The War Against the Imagination Continues

Here are a few brief (but telling) excerpts from Jeffrey Goldberg's recent Atlantic article entitled "In Maryland, a Soviet-Style Punishment for a Novelist":

"From the Dept. of Insane and Dangerous Overreactions to Fictional Threats:  A 23-year-old teacher at a Cambridge, Maryland, middle school has been placed on leave and—in the words of a local news report—'taken in for an emergency medical evaluation' for publishing, under a pseudonym, a novel about a school shooting. The novelist, Patrick McLaw, an eighth-grade language-arts teacher at the Mace's Lane Middle School, was placed on leave by the Dorchester County Board of Education, and is being investigated by the Dorchester County Sheriff's Office, according to news reports from Maryland's Eastern Shore. The novel, by the way, is set 900 years in the future [...].

"According to an equally credulous and breathless report in the Star-Democrat, which is published in Easton, Maryland, the combined efforts of multiple law-enforcement agencies have made area children safe from fiction. Sheriff Phillips told the newspaper that, in addition to a K-9 sweep of the school (!), investigators also raided McLaw's home. 'The residence of the teacher in Wicomico County was searched by personnel,' Phillips said, with no weapons found. 'A further check of Maryland State Police databases also proved to be negative as to any weapons registered to him. McLaw was suspended by the Dorchester County Board of Education pending an investigation and is no longer in the area. He is currently at a location known to law enforcement and does not currently have the ability to travel anywhere.'

"I've tried to reach the sheriff, so far unsuccessfully, to learn whether McLaw's 'inability to travel anywhere' means that he is under arrest. It is somewhat amazing that local news reports on this case don't make clear whether McLaw is under arrest, and if so, on what charge. It is equally astonishing that the reporters on this story don't seem to have used the words 'First Amendment' in their questioning of law-enforcement officials, and also astonishing they don't question the Soviet-sounding practice of ordering an apparently sane person who has been deemed unacceptable by state authorities to undergo a psychological evaluation.

"It would be useful to know if McLaw is under investigation for behavior other than writing two novels—and perhaps he will be shown to be a miscreant of some sort—but so far, there is no indication that he is guilty of anything other than having an imagination, although on Maryland's Eastern Shore, as news reports make clear, his imagination is considered an active threat."

To read Goldberg's entire article, click HERE.

Wide Area Aerial Surveillance

What follows is the first sentence of a recent article entitled "How One New Drone Tech Finally Allows All-Seeing Surveillance" by Tyler Rogoway (a defense journalist and photographer):

"The omnipresent watching aircraft of dystopian science fiction has quietly become science fact.  Meet Wide Area Aerial Surveillance, the all-seeing eye in the sky that will change our lives forever...."

To read Rogoway's entire article about Wide Area Aerial Surveillance, click HERE.

William S. Burroughs and the Dead-End Horror of the Centipede God

Here's a recent article by Mark Dery (courtesy of BoingBoing) that's well worth your time.  Entitled "William S. Burroughs and the Dead-End Horror of the Centipede God," this article argues that Burroughs's perpetual obsession with centipedes is a strange metaphor for the gradual dissolution of freedom of thought and the complete annihilation of human liberty.  Here are the first two paragraphs of Dery's article:

In the annals of centipede phobia, William S. Burroughs stands alone. The man loathed the beasts, loathed them with a loathing that would not die. Had he lived to see Web videos of pet centipedes with pinkies (hairless baby mice) in their death grip—a thriving subgenre, on YouTube, of what might be called predator porn—Burroughs would surely have emptied his beloved .38 (a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson, which he slept with every night) into his computer.

In Burroughs’s novels, centipedes are the emissaries of a Venusian fascism, a mind-controlling horror so virulently opposed to free thought, racial tolerance, gay rights, and other mile-markers of human progress—in fact, so hostile to mammals in general and Homo sapiens in specific—that they are literally from another planet. Like the aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Jack Finney’s bad dream about the loss of individualism (whether to suburban conformity or communist infiltrators, we’re never quite sure), Burroughs’s centipedes don’t just want to knock us off our perch as evolution’s crowning achievement; they want to parasitize us, puppeteer us.

To read Dery's entire article, click HERE.

Back in 2006 I wrote my own article about William Burroughs for New Dawn Magazine, analyzing Burroughs' fiction from the perspective of Gnostic mythology.  This article later became Chapter 13 of my first book, Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form.  Reading both pieces back to back would no doubt reveal illuminating connections between the two articles with regard to Burroughs's view of what he called "The Reality Studio" and its labyrinthine system of control.  To read my WSB article, "William S. Burroughs:  20th Century Gnostic Visionary," click HERE.

