Robert Guffey: LIVE FROM SANTA MONICA!!!

Back on Saturday, June 8, impresario Gerry Fialka interviewed me about Cryptoscatology and related matters for a little over two hours at The UnUrban Cafe, a coffee shop/art gallery in Santa Monica.  You can hear the unexpurgated recording of that fateful encounter by clicking HERE.

Non-conspiracy Cryptoscatology (Part 2)

In the past, as part of my on-going study of the nascent field known as “Cryptoscatology,” I’ve reviewed books that I believe could be included in the category of “Non-conspiracy Cryptoscatology” (e.g., THE PERILS OF MOVIEGOING IN AMERICA by Gary D. Rhodes and TEEN ANGELS & NEW MUTANTS by Stephen R. Bissette).  My first book, CRYPTOSCATOLOGY, focuses primarily on conspiracy theories, but the word “cryptoscatology” simply means “the study of secret shit,” and in our society “shit” (i.e., that which is considered illegitimate by mainstream culture) can take many, many forms.   

Basically, any field of endeavor that is far removed from the “value grid” of mainstream society is more than capable of winning an honored seat in the hallowed halls of the Academy of Cryptoscatology.  This means that Cryptoscatology must, of course, include pornography within its capacious parameters.  

Today, students, we’ll be studying the field of pornography in the form of two new books by Harlan Ellison:  PULLING A TRAIN and GETTING IN THE WIND, both recently published by the very hip new publishing house, Kicks Books in New York.   

If, after reading this review, you’re interested in purchasing the books and meeting Mr. Ellison in person, you might want to keep this date in mind (the following information is excerpted from a recent Kicks Books press release):

Saturday, July 13, 2 – 5 pm An Afternoon Reading, Signing and Haircut Party with Author Harlan Ellison La Luz de Jesus Gallery**and Soap Plant 4633 Hollywood Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90027 Sweeney Todd’s Barber Shop 4639 Hollywood Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90027

Join the greatest living author of Juvenile Delinquent street fiction Harlan Ellison for this rare event as he arrives at in grand style at La Luz de Jesus’ neighboring vintage clip joint, Sweeny Todd’s Barber Shop, for a specially designed trim by shop curator Sween Lahman and is then escorted to the gallery for a reading, and signing of his Kicks Books blockbusters, Pulling a Train and Getting in the Wind. Limited edition 11 x 17 posters of the book covers will be available at this event. It will be an afternoon of pizzazz and vinegar with a true living legend! [END OF EXCERPT]

What follows is my review of Ellison’s two most recent collections….

Still Pulling This Train:  Harlan Ellison’s Pulling a Train and Getting in the Wind

by Robert Guffey

  

Bearing titles with deliciously lascivious double entendres, Harlan Ellison’s latest story collections—Pulling a Train:  Violent Stories of Naked Passions and Getting in the Wind:  More Stories By a Very Young Harlan Ellison—are dark twins linked by the common themes of erotic violence and violent eroticism. 

Though well-known for having written such classic short stories as “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” (1965), “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (1967), “Grail” (1981), and “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore” (1992), Ellison began his career in the late 1950s churning out penny-a-word pulp stories for men’s magazines such as Guilty, Manhunt and Trapped.  Considered pornographic upon their original 1959 paperback release, under the title Sex Gang, the stories featured in Pulling a Train and Getting in the Wind have been resurrected by Brooklyn-based Kicks Books publisher Miriam Linna (a former musician who once performed with such punk bands as The Cramps and Nervous Rex).  Intended as nothing more than space-filler for long-deceased “he-man publications” such as Knave, Rogue and Caper, these tales have risen like a perverted phoenix from the puritanical ashes of 1950s moral strictures.  Both books are fascinating time capsules.  What must have seemed like standard softcore porn in 1959 now emerge in the 21^st century as historical records of the cultural mores of midcentury America and the ever-shifting borders between what’s considered decency and degeneracy in mainstream culture. 

