Book Reviews: Spring 2024

Anna Faktorovich

British Medieval Latin Texts: Thoroughly Translated and Introduced 

Carolinne White, and Catherine Conybeare, The Cambridge Anthology of British Medieval Latin, Volume 2: 1066-1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, January 2024). Hardcover. 522pp. Index, bibliography, maps. ISBN: 978-1-316-63729-6.

*****

“A series of Latin texts (with English translation) produced in Britain during the period AD 450-1500. Excerpts are taken from Bede and other historians, from the letters of women written from their monasteries, from famous documents such as Domesday Book and Magna Carta, and from accounts and legal documents, all revealing the lives of individuals at home and on their travels across Britain and beyond. It offers an insight into Latin writings on many subjects, showing the important role of Latin in the multilingual society of medieval Britain, in which Latin was the primary language of written communication and record and also developed, particularly after the Norman Conquest, through mutual influence with English and French. The thorough introductions to each volume provide a broad overview of the linguistic and cultural background, while the individual texts are placed in their social, historical and linguistic context.”

In my British Renaissance Re-Attribution and Modernization (BRRAM) series’ Richard Verstegan’s Restitution for Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities volume, I explained that the history of Britain, as it is currently taught in schools, was fabricated by Britain’s ghostwriting Workshops. Verstegan, in particular, was instrumental in forging many Old and Middle English texts that he created by translating Latin texts into these variants of Old German and selling these as expensive antiques to collectors, and in transcription to book-buyers. Restitution was the first Old-Middle English dictionary in part because Verstegan had spent the previous decades fabricating these linguistic variants. Restitution also explains that modern geneticists have concluded that modern Brits migrated to Britain from German-Dutch regions in around 900 AD, and then serfdom was introduced over these migrants after the Norman conquest around two hundred years later. Latin had been the official language of Europe, and the regional variants, such as Old German were merely erroneous usages of Latin that had diverged into distinct languages. Thus, the study of Latin manuscripts from 1066-1500 is the study of almost all pre-Renaissance-Workshop and pre-English authentic texts created in Britain (though some of these Latin manuscripts might have been created in Europe, and merely later claimed to have been British in origin). Before the Norman enslavement of the British population, they had no need for legal contracts designed to enforce this enslavement with rules fabricated by the enslavers.

The “Introduction” to this book explains that most of these documents were stored “for centuries” at only two central locations, “Westminster and in the Tower of London”. Their publication in this book is a major step in a disclosing direction, as their had been intentionally off-limits to the public for most of British history because this allowed them to be manipulated by having new forgeries introduced when history needed to be altered, such as creating a foundation for a new peerage, or a new aristocratic claim to an enormous piece of land. A forger merely had to labor at one of these locations as a ghost-clerk to introduce volumes of documents that were unreadable to nearly all in the mostly illiterate public. The “Introduction” to this book reports similar unsubstantiated propagandistic books as most books that are designed to puff the intellectual superiority of Brits in early British history. “By the twelfth century, access to education was increasing at all levels and a more secular syllabus was also available” (6). The author cites another modern critic as a source for this claim. There are no statistics for the literacy level in Britain in the 12^th century, and if the surviving documents are counted as the only texts that anybody wrote in that century, there was only a handful of Latin scribes who continued studying the Bible to enforce the feudal system on the masses through the power of the God-sponsored monarch. At most there were 5% of American slaves in the 18^th century who were minimally literate or had a basic ability to read and write. Then, why would the British enslaved population under feudalism in the 12^th century have had any access to an education outside of the indoctrination necessary to force their labor? The author does not address such questions, and instead digresses into generalities such as the “characteristic elegance” of Aelred’s writing style, adding that the “handwriting is often extremely beautiful” (8). There are no references to “carbon-dating” or even few references to dating any document by means other than accepting the stated date as true. One of the only estimated datings appears on “Tex II.1b” on “The Battle of Hastings” that is described as “dated no later than 1125”, seemingly merely because the Latin spelling variants in the text match other texts credited as created at around this century. The subtitle of this book is the precise “1066-1500” time-period, so the author should have invested a bit more research into explaining why the stated dates should be believed, or why undated texts have been dated as they have been. The positive element that is explained at the end of this “Introduction” is that the point of this volume is to give access to the public to read the contents of texts that have been inaccessible until now. Interesting details include “the Abbot of St Albans’ epic-style description of his sea crossing in 1423”, or “satire and black humor, for example in the chronicle of Meaux Abbey in Yorkshire, whose author comments… that after the naval battle of Sluys in 1340, the fish had eaten so many dead Frenchmen that if God had given fish the ability to talk, they would have spoken French” (29). While humorous, this reference is also likely to point to a propagandistic exaggeration, as there were clearly far fewer ships or soldiers used in battles during this period, starting with the Norman Conquest, which appears to have in fact been achieved with near-no resistance. But a tale of documentary conquest by writing contracts in a language the native Brits did not understand would not have been as inspiring for nationalistic pride.  

The Norman Conquest is covered in the first translated piece in “Section II.1”: “The Bayeux Tapestry”, dated: “?before 1080”. The prefacing remarks on it explain: “Although it has been preserved for many centuries in Bayeux in Normandy, it is likely to have been made in England, as English needlework was renowned already at this time”, having been puffed in other sources that could have been Norman propaganda, such as “William of Poitiers’” Gesta Guillelmi (33-5). If English women learned the French style of needlework, their output would have been indistinguishable from the French or Norman, and thus this is a cyclical argument that does not provide any evidentiary reason to believe that this tapestry was made outside the place where it was stored: Normandy. This is a great example of the problem I mentioned where many Latin “British” documents tend to have content and provenance that suggests they are more likely to have been created in continental Europe as propaganda aimed to minimize Britain and to glorify conquests over Britain. 

The faults with this publication I have mentioned are not unique to this particular author, but rather are to be found in all books that cover this period of British textual output. If I was still researching the Renaissance for my BRRAM series, I would have read most of this book cover-to-cover, as most of the Latin texts and translations provided in this volume have not been previously accessible in any digitized format. And the sections on the history, and linguistics that introduce each of these pieces should make it extremely easy for new and established researchers in this field to briskly enter each new subject with their help, so they can focus on the evidence in these manuscripts that is relevant to their unique research projects. Spotting linguistic or historical errors in the past interpretations of these manuscripts cannot begin without such reference materials that compress this potentially erroneous information. The inclusion of both original Latin, and English translations is also rare, as typically only one of these is included in anthologies. One down-side is that there is only a single illustration or a copy of one of these manuscripts: “Example from 1296 of the Feet of Fines Document”. Copies of at least a page out of all manuscripts in this volume should have been included to allow the public to judge if the same handwriting style appears in manuscripts that are supposed to be from different centuries, allowing for the identification of backdated forgeries. The author probably did not have the budget to pay these archives thousands or perhaps millions of dollars to digitize these pieces and for permission to reproduce them in a scholarly book intended for commercial use. Some archives do not allow for self-photographing of such manuscripts. Because modern aristocrats still hold lands that rely on some of these documents, they really should have been digitized online as soon as this became technically possible.

Despite my many objections, I am delighted to have this book in my digital collection, so that I can use it if I ever come across the need to check Latin sources from this period in my research. I thus recommend it to others who occasionally or regularly have need to check such historic sources, including private home libraries, and major university libraries.

Critical Guesses and Digressions on Old Norse-Icelandic Undated Manuscripts

Heather O’Donoghue, and Eleanor Parker, eds., The Cambridge History of Old Norse-Icelandic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024). Hardcover. 634pp. Index. ISBN: 978-1-108-48681-1.

***

“A landmark new history of Old Norse-Icelandic literature…, a… guide to a… body of medieval writing… The latest in-depth analysis of every significant genre and group of texts in the corpus, including sagas and skaldic verse, romances and saints’ lives, myths and histories, laws and learned literature… Innovatively organized by the chronology and geography of the texts’ settings—which stretch from mythic history to medieval Iceland, from Vinland to Byzantium—they reveal the interconnectedness of diverse genres encompassing verse and prose, translations and original works, Christian and pre-Christian literature, fiction and non-fiction.”

My BRRAM research in Verstegan’s Restitution indicated that Verstegan forged or fabricated a fictional mythology for Germanic people across Europe. Verstegan took brief propagandistic earlier references to satanic or semi-Roman deities in texts written by Catholic priests and added fiction to expand these into what seemed like a structured mythological narrative. As I searched for pre-Renaissance manuscripts that substantiated this narrative, I learned that Old Norse-Icelandic literature offered the richest cited examples, but these sources tend to be difficult to access either in digitized originals or as transcriptions or in translation. Thus, this book was a necessary request-item for review. As its “Introduction” reports, “With the conversion to Christianity in 1000 CE came literacy”, and pre-Christian texts were thus mostly written by Christian propogandists that were motivated with making the past look worse than the present feudal system that not only enforced labor but also claimed belief in the Christian mythology or fictional deity. Christian scribes could write fiction that they could present as authentic Norse mythology carried by “oral” tradition. This “Introduction” acknowledges that this mythology seems to echo “the rise of the European novel” (1), but the likelihood that these stories could have been forged in parallel with the earliest European novels is not mentioned.

The “Manuscripts and Textual Culture” section of the book explains the broad rules that were used to set dates on anonymous and undated manuscripts; for example, “The oldest script-type found in Icelandic manuscripts is Caroline minuscule, which was common up until the first decades in the thirteenth century” (41). This can mean that there was a single scribe who wrote this cluster of texts that have been instead spread as dated across centuries. This is a common mistake in such antiques, as most archivists fail to acknowledge that when texts they want to be from different periods seem to be written in a shared handwriting style this means they are by a single scribe in a single period.

