sympathetic and understandable; it's just how it consumes him makes him a somewhat tragic figure. However, because of his unpleasant aspects, down to his vomitous diet, Chaney spends most of the book as a pathetic if effective character, rather than one who evokes true pathos.
I don't think I caught it the first time I read the book, because it stood out to me when I was rereading the manuscript before writing my essay, but Wilson humorously lays the chaos of the end of the Sixties and the Seventies at Chaney's feet. His surrealist assault is responsible for riots and bombings...which is eerily reminescent of the joke that has been floating around since 2016 or so that Project Mindfuck has worked a little too well. Amidst the general horrors of war and climate change, our society is churning towards November 5th; the aftermath of which, no matter what happens, will see heated rhetoric and a very good probability of greater social unrest/violence. Our society has had chances to change course and unify, to take it down a notch, but it seems...nothing doin'. At least for the foreseeable future. Is it possible that there the MGT is out there, setting off chain reactions that led to this? (Is it Tom Jackson?) Did Markoff Chaney invent the Internet? Considering Chaney's surrealist bonafides and the rise of theocratic-fascism in my home country, I was reminded of a quote from Alan Moore's recent novel, The Great When:
"After two hours and another cuppa each, they came to the conclusion that all the surrealism of the 1930s had a lot to answer for, and so had Hitler."
But, with my own worries turning into bitterness all-too-often, I think I might need to ask myself occasionally whether I'm drinking the water or the wave. I'm still not going to read the fucking misleadingly titled John Fowles novel though.
The Sex Magicians Chapter One: "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" pg. 3-13
Apologies and obligatory reminder of Swedenborg's dictum: "angels know nothing of time." That dictum is spoken by Swedenborg's pilfered head in The Great When and mentioned a few times over the course of The Bumper Book of Magic. In some ways, I feel as if I've been on drugs with two such important titles coming out with only a breath/the breadth of a week in between them. I also timed my return to school on the worst possible day and ended up going back in time for conferences which saw me arriving home at 8pm. But here we are, and hopefully we can all agree- better late than never.
The first chapter of The Sex Magicians introduces us to arguably the primary protagonist of this slim volume of smut, Dr. Robert Prong. Prong is the first incarnation of Dr. Frank Dashwood in The Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy. Dashwood, named after the founder of the most infamous incarnation of the Hellfire Club, and Prong both hold the enviable, if somewhat challenging, position of head of the Orgasm Research (Foundation). As exact as Phineas Fogg and as hellbound-determined as Macbeth, Prong is imbued with a lot of humor by Wilson. His names for the various dildos made me snort, as did his assistant's name when I read it the second time. Humor aside, Wilson wastes little time in filtering some of his own fascinations through Dr. Prong as he references the Foundation locating the "original" Cuban Superman, a fantastically real if-much-fictionalized performer in the sub-tropical sin-paradise (for the tourists and the elite, at least) of pre-Revolution Havana. Wilson has an entry on the Superman in his Playboy's Book of Forbidden Words and explains that he was a performer who performed in sex shows where he was known for his his ability to couple with multiple women, ejaculating with each partner, and still keep the show going. Wilson notes, with what seems to be a little disdain or dissapointment, that succesor or imitation Supermen were not able to replicate the original's act and instead used Novocaine to dull their members. He ends his entry with a bon mot wondering about the Superman's fate under Castro's socialism.
The original Superman performed at the Teatro Shanghai, an infamous club in a city of racey entertainment, and his true identity remains a mystery. He was a mystery of a man who seemed to be a well-loved neighbor, who might have practiced Santeria and was most likely gay. Evidently, even during the hayday of his performance, he was often only known to tourists by the enigmatic title "The Man with the Sleepy Eyes" and to locals as "La Reina" as a crude allusion to his true sexuality. A recollection of the show from journalist Robert Stone, excerpted from this excellent and highly-reccomended essay, recounts some of the less appealing aspects of the Superman spectacle:
The Superman Show, Stone recounts, featured a blond performer “whose deportment was meant to suggest wholesomeness, refinement, and alarm, as though she had just been spirited unawares from a harp recital or a public library.” The other performer was a black man “who astonished the crowd and sent the blond into a trembling swoon by revealing the dimensions of his endowment.” Stone continues, “Suffice it to say that the show at the Teatro Shanghai was a melancholy demonstration that sexism, racism, and speciesism thrived in pre-revolutionary Havana.”