If titillation alone had been the main impetus of these stories, then reprinting them now would be a waste of time.  But Harlan Ellison, even in his early 20s, was too talented to take the easy way out of any assignment no matter how perfunctory it may have seemed at the time.  In his entertaining introduction to Pulling a Train (entitled “Inescapable Cemeteries”), Ellison calls these “zilch” stories “crude,” and of course they are.  And yet the overall  tone of the stories are permeated with an offbeat world weariness, genuine schadenfreude, unusual for a young writer fresh out of Ohio who somehow found himself in the 1950s Big Apple cranking out one-handed reads to make ends meet.  It’s this curiously dark tone that lifts the material above its utilitarian roots. 

The centerpiece of Pulling a Train is a lurid novella entitled “Sex Gang,” a hardboiled crime story about an eighteen-year-old thug named Deek Cullen who seems to be at the end of his rope when we’re first introduced to him and quickly descends—inch by painful inch—deeper into darkness as the tale progresses.  Cullen’s desperation is palatable and effectively conveyed through Ellison’s staccato, stripped-down prose as the protagonist becomes unwillingly involved with an all-girl gang who spend their empty days stalking the mean streets of New York and raping virile young men like Deek in their spare time.  Though the novella was “written for a buck” (as Ellison says in his intro) at lightning speed, nonetheless one can’t help but feel for Cullen’s confusion and his utter inability to escape the tragic fate that awaits him.  Ostensibly aimed at male readers, from the perspective of the present day one might nonetheless interpret this quasi-noir tale of sudden and near-inexplicable violence as a proto-feminist manifesto, Valerie-Solanas-style, almost ten years ahead of its time.  Its blood-spattered plot twists, interspersed with tough-talking knockout Amazons, prefigure the self-aware, self-mocking tone of Quentin Tarantino’s 2007 film, Death Proof.  Indeed, while reading “Sex Gang,” I couldn’t help but think that this is the stuff Quentin Tarantino probably dreams about writing.  (I also couldn’t help but think that “Sex Gang” would make a fascinating 21^st century film, if adapted properly—or perhaps “improperly” would be the apt word in this context.)

The most intriguing stories in both Pulling a Train and Getting in the Wind are those that merge pornography with noir strains:  the aforementioned “Sex Gang,” “A Girl Named Poison,” “Dead Wives Don’t Cheat,” and “Carrion Flesh.”  All four of these pessimistic tales have not been in print since their original appearance in 1959 and are worth the price of admission alone. 

After finishing these two books at a fast clip, I pulled out my copy of Leslie Swigart’s exhaustive (and now very rare) 1973 bibliography of Ellison’s works entitled Harlan Ellison:  A Bibliographical Checklist, and uncovered references to many other early Ellison tales that—to my knowledge—have never been reprinted since their original publication in the 1950s pulp magazines that spawned them.  These stories bear such wonderfully over-the-top titles as “Psycho at Midpoint,” “Homicidal Maniac,” “Scum Town,” “Glug,” “Satan Is My Ally,” “Only Death Can Stop It,” and “A Corpse Can Hate.”  One can only hope that the release of Pulling a Train and Getting in the Wind might soon lead to the resurrection of these other lost gems from America’s pop cultural past. 

To order either Pulling a Train or Getting in the Wind, visit the publisher’s website by clicking HERE. 

Note:  This review appeared originally, in somewhat different form, in the March 2013 issue of THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION (#295).  

Michael Hastings R.I.P. (1980-2013)

Brief excerpts from Eric W. Dolan's 6-18-13 article entitled "Journalist Michael Hastings Dies in Car Crash":

"The journalist and author Michael Hastings died at the age of 33 on Tuesday morning [6-18-13]. According to his employer BuzzFeed, Hastings was killed in a car crash in Los Angeles [...].

"Hastings gained national attention in 2010 after exposing inflammatory comments made by Gen. Stanley McChrystal about President Barack Obama and the civilian leadership of the military [...].

"A person who witnessed the crash early Tuesday morning said he saw Hastings speeding down the road in his car when it suddenly jackknifed, slammed into a tree, and burst into flames."

Michael Hastings' most recent book was the New York Times bestseller The Operators:  The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan (Blue Rider Press, 2012).

To read Dolan's entire article, click HERE.

Thanks, NSA!