The paragraphs in this section tend to include general statements in the body of the paragraphs, with extensive citations of past scholarship on each point in the citations. This scholarly style means that most of the text is a puffery of past scholarship, without in fact doing any in-depth explaining of the subject at-hand. For example, there is a claim that the “oldest extant Icelandic paper manuscript” is “from 1539-48” from the “notebook that belonged to Gissur Einarsson, bishop of Skalholt.” The note on this claim describes the path “used for purchasing paper by the sixteenth-century bishop”, and dating “paper manuscripts based on watermarks”. In most studies I have read the term “watermark” refers to a date imprinted into a paper watermark; such dates could be watermarked in at significantly later years, decades, or centuries than the claimed watermarked date. Thus, this section should have mentioned if this analysis is merely based on such a written date, or some carbon or otherwise dating of water-markings or anything else that in fact requires scientific analysis. Instead, most of the body of this paragraph is full of hot-air that does not actually explain why the “1539-48” date is to be believed. For example, if the watermark had a specific year in it, then this should have been a specific year, such as “1539”, and not a year-range that suggests some kind of analysis; but carbon-dating and other such analysis cannot narrow the years down to a single decade (46).

The main problem with this book is that it does not include any full transcriptions or translations of the literature that is being discussed. For example, the chapter on “Heroic Poetry” includes pages of criticism before the first couple of stanzas are quoted. While the introduction mentioned that there are some digital archives that hold some of these manuscripts, most of them are still inaccessible, and thus discussing them critically without providing full transcriptions does not help readers with being able to critically evaluate and benefit, since the conclusions reached by these literary scholars can be entirely erroneous or different from what another reader might gather from these texts. Quoting from the middle of texts is not likely to be beneficial without the rest of the narrative, with a historical and linguistic introduction to the piece. Here is one such fragment from Hervarar saga ok Heidreks, or “The Battle of the Goths and Huns”: “That is acceptable for a bondmaid’s child, the child of a bondmaid though it may be fathered by a king. The bastard sat on the mound when the prince divided the inheritance” (171). The previous short paragraph briefly summarizes that a character has refused to “share… the ancestral magic sword”, so a higher price was offered, followed by this insult. This passage hints that this was propaganda written against local rulers’ claims, and in favor of European monarchs who were attempting to gain control over this region by making these rulers appear corrupt, and as if they had a bastardly origin. A few paragraphs earlier, the author of this chapter explained that Hervarar is “one of the earliest-composed legendary sagas, although these particular verses only survive in some late Icelandic manuscripts” (170). The author is not concerned enough to offer supporting evidence for this dating. If only “late Icelandic manuscripts” survive; then, this piece cannot be dated as the “earliest” manuscript. Its content is a blatant propagandistic narrative that was relevant to the “late” period, even if the warring sides changed. The surrounding notes do not explain where this entire poem can be accessed in the original or in translation. If this critic’s interpretation of the dating and contents is entirely incorrect, a researcher reading this section would have to travel to this archive themselves (potentially) to perform their own research, just to disprove the poorly researched assertions made here, and repeated in earlier studies. There also do not appear to be any illustrations in this lengthy book of the manuscripts under discussion.

While searching for specific texts might help some researchers, most will be very frustrated as they attempt to read this book. Thus, I do not recommend reading this project unless somebody is a specialist in this field and knows what they are looking for.

A Horrific Personal Anecdote About Insulin-Equivalent-Poison as a Weight-Loss-Tool

Johann Hari, Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs (New York: Crown Publishing, May 7, 2024).

***

“A… look at the new drugs transforming weight loss as we know it—from his personal experience on Ozempic to our ability to heal our society’s dysfunctional relationship with food, weight, and our bodies. In January 2023, Johann Hari started to inject himself once a week with Ozempic, one of the new drugs that produces significant weight loss. He wasn’t alone—some predictions suggest that in a few years, a quarter of the U.S. population will be taking these drugs. While around 80 percent of diets fail, someone taking one of the new drugs will lose up to a quarter of their body weight in six months. To the drugs’ defenders, here is a moment of liberation from a condition that massively increases your chances of diabetes, cancer, and an early death. Still, Hari was wildly conflicted. Can these drugs really be as good as they sound? Are they a magic solution—or a magic trick? Finding the answer to this high-stakes question led him on a journey from Iceland to Minneapolis to Tokyo, and to interview the leading experts in the world on these questions. He found that along with the drug’s massive benefits come twelve significant potential risks… What do they reveal about the nature of obesity itself? What psychological issues begin to emerge when our eating patterns are suddenly disrupted?”

Around 7 years ago, I did a full spectrum of lab tests that determined that I was close to becoming pre-diabetic. I had gone to a digestion specialist because I was concerned that I might have still been suffering from side effects of h-pylori food poisoning that had given me an ulcer a few years earlier. Instead of addressing this concern, that stomach-doctor was lobbying me to get a colonoscopy and to perhaps to a weight-loss surgery. I had gained around 100 pounds across the previous few years after another doctor had put me on a steroid-spray drug for my light sinus problems. The doctor who ordered lab-tests refused to see me again when I refused to do the invasive procedures he recommended, so I had to research the lab-data myself by searching for what each of the tests (hundreds of data points) was stating about my health. When I researched my weight (248 pounds at the peak in 2016), I realized for the first time that I was classified as morbidly-obese. Back in 2009, when I started my PhD studies, I was at my lowest weight in a while at around 148 pounds. I had not weighed myself outside a doctor’s office almost ever, being entirely unconcerned regarding my weight (except for moments such as when I was seriously considered for an acting role in 2008 at my lowest weight, without having looked in the mirror to check my looks had improved). When I researched obesity in 2016, the answer I found was going vegan, and so I moved rather rapidly in that direction, and lost around 100 pounds, dropping back down to around 148 temporarily by the end of 2017, before climbing upwards to 160-70 and staying at that weight through the present. I have changed my diet occasionally. Eating almost no processed food led to the low-point, as did precise calorie-counting with an app and keeping the calorie-count low to decrease the weight. Aside for my solid will-power, eating large quantities of unprocessed fruits and vegetables through the bulk of the loss kept me from being hungry simply because of the chewing labor involved and the fullness felt after eating such buckets of good food. I have also been hydrating with water and tea regularly, whereas before I almost never drank simple water just to meet a hydration-minimum, if at all. And I have been exercising daily for over an hour with aerobic, weight-training and stretching sets, across these years. I have occasionally eaten non-vegan foods whenever I have traveled to conferences and the like across my diet years, as practically always wins over the rules of this diet. I was conditioned to follow strict food rules from the 4^th grade when I was exposed to them at an Orthodox Judaism school. And I have even eaten processed foods like chocolate vegan milk recently, which I would not have touched when I started this diet. The reason I almost immediately went vegan and maintained a diet unflinchingly after reviewing my lab results is because of my terror of needles, knowing that I would have to give myself regular shots if I developed diabetes. I fainted when I had those lab-tests done, and have not repeated any full set of tests since. Thus, if that stomach-doctor had told me in 2016 that the solution was to give myself Ozempic shots it would have been as strong or stronger of a “no”, as his ideas about a colonoscopy etc. being relevant. That stomach-doctor declared bankruptcy shortly after my visit, so this financial pressure must have been the reason for his strange refusal to see a patient to help with solving problems cheaply. Given these facts regarding my own experience, the weight-loss-shot trend is horrifying. If the drug is maintaining the weight loss, then going off this drug is equivalent to me reversing all my pre-weight-loss practices, including not drinking water, not exercising, and eating twice more calories of non-vegan fatty food. Staying on any drug for a lifetime is obviously as damaging to health as being an alcoholic or a tobacco smoker, especially if the drug is designed to fool the body, altering its chemistry, etc. Weight-loss surgeries work because they make people vomit if they attempt to over-eat, forcing adherence to a diet, until the stomach or the like re-expands and can again take in over-sized bunches of food. Because veganism works by over-filling the stomach with food that convinces the brain it is full earlier than compressed processed food would with equivalent calories, somebody who has had weight-loss surgery cannot also go vegan and take advantage of such fruit/vegetable-bulking. Eating half-a-watermelon for lunch would be far safer to make somebody feel full than getting a shot that makes them feel so noxious they do not want to it. I just wanted to insert this public-service-announcement before looking inside this book to warn readers away from this idea: giving this warning was my motive for requesting this book.

The subtitle of this book is at least not a pure puffery as it refers to the extremes of “Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks”. But then the “Contents” page of Hari’s book includes a typo in the subtitle of “Chapter 1… How he Drugs Work”. The first chapter that caught my attention is the one that seems to argue against my previous paragraph: “Chapter 6: Why Don’t You Diet and Exercise Instead?” Hari begins by describing a dinner out he had with a friend when “he shoveled some breaded chicken schnitzel”. I have not dined out (except for during conference trips when all rules are out) since I moved to my tiny house in Quanah in 2017. There are no fancy or semi-fancy restaurants in my region, so dining out means cheap fast-food, which is not appealing, even if I was not vegan. As soon as I realized I was morbidly obese, I decided to avoid such fast-food or minimize it. So I do not understand how Hari is actively eating this stuff, and is contemplating diabetes shots instead of just putting the “schnitzel” down. His friend asks him this same standard question. He answers that since his “late teens” he had “diligently tried” this “usually around once a year.” Why would not eating out, or eating a vegetable once a year be a serious attempt at weight loss? Obviously, whatever anybody does for 1/365 days is not going to have any meaningful impact on our weight. The obstacle that stopped him after this vigorous day was “hunger”. What? Not eating out for a day makes him hungry? Is he going from eating a wagon-of-fat to nothing, maintaining the near-zero calories until he is starving and then returning to the wagon? Why isn’t he snacking on fruits, or nuts or anything reasonably low-calorie throughout his diet days to make sure to avoid feelings of hunger preventing slide-backs? Then, he goes to a clinic for an “intestinal cleansing therapy”. The colon etc. is self-cleaning: everything in it comes out eventually somehow. If special cleaning is necessary due to constipation, eating half-a-watermelon is more likely to “clean” it thoroughly than over-the-counter drugs, or the invasive stuff that can happen at an over-priced clinic. The more fiber we eat, the faster the “intestinal” stuff is going to exit. Just a basic tip in case Hari is going to ponder the options in the future. Hari then describes that he was served “stale” bread deliberately at this clinic to teach him “to chew”. Amazingly, Hari remained in this facility, and listens with amazement to an absurd lecture on chewing technique and silent eating. At this point I realize that this chapter is supposed to be about simply exercising and eating less, and instead of just trying this, Hari has taken on a money-wasting exercise that has him having “tea” for all his meals, without meeting the caloric minimum necessary to avoid the extreme-hunger he was afraid of at the onset. When he is refused food days in, he stages an “uprising” by eating “pizza”, and leaving without his deposit. Those who run that facility know that everybody will fail and either will have paid in advance, or will return again after hunger forces them to binge after a stay. The scientists at these facilities spend their time investigating how to make people pay as much as possible, while having to provide as little food as possible, and maximizing recidivism. They win if their diet-plan fails. The simple advice is, eat less and exercise, not starve and meditate in silence. The reason 95% of dieters fail is because the diet-industry makes billions if most diets fail, whereas it would make no money if they gave advice that led to success. For example, telling a patient to go vegan and to eat as much as they want has been proven by studies to lead to significant weight-loss, which continues if veganism is maintained. It would take a few seconds for a doctor to tell a patient to go vegan and to thus increase fruit-vegetable-bean-bread-oats-etc. fiber consumption. Since this can happen during an unrelated appointment with a non-specialist, this doctor would make $0 extra for this medical prescription of good food. The patient can then lower their grocery bill by maintaining this diet. In contrast, any wellness guru who can give nonsensical advice that does not work can pocket hundreds or thousands for continuous streams of nonsensical lectures, and then this patient is forced to seek out another nonsense-lecturer or servicer who makes even more to make sure than 95% of clients fail and keep paying into this system. Weight-loss-shots that cost thousands are an example of extreme profit-margins, as the production of this drug costs pennies, and if 25% of a population were on these drugs this would equal the cost of 25% of the population having entirely unnecessary surgeries annually.