The Cuban Superman was probably such a tantalizing bit of salacious folklore (really, read the essay) for Wilson because he represented what Wilson considered to be an almost-impossibility amongst men: multi-orgasmic longevity. Indeed, Wilson's admiration and envy of women's ability to acheive orgasm multiple times in a single session is one that comes up throughout his fiction and nonfiction works and Prong's similar obsession is the inciting incident for the creation of the Mama Vibe. One can balance this portrayal of women's sexuality, filtered solidly through the male gaze, with the dual truth that many women aren't educated or empowered to understand what makes them orgasm- especially during the benighted, if seemingly liberated, pre-Internet age. While I'm certainly not arguing that the web is a great source of sexual education in general, if used judiciously and with a sense of responsibility, one can find a plethora of informed articles on many aspects of the seemingly unlimited spectrum of human sexuality. During Wilson's age, hearsay and pornography were often the only sources of information about what I'm going to call "the sexual other," namely people who didn't tick like you do.
For instance, when we first read The Illuminatus! Trilogy together, my lovely wife noted that Wilson and Shea seemed to think it was very easy for women to reach orgasm. Wilson also seemingly overestimated the ability for women to achieve orgasm through vaginal intercourse; or, at the very least, he embued his fictional characters with the right combination of nerve endings to do in ways that would be statistically improbable in real life. Aside from these very heteronormative misconstruings of "the sexual other," Stone's recollection and assessment of the Superman Show and details found in Wilson's description of ACE-via-HAL's voice remind us that the 20th Century was an era of misconception and ignorance, not too unakin to our own, but enough so that the atmosphere can occasionally stifle. I can move through those patches pretty quickly, but that's my experience- your mileage may vary.
On the other hand, I found the following excerpt to be strikingly modern in its reflective humor on racial anxiety:
"It was Roger's habit to talk in racy and slangy terms on occasion when addressing foundation employees. 'It relieves the tension,' he would explain if a visitor was upset. 'Call a spade a spade,' he would add emphatically, unless the visitor happened to be black."
The joke concerns the dictum, "call a spade a spade" which pre-dates the usage of the term "spade" as a slur and rather refers to the gardening implement, and is actually a mistranslation (attributed to Erasmus) of an older Greek idom "call a bowl a bowl." The fact that Prong finds the statement to be sufficient for most visitors except when faced when a visitor who might, quite rightfully, interpret it differently seems like something from an Iannucci-produced comedy. (Perhaps of some interest, while I intially believed that the idiom was referring to the playing card suit as a kind of "anti-cheating" dictum as its origins, it does not. The origin of the slur does refer to the playing cards and was first used in the 1920s, long after the mistranlated idiom had entered into the vernacular.)
Finally, we arrive to the man of the hour, if we are to conceptualize man's true self as his dick: the appendage chosen by Miss Josie Welch to have attached to ACE, King Kong. Wilson was fascinated by the sexual subtext of King Kong and brought it up intermittently throughout his oevure: the obvious lustfulness in Kong's attitude towards Ann Darrow, the sexual jealousy that palpably existed between Kong and protagonist Jack Driscoll and the question of exactly how the mechanics of such a coupling between beauty and beast would play out. This is made all the more interesting when we consider the biological reality of a gorilla's stature to penile length does not measure up to the chthonic belief that Kong, whilst erect, would become some sort of ithyphallic deity. I will admit that, in the throes of sexual development, I had wondered about this as well- long before reading Wilson, so I can't even blame him. A quick Google will show you that other brilliant and discerning minds have entertained the same series of ruminations, calculations and self-effacing emasculation. So this thrust of ideas is what is prepared to enter Miss Welch on the interior original cover, and it's even bigger than it looks. Like God's dick, famously pondered upon by Wilson in his inaugural The Realist article, King Kong's dick, if properly conceptulized, would defy the dimensions of the imagination. We leave the chapter with the priapic version of St. Anselm's ontological argument running in and out of Josie Welch, taking her into a sexual reverie verging on an astral incursion, and Prong about to throw away his hard-maintained scientific credibility. He's saved from this ignominious, A.M.A.-condemned fate by a phone call.