An excerpt from Iain Thomson's 6-12-13 Register article entitled "Thanks, NSA:  Amazon Sales of Orwell's 1984 Rise 9,500 %":

"A glance at the 'Movers and Shakers' page of Amazon shows there's been an unusual reaction to the current NSA spying scandal: sales of George Orwell's classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four are up 9,538 per cent.

"It was somewhat ironic that the news of the NSA's systematic slurping of phone records and the subsequent revelations about the PRISM spying system were revealed in the same week as the 64th anniversary of the publication of Orwell's dark masterpiece.  Now it seems people are buying it up either to learn about what could be, or simply because recent events reminded them to read the classic.

"There are certainly parallels with the current situation to be found in the book, although we don't yet have clocks that strike thirteen. Certainly Orwell's imagined telescreen that monitors the populace in their living room could be seen as potentially very similar to Microsoft's Xbox One, which comes with a Kinect system that can monitor your heartbeat.

"One might also draw parallels with the tale of a state locked in perpetual war. The US military has officially been in combat for over half of the years since the book was first published in 1949 (Korea 1950-53, Vietnam 1959-1975, Grenada 1983, Panama 1989-90, Kuwait 1991, Bosnia 1995, and Afghanistan ongoing since 2001) and that's not including 'police actions' and 'wars' against drugs and terror."

Read the rest of the article HERE.

 

Cryptoscatology at The Unurban

 

ANNOUNCEMENT!

I'm being interviewed about Cryptoscatology this Saturday by media ecologist Gerry Fialka at The Unurban in Santa Monica.  Here's the necessary info:

June 8, SAT, 4pm-6pm:  Media Ecology Soul Salon -- Author ROBERT GUFFEY (Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form) interview http://www.laughtears.com/mess.html Unurban 3301 Pico Blvd. Santa Monica CA 90401 310-315-0056.  Admission price:  FREE!

Perhaps I'll see you there.  Copies of Cryptoscatology will be available, and of course I'll sign them if you wish....

Behold!!! the Protong

September 2023 update: My new novel, DEAD MONKEY RUM, revolves around the work of visionary artist Stanislaw Szukalski. To find out more about this book, click HERE!

April 2019 update: The last chapter of my new book, BELA LUGOSI AND THE MONOGRAM NINE (written in collaboration with Gary D. Rhodes), is all about the artwork of Stanislaw Szukalski and its connections to 1940s horror cinema, particularly THE RETURN OF THE APE MAN starring Bela Lugosi. If you're interested in reading this chapter, you can purchase a copy of the book by clicking right HERE.

This past February, the Cal State Fullerton Begovich Gallery hosted an exhibit entitled "Szukalski:  Drawings," which spotlighted the mind-bending artwork of an unjustly obscure genius named Stanislav Szukalski.  According to Mike McGee, the curator of the show, this was the "first extensive survey of surviving Stanislaw Szukalski drawings."

Though he was born in Poland in December of 1893, Szukalski lived and worked in Burbank, California for several decades until his death in May of 1987.  His eccentric artwork, which include drawings as well as masterful sculptures, were eventually embraced by an eclectic mixture of notable Southern Californians such as Glenn Bray, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Williams and Jim Woodring (among many others).  If you haven't seen a copy of Szukalski's book Behold!!! the Protong, available from Last Gasp, you truly don't know what you're missing.  The subtitle of my first book (i.e, "Conspiracy Theory as Art Form") could easily apply to both the life and work of Stanislav Szukalski.  Perhaps no one ever went quite so far to transform a theory into an art form as much as Szukalski.

Szukalaki's theory is a rather complicated and peculiar one, but Richard Chang of the Orange County Register offers a fairly accurate condensed version of it in the excerpt below: 

"...Szukalski developed the pseudoscientific-historic theory of Zermatism – the belief that after the biblical flood of Noah's time, as described in the Book of Genesis, mankind fled to two main high-ground locations – Easter Island and Zermatt, Switzerland (hence, 'Zermatism').