In “Chapter 7: The Brain Breakthrough”, Hari begins by reporting that he has started taking Ozempic, but while he believed (without reporting the numbers) that he was losing weight, he started feeling that his “mood was strangely muted. I didn’t feel as excited for the day ahead… I felt a little listless…” Only when he was facing clinical depression did he then begin researching “the brain effects”. He writes that the drug is supposed to work because “They are an artificial copy of a guy hormone—GLP-1—that tells you when you’re full. The real hormone lasts for a few minutes and then vanishes; the replica lingers for a whole week.” It is “boosting fullness and slowing digestion.” One of the most-frequent pieces of advice for weight-loss is increasing metabolism, which means speeding up digestion, and yet this drug performs the opposite function. Additionally, Hari realized that GLP-1 is produced in the brain, so the reduction in appetite really happens by manipulating the normal chemistry in the brain. He then cites a study that claimed that GLP-1 injected into the brain causes a “cut back on” specifically “junk food”, and the consumption of the same amount of “normal” food. This is absurd because there is no rat “junk-food”, as rats are fed rat-food… He goes on to speculate that this drug can dampen addiction, but this is entirely a false argument because he started this digression by explaining that GLP-1 is a hormone that the body releases specifically when somebody has eaten too much to signal fullness, and to slow digestion because there is too much food to process. The Mayo Clinic explains it thus: “When blood sugar levels start to rise after someone eats, these drugs stimulate the body to produce more insulin. The extra insulin helps lower blood sugar levels.” They are used by diabetics in combination with insulin because they have a parallel effect on blood sugar levels. This process can only be making somebody noxious instead of full because a drop in blood sugar level should stimulate new natural hunger to bring the blood sugar level to a stable level. If there is an artificial chemical constantly lowering the sugar level, this must be an enormous risk towards developing diabetes, just as giving somebody who is non-diabetic insulin can trigger the start of diabetes. This is all extremely disturbing. Every time I hear somebody talking about a trend towards widespread usage of these drugs, I am horrified, and reading this conversational account explains how people who fail to look up definitions on Mayo Clinic (at least) are fooled by such personal-narratives.

I hope nobody reading this review will try these drugs, nor read this book. Just listen to my free advice: exercise and eat more fiber in real food.

Puffery for Increasing Police Budgets, Despite Unsolved Crimes Credited to a Lump of Multi-Ethnic-and-Multi-Ideological “Anarchists”

Steven Johnson, The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective (New York: Crown Publishing, May 14, 2024).

***

“Account of the… struggle between the anarchist movement and the emerging surveillance state stretches around the world and between two centuries—from Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite and the assassination of Czar Alexander II to New York City in the shadow of World War I. April 1914. The NYPD is still largely the corrupt, low-tech organization of the Tammany Hall era. To the extent the police are stopping crime—as opposed to committing it—their role has been almost entirely defined by physical force: the brawn of the cop on the beat keeping criminals at bay with nightsticks and fists. The solving of crimes is largely outside their purview. The new commissioner, Arthur Woods, is determined to change that, but he cannot anticipate the maelstrom of violence that will soon test his science-based approach to policing. Within weeks of his tenure, New York City is engulfed in the most concentrated terrorism campaign in the nation’s history: a five-year period of relentless bombings, many of them perpetrated by the anarchist movement led by legendary radicals Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. Coming to Woods’s aide are Inspector Joseph Faurot, a science-first detective who works closely with him in reforming the police force, and Amadeo Polignani, the young Italian undercover detective who infiltrates the notorious Bresci Circle.”

The “Preface” begins dramatically with the details of the types of bombs that caused the disturbances in Manhattan: “more inventive ones utilized a kind of hourglass device releasing sulfuric acid into a piece of cork, the timing determined by chemistry, not mechanics: how long the acid took to eat its way through the cork, until it began dripping onto the blasting cap below.” Such researched details are unusual in combination with dramatic action in mainstream non-fiction, so this is a good start. Then, Johnson defines the term “anarchist” and the movement that used this term, using uniquely insightful political theory.

However, then the narrative turns to a puffery of investigative procedures, concluding that before the CIA and FBI, the NYPD created a method that stopped this “anarchist” movement by solving whodunnit regarding the bombings. There are enormous numbers of bombs that are annually exploded across the US today, and the only difference is that all those who operate such attacks are no longer joined together under the umbrella of “anarchist”, as they were at this period, since Johnson explains that this term covered Russians, Italians, communists, far-righters etc., or pretty much all outsiders. It is also a puffery to suggest the NYPD was corrupt in or before 1914, and is no longer so, as this institution has remained equally corrupt across its history, and rather if it is described as corrupt or not in the press that has changed across this past century. The ridicule of police in the press has been censored, so that when cases of police corruption surface these are now presented as outliers. The US is not less corrupt than countries that are described as extremely corrupt in the media, the media in those other countries are simply freer to describe corruption when they see it. Most of the remainder of this “Preface” is thus a puffery, which celebrates the “Identification Bureau”, which merely contained “file cabinets containing tens of thousands of photographs and fingerprints”, or the bare minimum necessary to attempt a criminal investigation in an enormous city such as New York.

Then, “Chapter 1: The Controlled Exposition” takes the narrative back to 1866 in Germany, which oddly begins with a detailed description of the “living organisms” that died millions of years earlier to create a dune’s sand, just to situate this period as being about the time of “Darwin’s” evolutionary theories; as I explain in my new series, and other scholars have recently noticed, “Darwin” plagiarized an earlier French scientist’s evolution research from a hundred years before that time, so using Darwin as a time-setter is simplistic and irrelevant. Then, the more relevant science of “nitroglycerine detonations” by “Nobel” is described. But this is a complete digression from the subject puffed in the “Preface” or the promise that this book would show evidence of genius detective-work at the NYPD. There are 3 parts in this book, and only the third part is about the investigation itself.

“Part Three: Detonation: 1914-1919” would in theory begin with evidence of what the police did successfully, but it instead begins with the allocation of funds to start a new police wing, which happened because operators in the department were able to cluster unrelated incidents as the work of “anarchists”, thus convincing city-leaders that this was a coherent threat that required money. When there are details, they report various “radical” incidents and publications, such as Howard Zinn’s “master’s thesis” about the Ludlow massacred, followed by Woody Guthrie’s ballad, “Ludlow massacre.” The next chapter describes protests. There are many digressions with descriptions of irrelevant items such as clothing: “Alexander Berkman strode confidently out of the Tarrytown train station, a cane in one hand, dressed in a crisp dark suit, with a white tie and pocket square.” Without citations, these clothing details can be entirely fictitious, as, for example, there is no way of looking into Berkman’s mind to check if he indeed felt “confident”. Then “Chapter 20: The Blast” begins again irrelevantly with a sunrise in the “summer heat”, before an explosion at 9:06am. Then, finally, there is a relevant description of the damage from this bomb. Then, there is another interesting narrative that explains that back in May through June “someone had begun quietly but persistently removing sticks of dynamite from the construction site.” This is the first sign of investigative research into the central promised subject of this book, but there is no explanation regarding which detective learned of this detail. The next paragraph clarifies: “Much mystery remains about the exact manner of the theft. Was there an inside man on the IRT payroll who was fencing the dynamite on the side?…” In other words, somebody at this construction site reported these thefts to the police and that’s how this case was solved. But the police failed to ask basic whodunnit questions like the one mentioned that could have in fact detected what led to this bombing. This proves that despite added funds to the police department, no improvement in actual detection was generated, or that the puffery of the NYPD in the preface is undeserved.

If somebody is searching for a mystery semi-fiction to read under the hot summer sun, this might be an enjoyable read, but for those who want to understand how budgets of police departments have grown without any progress in policing… you have to read between the lines of this propagandistic support of incorruptible policing.

An Incompetent Forgery Builds America’s Economy: Described in Digressive Imaginings

William Hogeland, The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 28 2024).

**

“How Alexander Hamilton embraced American oligarchy to jumpstart American prosperity. ‘Forgotten founder’ no more, Alexander Hamilton has become a global celebrity…. What did he really want for the country? What risks did he run in pursuing those vaulting ambitions? Who tried to stop him? How did they fight? It’s ironic that the Hamilton revival has obscured the man’s most dramatic battles and hardest-won achievements—as well as downplaying unsettling aspects of his legacy. Thrilling to the romance of becoming the one-man inventor of a modern nation, our first Treasury secretary fostered growth by engineering an ingenious dynamo—banking, public debt, manufacturing—for concentrating national wealth in the hands of a government-connected elite. Seeking American prosperity, he built American oligarchy. Hence his animus and mutual sense of betrayal with Jefferson and Madison—and his career-long fight to suppress a rowdy egalitarian movement little remembered today: the eighteenth-century white working class.”