Operation Fantasia

From Greg Ross' blog, FUTILITY CLOSET, comes this fascinating history lesson about a U.S. psychological warfare plot intended to be employed against the Japanese during WWII:

"In 1943, seeking to use psychological warfare to prevail in its efforts against the Japanese, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services hit on a strange plan. Noting that Shintoists might view the image of an illuminated fox as a harbinger of bad times, the agency’s experts suggested that 'under extremely trying conditions' the Japanese 'would be adversely affected by what they might consider an evil omen' and succumb to 'fear, terror, and despair.'

"How does one make a glowing fox? Planners started by experimenting with fox-shaped balloons covered in luminous paint and dangled by fishing line, but by the end of 1944 they’d shelved that idea and begun spraying live foxes with luminous paint, hoping to release them across the 'entire field of combat,' calling this America’s 'most potent' psychological tool against the Japanese."

To read Ross' entire article, click HERE.  

(When you read the rest of this piece, note that this particular psychological warfare plan was tested first on Americans, a tried-and-true tradition that continues to this day with other--even more outrageous--psychological warfare operations.) 

SPIES AND SAUCERS NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER!

My first book of fiction, SPIES AND SAUCERS (a collection of three interrelated novellas), is now available for pre-order from PS Publishing in England!  Here's the dust jacket ballyhoo:

Madness, murder and mayhem abound in SPIES & SAUCERS, a collection of three sui generis novellas by ROBERT GUFFEY.  Each of these tales explores the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s, as well as the flying saucer obsession of that era, while straddling the boundaries of seemingly disparate genres:  metaphysical science fiction, espionage, satire, and crime noir.

The first part of SPIES & SAUCERS, “The Fallen Nun,” takes place in 1959.  Our protagonist, Kyle Black, wakes up one morning to discover a dead nun lying facedown in the marijuana garden in his backyard.  Attempting to solve the mystery of how the nun ended up in his garden leads Kyle to strange encounters with an Irish Cyclops named Finn mac Cumhall, a Devil Bat grown to enormous proportions by a dead mad scientist, two homicidal tabloid journalists, and a sickly extraterrestrial abducted by a time travelling mother superior…

In “Communist Town, U.S.A.,” a young FBI agent named Philip Trowbridge is sent to Wisconsin in 1955 with orders to infiltrate a small town, reportedly a hotbed of underground Communist activity, in which several previous FBI agents have disappeared without a trace…

“Spies and Saucers” is set three years earlier in 1952 and involves a blacklisted, left-wing Hollywood screenwriter named Curt Adamson.  Down on his luck after having been dumped by every studio on the West Coast, Adamson is recruited by a covert spy agency to write a screenplay for an unknown reason—unknown only to Adamson, that is.  Adamson’s superiors are well aware of the screenplay’s purpose.  Though consistently told he doesn’t have a “need to know,” Adamson insists on discovering the truth behind the tale he himself is weaving, and uncovers a plot far more outlandish and ominous than the cheap horror and science fiction B-movies on which he’s built his tarnished reputation…

If you wish to pre-order a copy of SPIES AND SAUCERS, simply click HERE.

NOTE:  My short story “Selections from The Expectant Mother Disinformation Handbook” is still available from PS Publishing in the latest issue of POSTSCRIPTS (#30/31), which also contains scintillating tales by RAMSEY CAMPBELL, JACK DANN & BARRY MALZBERG, FORREST AGUIRRE, MIKE RESNICK, DARRELL SCHWEITZER and many others.  I'm told there are only a few copies of this issue left, so if you wish to order POSTSCRIPTS #30/31, I urge you to click HERE before they're all gone... forever!

William Seabrook vs. Hitler!

We now hop into our cryptoscatological time machine and travel back to that infamous year of 1941 in order to witness William Seabrook, author of the groundbreaking 1929 book THE MAGIC ISLAND [a travelogue about Haiti upon which the 1932 Bela Lugosi film, WHITE ZOMBIE (the very first zombie flick), was unofficially based], attempting to cast a hex on none other than Adolf Hitler himself!  Simply click HERE to see the anti-Nazi ritual in action....

The CIA Style Manual & Writers Guide

From Jillian Steinhauer’s 7-9-14 article “The CIA and the Power of Words”:

“Like any proper organization that produces large quantities of writing, the CIA, it turns out, has a style manual. The legal nonprofit National Security Counselors obtained a copy of the 2011 version a little over a year ago, via a Freedom of Information Act request, and posted it online. (Quartz blogged about it yesterday.) It is an absurdly thorough, mundane yet fascinating look at the politics of language.

“The 2011 Style Manual & Writers Guide for Intelligence Publications runs nearly 200 pages. It covers everything you’d expect from a guide of its kind: capitalization, numbers, compound words, modifiers. In some ways, it’s a completely unexceptional document.

“Yet, as you page through, little things start to emerge […].”

To read the entirety of Steinhauer's “The CIA and the Power of Words,” click HERE.