"He used pictographs to illustrate how these locations provided the origins of a single, ancient language – Protong (his own term). He also believed that the human race had bred with a competitive race of Yeti (Abominable Snowmen or Bigfoot, for the uninitiated), and the result was a hybrid that polluted the purity of homo sapiens. Szukalski argued further that the hybrids were responsible for many of people's problems throughout history.

"While his evolutionary theories are fascinating, they're bizarre and highly unscientific, and through the decades, no other legitimate source has backed them up. Szukalski's drawings in the Fullerton exhibit do encompass some of his ideas, but they merely scratch the surface of what appears to be a labyrinthine Pandora's box of contorted conceptions.

"A significant amount of Szukalski's work is believed to have been destroyed in Poland, particularly during World War II. But some of it survived in a trunk left in California. A 1920s sketchbook in a glass case, with the title 'Lest We Forget' stenciled on the cover, contains intricate and amazing sketches. A video nearby helps disclose some of these works, which were created on plebian, daily journal paper.

"In Poland, Szukalski wrote and illustrated a mythological tale titled 'Rege Rege.' Several illustrations from a later, longer version are in the Begovich exhibit, and they demonstrate how detailed, wild and cinematic his vision was."

[END OF EXCERPT]

[If you want to read the entirety of Richard Chang's article about the Szukalski exhibit, click HERE.]

A few years before the Fullerton show, on October of 2009, I attended an exhibit that featured the work of Szukalski and--as an added bonus--the infamous Richard Shaver, an American painter and Hollow Earth theorist whose ideas about Earth's secret history weirdly parallel Szukalski's.  I was so impressed by this show that I wrote a review of it the second I returned home.  This review was published about a week later (on October 24th, 2009) on paranoidsonline.blogspot.com.  The curator later told me that I was the only writer who'd actually bothered to cover the exhibit, which stunned me.  But perhaps I shouldn't have been very surprised....

For your edification, here's the full text of my review:

The Mad Genius of Richard Shaver & Stanislav Szukalski

by Robert Guffey

On October 16, 2009, I had the privilege of attending one of the oddest gallery shows in recent Southern California history entitled “Mantong and Protong: Richard Sharpe Shaver and Stanislav Szukalski.” This exhibit was the brain child of curator Brian Tucker, director of the Pasadena City College Art Gallery. Despite being modest in size, limited to two rooms the size of an average studio apartment, the exhibit itself possessed a scope that was almost cosmic in nature. Though Shaver and Szukalski were no doubt unaware of each other’s existence, both have a great deal in common. Tucker was perceptive enough to notice these subtle links and build an entire show around them.

Both gentlemen, in the end, could be considered Outsider Artists. Much of their work was completed well outside the scrutiny of the modern art world. Indeed, it’s doubtful that either individual perceived the bulk of their work to be “art” in any traditional sense of that word. Their art objects were merely adjuncts to a utilitarian goal: to prove a scientific theory considered to be off-the-wall by mainstream society.

Both men achieved some level of fame early in their lives. In 1943, at the age of 36, Shaver became infamous among American science fiction fans for a series of outlandish articles and stories he wrote for Ray Palmer, editor of Amazing Stories Magazine. Shaver claimed he was in contact with monstrous beings who lived beneath the Earth. Some of these beings were called “Deros,” short for “Detrimental Robots.” These Deros had been beaming messages into Shaver’s head for quite some time. They had even taught him about the hidden history of the human race, including a long lost ur-language called “Mantong,” the source of all human language existing on Earth in the present. To the dismay of rationalist science fiction fans the world over, hordes of readers began writing letters to the magazine insisting that Shaver was correct—they, too, had received messages from the subterranean Deros! What became known as “The Shaver Mystery” continued to be a popular, though extremely controversial, topic in science fiction fandom for a period of about ten years. Eventually, however, Shaver drifted into obscurity and began turning his attention to even stranger pursuits.




One of these endeavors resulted in a series of almost surrealist paintings and photographs based on images Shaver claimed to have discovered imprinted on the interior of ancient rocks. Some of these pieces bear titles that would seem right at home in an exhibit of Robert Williams paintings, e.g.: “Action Photo of a Crazy Codfish Attacking A Lugubrious Flounder Taken At Forty Fathoms.” Shaver claimed that the destruction of a pre-Deluge civilization had somehow been recorded as images stored within these rocks. Shaver painted what he saw in a valiant attempt to help the rest of the human race witness the apocalyptic images that—he felt—should have been plainly obvious to anyone with eyes to see.