The above blurb promises a less propagandistic American history than most. The introductory chapter does not continue this intense truth-telling, as it is mostly digressive, discussing all periods of American history, and even barely explaining what Hamilton actual policies were as it attempts to summarize the contents of the chapters. Then, “Chapter 1” is again very digressive as it describes some sort of an effort “to get rich quick” in 1741 by Hamilton, referring generally to some “British colonials in the Caribbean… making more and more money exporting more and more sugar…” One of the rare interesting specific details is the mention that as part of his success in New York came his “changing his birthdate to 1757” to appear to be a “wunderkind” as he began studying at Kings College in 1773. In other words, he started his studies with fraud, and so much have basically purchased a paper-degree, without doing real intellectual work, or such a forgery would have been noticed by administrators. Then, there are general references to some kind of business speculation, most of which tend to claim Hamilton succeeded by fooling socialites to give him money and power, as his “father-in-law” curated “friendly connections with the right people.” With barely a degree, and with wealthy corrupt connections or nepotism, Hamilton ended up in charge of directing American financial policy by 1781. Most of this book is hot air, where the writer appears to be imagining what people felt or believed, instead of researching the “history” of what happened. The next chapter includes a few rare specifics such as that Morris, Hamilton’s affiliate, “sorted out empires’ and companies’ various exchange rates for paper currencies and notes against real money… gold and silver coins”. The author digresses into the definition of “real” and “silver”, without quoting any source or simply explaining just what Morris’ job was, why it was significant, and why the narrative has digressed into such abstractions instead of attempting to support the ambitious promised thesis of being an anti-propaganda about just what Hamilton’s economic plan for America was.

This is a horrid book. It might eventually get to a point, and it might include scandalous details, instead of standard puffing propaganda, but these details are enclosed in pages and pages of unresearched nonsense. Nobody should read this book unless they want to be frustrated and confused.

Confessions of a Drug-Addicted Black-Hat-Hacker

Barrett Brown, My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous: A Memoir (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July 9, 2024).

***

“Barrett Brown went to prison for four years for leaking intelligence documents. He was released to Trump’s America. After a series of escapades both online and off that brought him in and out of 4chan forums, the halls of power, heroin addiction, and federal prison, Barrett Brown is a free man. He was arrested for his part in an attempt to catalog, interpret, and disseminate top-secret documents exposed in a security lapse by the intelligence contractor Stratfor in 2011. An influential journalist who is also active in the hacktivist collective Anonymous… He exposes the incompetence and injustices that plague media and politics, reflects on the successes and failures of the transparency movement, and shows the way forward in harnessing digital communication tools for collective action.”

The first chapter begins with a description of a prison. He has threatening interactions with guards and inmates and reports “the loss of my books”, which he had access to together with a radio at a different prison. Then, some “Hispanic fellow” down the hall yells that he will “send you some coffee tonight! You’re awesome, Brown!” This makes him think of himself as one of the “saints”, who has been shamed. While it is important to describe poor conditions in prisons: what does this have to do with the subject advertised in the blurb? The section ends with concerns that the FBI and “Themis” have an “ability and willingness to dig up dirt on activists’ children using social networks”, and other general theories of conspiracy that are detached from the actual actions that led this guy to be imprisoned. Specifically, Themis was planning cyber attacks on WikiLeaks’ anonymous submitters, or to submit “fake documents”, to call WikiLeaks out on fabrication. At this point, I just looked up Barrett Brown’s Wikipedia page, as it seems he might never get to what he was accused of in this book. Brown is a journalist who confessed his association with Anonymous, but had disassociated from it by 2011. Apparently, he previously contracted for $100,000 with Amazon to write a book specifically on Anonymous, but spent the money and never wrote this book. Brown notes in the book that there was an attempt for “hackers… to bring down the Amazon site” with around 1,500 participants; this suggests that Amazon might have paid Brown $100,000 as a ransom to stop leading Anonymous missions that attacked their website. So instead, this book is apparently an avoidance project that does not confess his actual hacking activities. And apparently Brown staged a kidnapping attempt and an outing of 75 Zetas gang members to promote an earlier book in 2011. And several other similar incidents followed in 2011 before the FBI began prosecuting him in 2012. “In 2010, he founded Project PM, a group that used a wiki to analyze leaks concerning the military-industrial complex.” So he is complaining generally about potential government spying… because he had designed a program that aggravated espionage sources on the military-profiteers? Specifically, he mined through hacked-by-others emails for information on “Romas/COIN” that was designed to spy on Arab countries. He was sentenced to “63 months in federal prison” for nebulous claims of “obstruction of justice” and had to pay “$900,000” in damages to Stratfor, the military-contractor he had outed as being a corrupt war-profiteer. The reason this book is disjointed is apparently because Brown has confessed heavy drug usage of meth, as well as paranoia and other mental illnesses.

I am now going to search this book for the key terms in this bio instead of attempting to find some lineal meaning. When discussing “Anonymous”, Brown writes its techniques included “drawing upon obscure network protocols to allow internet users to temporarily knock out websites via sheer blunt force”. Or “outright hacking… a raid of Turner’s email account yielded proof that he’d served as an FBI informant, confirmation of which cut him off from his white nationalist allies—as well as from the FBI itself”. That’s something American propaganda films don’t show. Hackers are outing informants to prevent the FBI from gathering data on white-nationalist groups? Why would such activities be useful for anybody other than the white-nationalist groups? Brown claims that it is nonsensical to believe that Anonymous could “be capable of taking control of the nation’s power plants.” He explains that the name “Anonymous” came from 4chan using the “default… username ‘Anonymous’” for anybody who did not want to enter “a screen name”. In another section, he comments on Anonymous’ use of “lulz” to refer to their “pursuit” of malicious pranks, such as “messing with online children’s games like Habbo Hotel”, or a “‘nationwide campaign to spoil the new Harry Potter book ending.’” He quotes an anonymous Anonymous member for the last quote, as opposed to his own activities.

Regarding Zetas, Brown writes that a “dealer” who was “connected to the Mexican contingent of Anonymous” was indeed kidnapped. He confesses that he assisted this operation of freeing the kidnapped affiliate by threatening with outing gang-member names. But the press “promptly decided that I myself was in charge”. He then faced threats of retaliatory assassination by the gang, and then the narrative gets confused because of Brown’s consumption of large quantities of drugs while on this job. He leaps to a discussion of receiving requests from one conservative blogger to hack another conservative blogger to prove the assertion that one of them was an “antisemite” to win a “dispute” between them. He includes a discussion where he points out this would be illegal, but which seems to end with him neither agreeing nor disagreeing to go ahead with it. By not explaining what he decided to do, he seems to be advertising his malicious hacking services of this type to future potential clients.

In summary, this book confesses with light details the types of hacking services Brown has been selling to clients on all sides to attack anybody for money. However, the lack of technical details about just what the hacking process involves indicates that it is likely that Brown only connects clients with hackers, instead of having the knowledge to fabricate such attacks himself. The re-branding of Anonymous as a white-hat organization is certainly countered by books such as this one that explains its purely nefarious intentions to gain profit, and various other benefits (girls, drugs), without caring if either the hackers or those attacked are hurt (though attempting to protect themselves through anonymity, unless revealing their identity can be used to sell a book, merchandize or the like). If anybody out there is curious about Anonymous and does not mind sifting through a lot of nonsense to mine out bits of sense, they can benefit from this book. But they really have to purchase an ebook and search for terms that interest them, as reading the starts and ends of chapters or other standard strategies are not going to be helpful in decoding this project.

Biography of an Impressionist’s Struggle for Fame

Jackie Wullschläger, Monet: The Restless Vision (New York: Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor: Knopf, September 24, 2024).

****

“Drawing on thousands of never-before-translated letters and unpublished sources, this biography reveals dramatic new information about the life and work of” Monet. “Despite being mocked at the beginning of his career, and living hand to mouth, Monet risked all to pursue his vision, and his early work along the banks of the Seine in the 1860s and ‘70s would come to be revered as Impressionism. In the following decades, he emerged as its celebrated leader in one of the most exciting cultural moments in Paris, before withdrawing to his house and garden to paint the late Water Lilies, which were ignored during his lifetime and would later have a major influence on all twentieth-century painters both figurative and abstract. This is the first time we see the turbulent life of this volatile and voracious man, who was as obsessed by his love affairs as he was by nature. He changed his art decisively three times when the woman at the center of his life changed; Wullschläger brings these unknown, passionate, and passionately committed women to the foreground. Monet’s closest friend was Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau; strong intellectual currents connected him to writers from Zola to Proust, as well as to his friends Manet, Renoir, and Pissarro.”

This book is organized chronologically. The “Introduction” explains that the author began this research project because she realized Monet’s private life had been un-researched, and had found a catalogue of Monet’s 3,000 letters that had mostly not been translated before. Then, the “Prologue” describes Monet’s dramatic sketching of his newly dead girlfriend in 1879. A curious explanation follows that Monet had drawn around “fifty pictures” of Camille during her lifetime… But after her death, he hardly depicted a figure again.” The changes in Monet’s art with the three leading women in his life, Camille Doncieux, Alice Raingo and Blanche Hoschede, suggest to me that these women were the artists, who drew in different styles under “Monet’s” byline. But the author seems to interpret these changes as emotional impacts that were sufficient to alter artistic choices of the single male artist. Most of the description is about the emotion evoked by these Impressionist paintings, as they are described as being the “opposite of restrained”. Analysis of the letters focuses on Monet feeling “always hungry, always greedy”, and otherwise emotional. None of this is practically useful to modern artists who want to read about the lives of artists to learn the tactics that create superior art. Monet is also presented as somebody who in his “youth” “built Impressionism on his confidence”, ignoring that this was a movement that is credited to numerous different artists, some of whom preceded Monet. If Monet was its sole inventor, was he ghost-painting under others’ bylines? Otherwise how can he be singled out for his exceptionalism without acknowledging that he used a style that was communally shared by many others?