With the congruent release of The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic and the embarkation of the actual matter of Wilson's first published fiction, I think it is apropos to point out that Dr. Prong's apprehension of his seemingly-damningly materialistic approach to his art sounds strikingly similar to Steve and Alan Moore's understanding of consciousness; as far as it is outlined in "Adventures in Thinking," the opening essay of The Bumper Book, and reinforced throughout the grimoire, that consciousness itself is profound and demonstrably endless:
"Since these psychological intagibles were- as Dr. Prong sometimes wittily remarked- "both psychological and intangible," there was no end to his research."
Next week we'll meet the novel's secondary protagonist/antagonist whose legacy is a chain of characters that dangle well into the then-future of Wilson's fiction. I will make sure we're back on schedule for Tuesday evening. (I'm also working on a review of The Bumper Book of Magic, but it is going to take a minute. I'm trying not to make it too much of a navel gazing memoir. Probably going to be anyways.)
I have been in a starry eyed reverie since The Bumper Book of Magic arrived on my backporch yesterday and have pretty much ceased to function aside from reading the book and reexperiencing years of magical progress and regress. I'll have a post up tomorrow, until then- seek me in Fairyland (best avoided).
Holding the slim volume in your hands, you're surprised by how flimsy it seems to be, its papery viscosity. Curling covers and splayed pages like some sort of Gutenbergian seaweed, there's something in the tactile sensation of this reprint that reminds the reader that it is insubstantial. This slick-covered and salacious slender novella could have easily not been written or worked into publication. It could easily have been made real, in a small, behind-the-counter manner of real-ness, and still been easily, confidently forgotten. What you're holding in your hand(s) is, at the very least, an improbability.
Michelle Olley, being characteristically classy, opens her essay with some Sun Ra lyrics. I've seen a lot of people online and in the fleshier immediacy who have cast long shadows in the light of Crowley's new Aeon's light hail Sun Ra as a musician-cum-magician (or is it contrariwise?) who tuned into the 93 Current.
I've only read Michelle's intro and talked to her for about an hour, but I feel confident in calling her "characteristically classy." Olley's credentials take up nearly a page and her information and experience-laden Introduction to The Sex Magicians is full of the easily-given and hard-won wisdom of anecdote and reflection. Dinners with Bob Guccione and ruminations on the merits of looking backwards and inflicting modern values are deftly handled as our author-at-hand performs an extremely important task:
Michelle Olley contextualizes and absolves The Sex Magicians. Olley is in a unique position of being a pioneer in sexual expression and one who has come out on top of the game. As far as I know, Olley hasn't declared any extraordinarily ugly sentiments about any groups, peccadillos or ways of being. Instead, she applies her myriad and extraordinary experiences to a multi-fold (multi-folderol?) interpretation, framed in empathy and understanding. Having Olley as our barker and initial interloper with the raw material of Wilson's first published novel is a very good thing, and very apropos, for our clarity-by-convolution century.
When I read her introduction for the first time, while I was drafting my afterword time and again, I mostly felt a massive rush of relief. I had tried to make an unobstrusive apologia for the novel while still trying to dive into the "real" magic of the book and I wasn't hitting my stride. My unvarnished enthusiasm for the book and my dubious demographic made me a poor choice to explain anything. I was moved to splutter, condemn, excuse and shrug. Michelle made everything crystal clear with an authority I could only ape at. Thank Horus for her work.