According to Tucker, in the 1960s Shaver even went so far as to mail a couple of his rocks to President Lyndon Johnson along with a note urging the President to assign a team of scientists to study these hidden images before the Russians beat America to the punch. President Johnson’s reaction to this letter is not known, but one hopes those Shaver rocks are still sitting unobtrusively on a mantle in the Oval Office.

Like Shaver, Stanislav Szukalski also achieved some measure of fame in his younger days. According to Tucker, Szukalski was “a celebrated artist from Poland […] best known for his detailed and elaborately symbolic sculptures that combined elements evocative of European avant-garde and Meso-American iconography.” Like Shaver, Szukalski spent the latter part of his life constructing a unified field theory of human pre-history. The ultimate outcome of this theory was the 1982 book Behold!!! the Protong in which he claimed to have discovered the root of all language, known as “the Protong.” Like Shaver, he believed the human race was at war with an evil group of beast-like creatures who represented the devolution of the human race; in this case, the creatures were the result of humans mating with Yetis millennia ago. Like Shaver, Szukalski’s works would have been completely lost if not for the untiring efforts of a small group of admirers who didn’t wish to see his unique oeuvre tossed into the dumpster.


Szukalski himself cut up his voluminous notes and drawings with a razor blade in order for them to be seen more clearly on video during an interview conducted by Glenn Bray, the man responsible for preserving much of Szukalski’s work. Shaver’s equivalent to Glenn Bray in his own life was the aforementioned editor, Ray Palmer. If not for Palmer, who published many of Shaver’s paintings in his 1975 book The Secret World, the entirety of Shaver’s work would have been completely unknown. Indeed, some of Shaver’s paintings were turned over and used by its creator as signs advertising his pottery business; one of them was even used a doggie door! Tucker cleverly includes photos of these paintings’ backsides next to the original in order to demonstrate how little regard the artist himself had for his own work.

Though both achieved a certain measure of fame—or at least notoriety—early on, Shaver and Szukalski ended their lives as true Outsider Artists. Like Henry Darger (an Outsider Artist if ever there was one), both Shaver’s and Szukalski’s major works were destined to have been lost forever if not for the intervention of mere luck and happenstance. It makes one wonder how many other mad geniuses have had the work of a lifetime discarded by unsympathetic relatives or landlords annoyed by their former tenant’s unbearable eccentricities.

Fortunately, one can witness in person—for a short time—a slight fragment of the inner lives of these two mad geniuses at the Pasadena City College Art Gallery, at least until November 14, 2009, the day the exhibit closes. One hopes that some canny publisher will see the exhibit and commission Brian Tucker to produce a book-length version of MANTONG & PROTONG so future generations can marvel at the eerie synchronicities linking the intense, chimerical visions of these two unique 20th century artists.


For more information about Stanislav Szukalski's artwork, click HERE.


For more information about Richard Shaver's artwork, click HERE.

Albert K. Bender at New York's Hotel Commodore (1967)

What follows is a rare treat....

Albert K. Bender, author of the underappreciated 1962 nonfiction book Flying Saucers and the Three Men, was one of the greatest and most influential UFOlogists of the 1950s/'60s.  In collaboration with fellow UFOlogist Gray Barker (author of the 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers), he introduced the infamous "Men in Black" into the collective consciousness of modern folklore (and/or "folktruth").

By chance, I recently stumbled across a recording of a 30-minute lecture delivered by Bender at the Hotel Commodore in New York during the summer of 1967.  Intriguingly, during this speech he mentions a recently completed follow-up book to Flying Saucers and the Three Men, which (to my knowledge) was never released.  This tome must now enter the Pantheon of Lost Classics, along with Charles Fort's infamous X and Y.

You can hear the entirety of this lecture, the only known recording of Bender's voice, by clicking HERE.  

"Bow ties are cool."