The first chapter of the first part begins with just how little is known about Monet’s childhood, as, for example, he described himself merely as “a Parisian from Paris”. This refusal to share details suggests to me that there was a ghost-artist behind the Monet byline who did not care to learn who Monet was, and could only write letters etc. from “Monet’s” perspective after Monet had joined an artist Workshop and made his activities known. Most of the following biography of his childhood is imagined based on the history of the region where he lived, and sparse records. Then, finally, there is a description of Monet’s first “pair of sketchbooks from summer 1856” when he was 15. “Monet gives a glimpse of Ingouville’s bourgeois houses, set in parks with paths framed by yuccas and umbrella pines, suggesting already an appeal of gardens, of nature tamed, enclosed and decorative, as a counterpart to the attraction of the open sea”. What is missing here is just how Monet learned to draw, what his techniques were and how they changed. Instead, the interest is Monet’s interest in the sea, water, and other irrelevant abstractions (1-18).

A few pages later there is a note that Monet launched his artistic career as a “caricaturist”, by “circling the rue de Paris” and selling “caricatures of the town’s notables” in window displays. A few pages, there is a report that Monet was making “commissions” on portraits”, the number of patrons doubling in a month, together with his charge stabilizing at “20 francs”. From this childhood enterprise, the narrative leaps to when Monet was 30 in 1854, when he had grown tired of the repetition of caricature painting, and wanted to be famous. To solve this problem, Monet befriended Boudin, who was poor but connected to famous artists (19-30). Earlier, “he lived in Paris for four years, from the ages of sixteen to twenty, funded by an unlikely 2,000 franks earned from his caricatures”. Though the author reports that Monet claimed to have gone to Paris much earlier than when he actually went two years later (35). Immediately upon his arrival, Monet was greeted with help, as “Charles Monginot… offered Monet the use of his studio”. There is a report that Boudin was painting “for a free… Troyon’s skies for him”, or ghost-painting. Then, there are digressive comments about Monet’s friends, hints that he obtained some tutoring from artists, and his associations with folks like a “radical journalist” for whom Monet “copied Nadar’s caricature” (45). Monet’s strategy to be noticed was to chat in cafes to make connections and to draw paintings to be hung in the Salon, hoping they would be noticed, puffed, and purchased (47). 

I found myself drawn into this narrative. Many paragraphs contain irrelevant information, but it is all well-researched as opposed to airy. An artist who is interested in how somebody practically becomes famous in art will find many useful lessons here. Thus, I recommend this book for aspiring and mature artists, and for libraries of all types where artists might seek inspiration and information.

A Bunch of Random Stories About NFT-Related Stuff

Zachary Small, Token Supremacy: The Art of Finance, the Finance of Art, and the Great Crypto Crash of 2022 (New York: Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor: Knopf, May 21, 2024).

**

“In 2021, when the gavel fell at Christie’s on the sale of Mike Winkelmann’s Everydays series—a compilation of five thousand digital artworks—it made a thunderous announcement: Non-fungible tokens had arrived. The ludicrous world of CryptoKitties and Bored Apes had just produced a piece of art worth $69.3 million (at least according to the highest bidder). On that day, the traditional art market—the largest unregulated market in the world—put its stamp of approval on a very new and carnivalesque digital reality… Was it all just a money laundering scheme? And come on, what was that piece of digital flotsam really worth anyway?… Tracing the crypto economy back to its origins in the 2008 financial crisis and the lineage of NFTs back to the first photographic negatives. Small describes jaw-dropping tales of heists, publicity stunts, and rug pulls, before zeroing in on the role of ‘security tokens’ in the FTX scandal. Detours through art history provide insight into the mythmaking tactics that drive stratospheric auction sales and help the wealthy launder their finances (and reputations) through art. And we cast an eye toward a future where NFTs have paved the way for a dangerous, new shadow banking system.”

The introduction opens with a digressive pondering about Renaissance art and tulip mania. Then, there is a definition of the central promised subject of this book: “NFTs” are “recording transactions for digital goods and providing creators with access to resale royalties.” This is followed by a realistic note that this simple goal was side-tracked into ideology, as users began describing themselves as “human gods” to drive speculation or a steep irrational increase in NFT prices. Then, the tulip bubble is compared to this new mania. Then, finally a revelation: Rembrandt was “bidding on his own paintings” to solve his “money problem” that escalated into bankruptcy. This led Amsterdam’s painters’ guild to institute “a new rule: nobody in Rembrandt’s financial circumstances could trade as a painter.” But the starving-artist trope is pretty much why any artist has achieved fame in the past? Histories tend to report that some kind of publicity stunts, or manipulations of markets were involved in making any artist famous above billions of others. An example is the art thefts in Picasso’s circle, which indirectly spiked the value of Picasso’s art through the publicity associated with imprisonment of his affiliates. A description follows of a gallery showing without any art on blank walls, when $7 million in sales happened at a single event, orchestrated by Hobbs, who was a specialist in “code” in “cryptomania”. NFT’s can theoretically prevent forgeries, but when the “code” sells without any serious art behind it, then it is not protecting art from being duplicated, but is rather selling nothing for enormous sums by merely marketing it or puffing its cultural value. They were taking advantage of a pandemic that was keeping people away from physical art-shows to sell empty digital space. While there are some interesting ideas here and there, this book lacks coherent structure to systematically research this complex subject to arrive at concrete useful answers. The author reports that this began his research by spiking his curiosity.

Then, chapter “1: The New King of Crypto” begins with an attempt to put readers to sleep by describing a guy sitting on a sofa. Then, finally there is a description of Beeple as a series that began by doodling on “internet bile (racist caricatures, nude women… political satire)” before using animation software in 3D. It just gets more unreadable after this point, as the author digresses into random characters in this world without explaining where these stories are going, without citing sources, and just generally altering from puffing specific NFT providers, to ridiculing them as being absurdly counter-artistic.  

There is probably some kind of useful information somewhere in this book but it is hidden under piles of digressive meaningless ramblings and ponderings. Why couldn’t this author sketch out an outline for what he was planning to say, create sub-sections in chapters that specify what NFT creators they cover, why each is significant, and then have some chapters that analyze trends? Instead, all chapters have puzzling titles such as “We’re All Gonna Die”. And the narrative just runs wherever Small feels like going, as if he just kind of sets a timer to babble for an hour before bed, when he is too sleepy to do real work, about dudes he met online that day. Unless all this sounds interesting to you, do not attempt to read this book.

Casually-Philosophical Ponderings on Paradoxes

George G. Szpiro, Perplexing Paradoxes: Unraveling Enigmas in the World Around Us (New York: Columbia University Press, March 26, 2024).

***

“Why does it always seem like the elevator is going down when you need to go up? Is it really true that 0.99999… with an infinite number of 9s after the decimal point, is equal to 1? What do tea leaves and river erosion have in common, per Albert Einstein? Does seeing a bed of red flowers help prove that all ravens are black? Can we make sense of a phrase like ‘this statement is unprovable’?” It “guides readers through the puzzling world of paradoxes, from Socratic dialogues to the Monty Hall problem…. Presents sixty counterintuitive conundrums drawn from diverse areas of thought—not only mathematics, statistics, logic, and philosophy but also social science, physics, politics, and religion. Szpiro offers a brisk history of each paradox, unpacks its inner workings, and considers where one might encounter it in daily life. Ultimately, he argues, paradoxes are not simple brain teasers or abstruse word games—they challenge us to hone our reasoning and become more alert to the flaws in received wisdom and common habits of thought.”

The book is organized into sections on the “Silly and Surprising”, “Language” tricks, the “Unbelievable but True”, “Math”, Physics, Statistics, Philosophy, Logic, Faith, Legal Terms, Economics, and Politics. The introduction helps to explain the subject of “paradoxes” by examples such as that Theseus “asked whether a ship whose rotten planks have been replaced one by one over the years is the same ship as the original”. More usefully Quine is quoted: “A veridical paradox packs a surprise, but the surprise quickly dissipates itself as we ponder the proof. A falsidical paradox packs a surprise, but it is seen as a false alarm when we solve the underlying fallacy…”

So, the first part on “Quotidian Riddles” begins with a chapter that explains the statistics of why most people on average have friends with more friends than they do. The explanation is that outliers with too many friends are likely to skew the statistics in their friend-groups. The following explanation includes almost no numbers, and does not really address the falsehood in this assumption, or data-manipulation potential. Chapter “2: Waiting for Godot: The Elevator Paradox” thankfully begins by answering the conundrum logically. It takes longer for people to see an elevator if they live at the top floors. Physicists studying the problem found that “there is one-in-six chance… that the first elevator he encounters will be going up. But there’s a five-in-six chance… that the first elevator will be going down.” What? How can there be such a small chance of either of these seemingly 50/50 choices? No numbers were given previously to explain how these statistics were arrived at. This mathematician is not showing the work, as the author seems to be summarizing conclusions reached by others without attempting to follow the logic, or being seriously interested in presenting the precise reasoning behind a solution. Thus, those who are interested in advanced statistics are going to be deeply frustrated, as they either have to search for each of the mentioned studies to figure out what this guys is talking about, or just leave each section with a deep sense of disbelief and confusion. The next section on “hedonism” is at least more appropriate for general philosophical reflection: “constant pleasure seeking may not yield the most actual pleasure or happiness” because “the constant pursuit of pleasure interferes with the experience of it.” “John Stuart Mill” explained it thus: “Those only are happy… who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness… Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.” This is a deep useful conclusion that should help those suffering with depression by just having them think about others and on achieving some kind of a goal outside of themselves.

This is basically a silly book that attempts rudimentary philosophy. If you are bored and would like to be entertained with curious ponderings on strange puzzles, you might enjoy this book. But anybody who enters this book with a serious interest in being amazed with new discoveries about the world will leave it with a deep sense of unhappiness.

If a Revolution Is a Turn Where You End Up Where You Started: Hallucinogenics

Joanna Kempner, Psychedelic Outlaws: The Movement Revolutionizing Modern Medicine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, June 4, 2024).