In our conversation on the Hilaritas Press Podcast, Michelle endeared herself to me, even more, after unknowingly swatting away my sweaty-palmed concerns over speaking on a topic I am wholly unqualified to write about, by professing her intuitive understanding that Wilson was a force of good. Whatever outdated prose and off-the-mark suppositions Wilson makes in his texts, he is always working for the betterment of existence. He's still working on it. Michelle also does a great job in the podcast and her introduction by drawing the listener/reader's eye to Lost Girls, a corollary text to the one you hold in your hand that delineates the boundary between reality and porn and the health of the intertwining ecosystems.
As such, I welcome you to Wilson's first novel and a few months of serious smut. Let's feel those vibes.
Original cover art illustration of The Great When (Nico Delort)
My relationship with Alan Moore and novels is odd. At first, I almost regretted that Alan was my favorite author, because I was never a "real" comics fan. My comics consumption entirely comprised of The Simpsons and Star Wars, Dark Horse titles bought on midweek nights from the local newstand. Nothing serious. Upon reading The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume II, a comic book series composed of classic novels and some oddball references in the back, I was enamored with a new medium, made familiar and real by a Medium.
Such is the tone of The Great When, and I feel a lot like Dennis Knuckleyard until this day. You'd think the intervening years would matter, but I guess as the human conception of time is an illusion caused by our dimensional constraints, I'm still the cough cough cough slackjawed wishful secret agent I was when I was eighteen, and I wasn't even bombed.
Moore's only novel when I began reading him was the extraordinarily gnomic Voice of the Fire, with it's famously prophylactic first chapter and geographically hyperspecific references. It took me a couple times and a few years to get much out of it other than crying during the John Clare chapter. Jerusalem was Something Else. Echoing and expanding upon Voice, the gargantuan novel was a haunting chrous of self-turned-universe. Reading it was like being rendered. From the first time I heard him read the Michael chapter in the Northampton Library and strenously, and still imperfectly, transcribed it and reread it as a personal treasure. A jewel of the future. But I digress...
The Great When takes place during what was perhaps the bleakest twentieth-century phase for London; in the shadow of the Second World War. Postwar London/Britain is a behemoth I've learned about in scriptures such as Moorcock's Mother London (cited in the Acknowledgements of the present novel) and John Higgs' luminary Live and Let Love. It's all paraffin stoves and washbasin baths, pilchard on toast and communal toilets. Miserable shit, ripe for the weedy growth of nostalgia. Moore has always excelled at building atmosphere, whether in the visual or verbal medium, and this is his greatest trick yet. One smells and feels unfamiliar senses, vividly. (The whole weighty atmosphere is enough to make the geo-political non-entity sistrum of British culture in the Sixties seem a breath of fresh air for a drowning person.) The characters, long and short, have some more heft that the usual combination of names and dialogue. From name to attribute, the reader doesn't have a moment to question who they're meeting at the moment. It just is.
Moore, as he is at his best, has no shame showing off his mastery of his work. No character is described the same way twice and we're all the better for it. I found myself having to look up adjectives for their meaning, references for their provenance, for the first time in many years. The task is not tedious or pretentious, at all- rather, it is like the joy of discovery hearing some unfamiliar term is in our youth. This novel is the work of a Magician at the top of his Age, chronicling a city that isn't even his, in the most poignant and exciting way possible. Now that he has laid in the certain stone of the mind his beloved Northampton, Moore has turned his eye towards the metropolis...Behold, the real London!
I almost got to see him there once, in person. It was a show, a performance, on the behalf of Lex Records of his hagiography of Steve Moore in some disused tunnels that were once part of the London Underground. Unearthing- I won my tickets on the merit of my cough cough cough "essay" about why Alan was the greatest author. I didn't make the leap, couldn't have because of the bitter reality of logistics. But in my mind, I've been to Shooters Hill and Charing Cross. Shoreditch and Cripplegate are in my backyard.
This is a non-spoiler review, if anyone would like for me to go further into depth into the book, let me know!
[One of my students saw me reading the book and asked what I was reading. I simply replied it was the first book in a series of novels. They replied: "Is the next book going to be called The Great How?"