***

“How a group of ordinary people debilitated by excruciating pain developed their own medicine from home-grown psilocybin mushrooms—crafting near-clinical grade dosing protocols—and fought for recognition in a broken medical system. Cluster headache, a diagnosis sometimes referred to as a ‘suicide headache,’ is widely considered the most severe pain disorder that humans experience. There is no cure, and little funding available for research into developing treatments. When Joanna Kempner met Bob Wold in 2012, she was introduced to a world beyond most people’s comprehension—a clandestine network determined to find relief using magic mushrooms. These ‘Clusterbusters,’ a group united only by the internet and a desire to survive, decided to do the research that medicine left unfinished. They produced their own psychedelic treatment protocols and managed to get academics at Harvard and Yale to test their results. Along the way, Kempner explores not only the fascinating history and exploding popularity of psychedelic science, but also a regulatory system so repressive that the sick are forced to find their own homegrown remedies, and corporate America and university professors stand to profit from their transgressions. From the windswept shores of the North Sea through the verdant jungle of Peruvian Amazon to a kitschy underground palace built in a missile silo in Kansas…”

The note in this blurb about independent researchers finding that “Harvard and Yale” professors are willing to put their names on research conducted by others confirms my own findings about the prevalence of ghostwriting in academia since the dawn of print in the Renaissance through the present. Pharmacological science was primarily created by a couple of ghostwriters across Britain’s 18^th and 19^th centuries, as famous bylines such as “Darwin” and “Newton” were one of many bylines that referred to merely 11-12 active ghostwriters across all genres per century. This book opens with the “Psychedelic Timeline” that begins in 8000 BCE when “Psychoactive drug use across globe indicated by archeological evidence.” The next entry is from 1799 when “The London Medical and Physical Journal publishes the first medical description of a psychedelic mushroom experience, which it characterizes as a poisoning.” My current research of handwriting and linguistic evidence from the Royal Society’s archives for the 18^th century indicates only around 4 different handwriting styles across their scientific manuscripts, which have been assigned to hundreds of different puffed bylines. And frequently, as in “Darwin’s” case, scientists in other countries solved puzzles such as evolution at least a century earlier, but Britain’s propaganda machine claimed that they were first by forging manuscripts that had earlier dates (“Newton”), or simply ignored earlier foreign claims from the French etc. (“Darwin”). Across the Opium Wars with China, Britain was fighting for opium, while it was China that was attempting to block Britain’s corrupting influence that was poisoning its population. Mushrooms had been used as psychedelics from around the 8000 BCE point just mentioned, and Britain only learned about this use in 1799, and yet its “discovery” is used as this field’s origin-point. Those who are in academia pay for paper-degrees, and for ghostwriters to write their papers, as industry also hires ghostwriters to create papers that help them maximize their profits by keeping humanity maximally sick. While the pharmaceutical invention industry is thus entirely corrupt and has no room for authentic scientists who are purely interested in curing diseases, it is hardly a good solution for the few scientists with access to home-labs to seek escapist drugs that merely help to mute reality, without curing anything. The concluding years in the timeline between 2017-23 are marked by FDA’s approval of MDMA and other psychedelic drugs for medical use, after papers arguing for this from the “Harvard and Yale” scientists that had their papers ghostwritten in previous years. It is safer for society if those who want to use mind-bending drugs to do it legally, as they had done it a century earlier when the first drug-bans were instituted. But this history is a circle that began with profit-driven bans, and has circled back to profit-driven permissions. There isn’t exactly progress that has been made, but rather a nonsensical battle that led the field back to its starting-point.

The “Introduction” opens with a painful description of the debilitating condition of an extreme headache. This possibility of debilitating pain is used as a motive to explain why mind-altering drugs or “magic mushrooms” is the solution. Sympathy for somebody in pain might drive readers to agree with this argument, but upon rational reflection: why would it be a good idea for somebody who is experiencing extreme suicidal pain to also be seeing things that are not there in combination with this pain? Having altered beliefs about reality, or hallucinations would only be added symptoms on top of the headache that would create a still more serious mental handicap. The outcome, upon serious clinical testing, might hypothetically be extreme violence towards others or one’s self? Instead of this anticipated outcome, this patient reported that a “low dose of mushrooms, which felt to him more like a strong cup of coffee, could suppress his attacks for nearly a week”. Why on earth are these citizen-scientists believing this anecdote? Why would hallucinogenic drugs have an impact equivalent to a stimulant such as coffee? And why would any stimulant suppress pain? And why would a low dose be sufficient to suppress pain for an entire week? Instead of asking any such questions, the author takes this as sufficient to prove his desired thesis or that psychedelic drugs should not be “demonized”, but rather “hailed as a new transformative medicine”. Psychedelics, in fact, artificially manufacture the main known psychiatric disorder: schizophrenia with hallucinations and paranoia. Even recent research on pot has found that it can cause hallucinations, paranoia and can lead to psychosis, or other mental disorders. If a majority of people in any country want to use recreational drugs to create these mental abnormalities; they certainly should be allowed to do so. But they must be informed that this is the intended goal of the usage, instead of giving them propaganda that suggests hallucinogenic are pain-killers, or stimulants. Why do all sides repeatedly find that fooling the public is the only way to convince them or the government to act in a desired way? Shouldn’t an educated society be capable of making rational decisions based on truths? Kempner is aware that he is hitting the market with his intro because as he reports “20 percent of American adults live with chronic pain. Within this group, a jarring 7 percent endure what’s known as ‘high-impact chronic pain,’ a condition that substantially limits daily activities.” And the solution is for these people to also be experiencing hallucinations while they are immobile? The pop-media debate is about if patients’ should be believed by doctors that they are truly experiencing “pain”. All people who start using pain-medications begin experiencing pain, even if they were not before, because withdrawal (even slightly daily withdrawal when the drugs wear off) causes pain. Thus, questioning how one can prove is pain is real is nonsensical, as instead we should be asking why somebody who is healthy has been manipulated to want to take something that will cause them pain?

Instead of exploring these obvious problems, “Chapter One: Psychedelic Outlaws” begins by puffing the modest appearance of one of these civilian-scientists. Then, this book introduces the first concept I have not read elsewhere before: this modest dude tells a crowd that for $100 and in “forty-five days”, they can “produce all the medicine you need to treat yourself for a year”. He then takes a “canning jar” and a “bag of vermiculite”, and gives a lecture on how they can grow magic mushrooms at home. When I was a kid, I picked mushrooms in Russian forests. On an average trip, half of the mushrooms observed were the brightly-colored hallucinogenic or poisonous mushrooms, while the other half was eatable. You don’t need to grow poison at home, you can just go outside, and you’ll probably find something that can make you vomit that’s a fungus. “Drugs” that are given medicinal use really can only be qualified as such if some kind of scientific manipulation or research is involved. After this shocking explanation, the narrative returns to philosophy that puffs hallucinogenic, seemingly under the assumption that nobody will seriously manage to secure the seeds or the like necessary for home-cultivation. The story digresses into racism, how popular drugs are despite their illegality, before reaching this note: “a CIA-funded brothel in San Francisco served as a setting where CIA agents secretly observed as sex workers gave their clients LSD without consent, then attempted to extract information from them after sex.” Can you imagine applying for a job at CIA and then being required to work as a prostitute to poison “clients” to force false-confessions under mind-altering drugs? Why is this useful in supporting the legalization of these poisons?

I am very tired of reading this book at this point. I almost never drink alcohol, never smoked tobacco, and the last time I was forced to use pot by peer-pressure was 20 years ago. I just do not care about this struggle to escape reality, when there is plenty of falsehoods about what is advertised to be reality to need far more presence in actual reality. Anybody who has been reading this and finds that they want to go into this rabbit-hole, is welcome to carry on without me.

Illustrated History of the Bureaucracy in the Path of Original Theatrical Architecture

Richard Pilbrow, and Sir Richard Eyre, A Sense of Theatre: The Untold Story of Britain’s National Theatre (Lewes: Unicorn, 2024). Hardcover: $67.50. 532pp. Index, color photographs on thick paper. ISBN: 978-1-916846-03-6.

****

“The story of the creation of the National Theatre, told by someone who, uniquely, was there from the start, participated in its realisation and has been creatively engaged in the Theatre over the subsequent five decades…. Bridges an… account of the evolution of an architectural masterpiece with a deep exploration of how the building has shaped later theatre making.”

I requested this book under the mistaken belief that it was about 18-19^th century theaters in Britain, which I am currently researching for the re-attribution of these centuries. Instead, this book is about a recent theater that was built within the lifespan of its author, as this blurb states. The “Foreword” explains that this National Theatre was uniquely designed to house three theaters in one to allow for a continuous circulation of new plays. Most of this book is a puffery of its “building” as an “ascetic” success. Even notes about earlier criticism are disguised pufferies: “inflated, grandiose, hubristic”. As Eyre notes, theaters have not seen much innovation in their design since Epidaurus or the colosseum structure. There was a slight adjustment in the Renaissance when Roman architectural structures were created in the interior to create a standardized architectural theatrical style that is still reproduced in theaters built up through recent years. Eyre imagines that Frank Matcham’s “horseshoe-shaped auditoriums” were original, but they just move the stage slightly forward into the audience. Instead of describing “modernist” designs of theaters that might have theoretically introduced new concepts, the new aspect in this period is that theaters were apparently judged to be “old-fashioned” and thus not necessary. The obvious problem is that the initial Renaissance theater design was for around 1000-1500 people, where people could see and hear clearly what was going on on-stage (unless their neighboring theater-goers were rioting, or chatting, which was common). In contrast, giant modern theaters place most attendees so far from the stage that they see the actors in tinier forms than if they were watching this show on a home laptop. Leaving theaters small might invite more people to attend the theater, but Renaissance theaters were not profitable (as I explain in BRRAM), and the costs of modern theaters would multiply this unprofitability. Eyre adds that concrete does not help acoustics, and the various other problems with poor design that fails to account for problems most theater-goers are cognizant of. For example, he notes he failed to ask why the building was positioned in the wrong direction, or without facing “St. Paul’s as well as Somerset House”, which would have rationally been the point of placing that theater in that expensive central location (xi). Despite problems, at least this theater “works”, or has been the place where Eyre has been working across his career (xii). Well… that’s not inspiring, but onwards.

Eyre’s relief with the theater’s mere existence is explained in Richard Pilbrow’s “Introduction”, which explains that the idea began in 1848, but the “British establishment took 101 years to come to its support with the passing of the National Theatre Act in 1949.” 13 years after that Sir Laurence Olivier “was appointed” to create it. His first act was to cross out all of the designs that had been suggested for this structure by past architects. And Olivier was not the architect, but rather the manager, whose sole job seems to have been to hire the architect: Denys Lasdun. While this process had taken 150 years, Lasdun self-reported he knew “nothing” about building theaters. And so committees had done absolutely nothing for 150 years while being paid for appearing to commit or to ponder the matter and eventually made the worst possible decisions. For Lasdun, the “spiritual” aspect was of top-importance. The “Author” appears in this narrative after Lasdun’s “labor” has been completed and nothing can be done about the errors in its architecture, and now the business of managing performances began. More committees met with the “Author”. Finally, after this intro, the first photo of the concrete behemoth of stairs-overload is depicted.

The next sections describe these four (I thought previously there were only three mentioned in the preface) theaters; “The Olivier Theatre” is accompanied by a plan and description: it has a 1160 seating capacity (apparently to match Renaissance standards), and saw its first performance in 1976. The British ghostwriting Workshop of the 19^th century who conceived the idea for this triple-theater probably anticipated ghostwriting numerous new plays annually, and releasing a new play every week or so as during that time that generated so many now canonical dramas. But now these theaters are used to stage plays from this repeated canon, without actually employing much from original living dramatists.  The third theater is the smallest, seating only 400 people.

Then, the narrative retracts to the beginning and covers the history again from the “British Playhouse Design” forward back through the present. Most of the narrative starts in around 1960, or long after my time-frame of interest. But there are a few pages that cover the 18-19^th centuries that I am now exploring. I am going to mine it for materials in the relevant chapters of my study. The timeline in this book proved to be very useful for my own timelines that mention theater history.

Just as I found fragments practically useful for my research, there are likely to be specialists in different covered aspects who would find this book very useful for their individual projects. Thus, I recommend this book for all types of libraries. The cover is well-designed, and there are many colorful illustrations inside, so those with home libraries can also benefit from having this book to review for pleasure, if not for information.

A Visual and Textual Adventure Through the Beautiful Nebraska Sandhills

Monica M. Norby, Judy Diamond, et. al., The Nebraska Sandhills (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2024). Hardcover: $34.95. 260pp. Color photographs. ISBN: 978-1-4962-3583-1.

*****

“The Nebraska Sandhills… a place of rolling grasslands, rivers, and wetlands created by the Ogallala Aquifer that underlies the region. Home to abundant wildlife, from pronghorn antelope to sandhill cranes, the Sandhills are an ecological treasure. Dotted with ranches and small towns, the Sandhills are rich with deep cultural history, including those of Indigenous peoples, settlers, Black homesteaders, immigrants, ecotourists, and some adventurous golfers… Features nearly forty essays about the history, people, geography, geology, ecology, and conservation of the Nebraska Sandhills. Illustrated with hundreds of… color photographs of the area”, a “portrayal of this remarkable yet largely unknown region of the United States.”

The cover of this book is the best out of this set. It is just a very pleasant orange photograph of grass over a plain: a great display-book. The inside cover includes an expansion to this blurb from the photographer, Michael Forsberg: “twenty thousand square miles of north-central Nebraska and is the largest stabilized dune field in the Western Hemisphere. It is also the largest intact mixed-grass prairie left on the continent.” This is a very helpful explanation for the significance of this region, or other grasslands or hills. Page 4 includes a map of the giant region covered. When I drive across America (I mean really from coast to coast, or top to bottom, or on other extra-long trips), I tend to notice extreme geographic changes and the different beautiful settings, and these hills would probably take up many hours of continuing grass passing by, as a few highways do pass through it or along its edge. A skilled illustrator created this and other illustrations throughout. One map includes unique terrain visualizations with colored regions and other intricacies that stand out as especially well-designed among the different types of map illustrations I have seen (13). This map includes the region where I live in Quanah, Texas. “Quanah” has this name from its Native origin, and it still has a large Native population. The geography here is also very grassy, so this book is kind of about my region, though it describes a wilder section on the dunes higher up in the country. Another creative map shows the elevation gradations by feet, with diagrams that report different geographic features, or elevation across distance (62-3). And a map of “Dune Types” separates them into precise categories (65). This should be immensely helpful for those who study these topics, as this type of scientific maps are rare elsewhere. Another map covers “Saturated thickness”, or “the vertical thickness of aquifer-hosting geologic materials” (69). I once tried designing a map and learned just how difficult it is to draw an original map, so these are significant artistic and scientific achievements. The chapter around the mid-country map describes the Native histories of this region, including a drawing of a war with invaders, a photograph of authentic “Eagle corn” (14-5), and a photo of a powwow at the For Robinson State Park (16). A picture of a new “one-room schoolhouse” from 1910 (27) really helps to put into perspective claims that there was widespread literacy in England by the 18^th century, as it would have been too expensive even to erect this simple house back then for the poor that were spread across Britain. There are more giant photographs of settler lives in this region from 1900-30. The resolution and clarity of these images are superior, so it places viewers into these places (32-3). Photos of modern life are also creative and well-composed.

The content around these beautiful images is useful, specific, descriptive and original. For example, Martha Mamo writes that the “upland soil profile generally contains a thin, dark-color surface layer, called the A horizon, followed by unstructured subsoils that are mainly sand” (84). I have not seen original drawing animals in modern books perhaps ever before, and here there are several illustrations from the “Barstovian”, “Clarendonian”, Hemphillian” and “Blancan” ages during earth’s deep past. There were elephant-like creatures up to a couple million years ago in this region. And around 16 million years ago this region looked tropical, as opposed to grassy, before it gradually changed.

Looking over this book I feel as if I just took a tour of my region without leaving my tiny house. I hardly ever stop on trips, as I tend to need to save money and time. But looking at some of the images of waterways and curious animals in this book, it is tempting to venture out there to see it all in motion. One creative photo is of the Platte Basin region in “Timelapse” or from different seasons, from winter through summer. The photos are combined into a single collage. I haven’t seen this type of timelapse combination before (129). Most of the photographs are so beautiful, they initially look like drawings, as with the “Longhorn Cattle Drive from Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge” (232). There is also a fun set of illustrations in Craig Allen and Caleb Roberts’ chapter on “Alternative Futures of the Sandhills”, which imagine that the region can change into a forest from climate-change, or can turn into a dune sea from “overgrazing”, or it can become over-populated, or the region can be covered with solar panels and wind turbines (250-3); these graphics are “by Abigail Snyder, School of Natural Resources, University of Nebraska-Lincoln”.

This is just a delightful book that is a pleasure to look and read. I recommend it for all with home libraries, and especially those who live in the middle third of America. It is also essential for all types of libraries across America, and probably internationally as well, given broad interest in just how real Americans live.

Fantasy as British Monarchy-Building Propaganda

Wace; Glyn S. Burgess, translator, Roman de Brut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, April 11, 2024). Softcover: $12.99. 320pp. Index, 7.7X5.1”. ISBN: 978-0-19-287126-8.

*****

“Wace’s Roman de Brut (1155) can be seen as the gateway to the history of the Britons for both French and English speakers of the time, and thus to Arthurian history, as the first complete Old French adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin History of the Kings of Britain (late 1130s), in which Arthur appears for the first time as king of the Britons. The Roman de Brut was a foundational work, an inspiration for a series of anonymous verse Bruts of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries and for the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut—the most widely read French vernacular text on this material in medieval England—as well as a forerunner of the Middle English Brut tradition, including Layamon’s Brut (c. 1200). Wace’s poem thus inaugurates and shapes Brut traditions, including Arthurian tales, in verse and in prose, in historiography and in literature, including Wace’s innovation of King Arthur’s Round Table. This volume contains an English prose translation of Wace’s Roman de Brut, accompanied by an introduction and notes, a select bibliography, a summary of the text, a list of manuscripts, and indexes of personal and geographical names.”

In my BRRAM series’ Verstegan’s Restitution volume, I explained how the Renaissance Workshop ghostwrote and backdated some of the texts that were published just before their lifespans and within them (such as Harvey and Verstegan’s “Holinshed’s” Chronicles and Restitution itself) that created a fictional version of British monarchical and theological history. I did not linguistically test Medieval Middle and Old English texts, but there is evidence that at least some of them were forged in manuscript or in transcription for publication at a profit as antiques by Verstegan during the Renaissance. It is too improbable that the Workshop ghostwrote all antique Middle and Old English texts, so Wace’s history is likely to be one of the fewer authentic pre-Renaissance compositions created in Britain. Though because it was in Old French, it seems more likely that it was a propaganda that was manufactured in France during the continuing Norman conquest that converted Britain to a feudal system. Either way, this is a very significant work.

Given my research, my interest first turned to if this is an original translation, or if it mostly takes an earlier translation’s text. The section called “Note on the Translation” explains that it is based “on the edition by Ivor Arnold” from 1938-40. Since the question I had was if this translation was based on Renaissance translations or was created after that period, I checked the “Introduction” for additional information. The cluster of imitations or sub-Bruts mentioned in the blurb were made in unknown years, but have been claimed to have been made in different years, when it is more likely that they were variants created by the same anonymous ghostwriter who made the original Old French variant. Geoffrey of Monmouth variant of British history is claimed to have been made in the 1130s. No, there is no answer to my question, as the editor of this volume just took Arnold’s version, without researching what it had been based on. A bit of searching online indicated that before Arnold, there seems to have just been a French translation that was published in 1836-8, and an English 1912 translation. Verstegan would have thus felt comfortable adding fiction over this and other early narratives, as they were entirely inaccessible to the public until at least 1836 (in this case). The “Introduction” notes that Wace developed “the first account of the Round Table… with remarkable inventiveness” (ix). This acknowledges that the King Arthur legend is a fiction invented by Wace, as opposed to a history with documentary supporting evidence. Though it then attempts to claim that in “the Middle Ages the distinction between romance and history was not as clear-cut”. No. It was clear-cut. The writers who invented this fiction would have actively known they are crafting propaganda that sold a desired image of Britain and the Norman conquest of the British monarchy. If the author did not know the difference between fact and fiction… They could have made up a bunch of nonsense about weird monsters without mentioning a specific history with associated years. The biography of Wace that notes his year of birth, death, as well as the spelling of his name (the “Prologue” of Brut begins with an ironic claim to truth-telling in a third-person attribution to a translator instead of an author: “Master Wace, who is telling the truth about this, has translated this”; and it is this name that is spelled differently in different references; and the editor has not been able to figure out to what book this is referring to, as this is the earliest book that introduced the Arthurian legend etc.) are all uncertainties clearly proves that “Wace” was one of the pseudonyms used or later assigned, among others, such as “Monmouth”, which were used jointly to create the illusion of a concrete history, when it was purely fantastical. There are many similarly useful bits of information across this “Introduction” that should help readers reach their own conclusions about this text and its “author”.

Brut begins in Greece with a troop of Trojan soldier adventurers, who are touring Europe to fight battles. They are unfamiliar with Brits when they first land on that island and have a negative interaction when they attempt to hunt, so they return to continental Europe and battle against France, before returning to Britain. The story of King Leir and his daughters (including Cordelia) is told, amidst battles between pre-Roman British royalty, and the new invasions and intermarriages with Romans. There are claims that kings built roads, and other pufferies of how warfare helped to bring peace before the next attack. While this is blatantly a fictitious propaganda that does not reflect any truths about the history of what happened to lead the British people to still be under the power of a single-family monarchy, it is a very detailed and intricately-woven lie that is an entertaining read. Anybody who is interested in fantasy about monarchs, dragons, and wars would enjoy reading this work cover-to-cover.

This is a book anybody who has studied British literature casually, at school, in graduate school, or in their post-doctoral research should have in their home-library. And all types of libraries should acquire it for their collections, and anybody can at some point come across sources that refer to Brut, prompting a need to review this text itself.

The Bureaucracy and Hidden Corruption Behind Britain’s Royal Fine Art Commission

Robert Bargery, and Lord Foster, The Battle for Better Design: The History of the Royal Fine Art Commission (Lewes: Unicorn, 2024). Hardcover: $52.50. 170pp. Index, color photographs. ISBN: 978-1-911397-96-0.

*****

“Prince Albert was the first Chairman of the first Royal Fine Art Commission, appointed by Queen Victoria to commission art for the new Houses of Parliament. At the age of just twenty-two, he deftly navigated the complex project, leaving a remarkable artistic legacy and honing the skills that made him one of the Renaissance Men of the nineteenth century. Albert then set the template for a second Royal Fine Art Commission, created in 1924 as a priority of Britain’s first ever Labour Government. From the aftermath of the Great War to the eve of the Third Millennium, this Commission gave elite architects and designers from Edwin Lutyens to Henry Moore a platform to apply their minds to a democratic cause, putting in countless hours analysing the design of buildings, street furniture, roads and bridges… against the background of high politics, difficult personalities and the physical disruption wrought by wars, the motorcar and advances in technology.”

The first chapter in the first part, “Baptism of Fire”, begins by describing the fire at the old Palace of Westminster on October 16, 1834, and only the Westminster Hall survived. To rebuild, the “first Royal Fine Art Commission arose”. While it then offers a few other specific dates and events regarding the founding of this Commission, the discussion soon diverges into abstract pufferies of the British monarchy. For example, there are several paragraphs that claim that “the first Commission amounted to nothing without [Prince] Albert”. The next paragraph adds that the Queen and Consort had also helped launch it with Peel’s help for it to serve to help the Prince make “connections with the leading public and literary men of this country” (11). Such pufferies of monarchs as having some kind of an intellectual, financial etc. input in the operation of artistic or intellectual ventures is absurdly untrue. It is also absurd to describe a Commission that suggests it is serving the public with merely being a tutorship for a Prince. If this was its function, the Prince could have hired private tutors that would have been far less expensive.

I stopped at this point and used the contents in the rest of that first chapter in my new re-attribution series, where you can find those reflections. There is much interesting information related within the propaganda. In fact, the presence of thick propaganda is useful because it explains the applied strategies Britain has used to puff its nationalist monarchic agenda. Most countries around the world are guilty of such artistic nationalism, but it is rare to find a book that explains how the bureaucracy that builds it functions.

This book is full of beautiful paintings, photographs, and other visuals. The cover is black-and-white, probably to portray the soot that was in the air that damaged most of the original paintings that were created by the Commission. There is a wide spectrum of quality variance in this book, as some pictures are sketches, while others are of extreme high-quality and deserving of placement in a museum. It is more interesting to look at surprising images, as opposed to a set that is entirely perfect. This book is probably designed for academic libraries only, as it is unlikely the public would want to look inside these pages casually.

Confusing Etymological Facts with Uncertainties

Anatoly Liberman, Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, April 1, 2024). Hardcover: $29.99. 344pp. Index. ISBN: 978-0-19-7664-91-9.

***

“We like to recount that goodbye started out as ‘god be with you,’ that whiskey comes from the Gaelic for ‘water of life,’ or that avocado originated as the Aztec word for ‘testicle.’ But there are many words with origins unknown, disputed, or so buried in old journals that they may as well be lost to the general public.” It “draws on… etymological database to tell the stories of less understood words such as nerd, fake, ain’t, hitchhike, trash, curmudgeon, and quiz, as well as puzzling idioms like kick the bucket and pay through the nose. By casting a net so broadly, the book addresses language history, language usage (including grammar), history (both ancient and modern), religion, superstitions, and material culture.”

Richard Verstegan’s Restitution was the first Old English dictionary, and in that volume of BRRAM I cover alternative definitions for English words that were invented by Verstegan during his Old/Middle English forgeries, or as he mistranslated words he did not know from Old German, and other glitches. The “Index” to this volume does not mention “Verstegan”, so I am suspicious regarding how Liberman could have managed to find the first definition of “goodbye” to ridicule without consulting Verstegan; this probably means that he only consulted modern dictionaries such as Oxford’s, which tend to repeat Verstegan’s earliest dictionaries without giving them credit, and thus confusing etymological research. For example, “goodbye” could have been based either on “good” or “god”, and either “bye” or “by” as these words were spelled interchangeably in the pre-modern period. 

The next objection that came to mind is why Liberman had chosen just some words, none of which might be relevant to a narrow etymological question somebody might need answered for each unique research problem. Liberman explains this decision in the “Introduction” that clarifies that Oxford University Press had encouraged him to start an etymological blog back in 2005, and then in 2023 he submitted this book draft to them that consisted of the most interesting” posts out of his “close to eight hundred posts”. He edited these chosen posts to generate this book. This is hardly a positive from a reader’s perspective. But he goes on to add that these essays attempt to “solve” etymological mysteries, as opposed to merely repeating what typical etymological definitions tend to offer about these words. He mentions that he consulted “countless language historians”, but adds that in the chapters themselves “the references to the scholarly literature have been reduced to the barest minimum.” Those who are interested in references are asked to consult somebody else’s book from a different press (1-2). This is not a good start. He later clarifies further that the words he investigated are those that past etymologists have categorized under “origin uncertain”, taking this as a challenge for closer analysis (6).

Then, in the first chapter, he confirms that OED is his main source, as be discusses casually the words that have survived into Modern English primarily because “Shakespeare” used them (13). In general, this author is too self-reflective. For example, he seems to have anticipated that I would question why “pun” deserved a section in this book as its “origin” is hardly “uncertain”. He begins this section philosophically: “if the sought-for origin is known and can be found in a dictionary or the Internet, what is the point of writing such a book? And if the answer has never been found, why bother?” He elaborates that the first section on “alairy” was an example of a case where his reading of “articles” on the subject meant he knew the answer, while most reader didn’t, though he didn’t “decipher” this word’s meaning. He promises to make this discovery regarding the origin of “pun”. But he begins by noting that this word appeared in a known year in “Abraham Cowley’s” comedy before being defined in the first edition of OED in 1669. Then, there is no mystery, as the meaning has been gathered from the context, or by the ghostwriter and defined soon after first-usage. He then adds the etymological derivations in similar words in earlier languages, further proving that this is not a mystery, but rather an established research path (35-6). He later offers some points that seem to complicate the question, and then offers solutions for these. He finds an origin in Latin, before lamenting the failure of a better word being introduced to replace the nonsensical “pun” (37-8). While I enjoy and understand such etymological word-play, I cannot imagine researchers who need rapid essential information to address their research question would appreciate these digressions. The division of these words into categories such as “It Takes All Sorts to Make the World Go Round” and a lack of even alphabetic organization within sections makes it very difficult for a reader to search this text with a purpose in mind. And if this book is assigned in an etymology class, students are likely to be annoyed with the digressions, and uncertain about the lessons because Liberman tends to contradict his earlier statements in later ones.

And if somebody has a frank curiosity regarding a specific strange usage, such “play hookey”, they encounter paragraphs of irrelevant digressions at the start of such sections. This section starts with reflection on the commonality of Dutch and German word-origins. The lack of citations in this paragraph is one of the reasons Liberman misunderstands this topic. Most modern Brits have DNA origins in Dutch-Germany that starts in around 900 AD, as those speakers of Old German/Dutch migrated into Britain with their language. So Old English and Old German is really the same language up to the point of their arrival, and then it diverged slightly, before the Norman Conquest led to the introduction of Old French words (also a variant of Old German) as well as other variants that were more distant. It is true, as Liberman states, that there was “no Dutch military invasion of England”, but he fails to understand that it was not mere “contacts” with Dutch that led to the language duplication, but rather that the “English” were the German-Dutch settlers. After this digression, Liberman begins offering some possible meanings of several related words, before eventually beginning to give the relevant origins for the phrase in question.

Since I am working on finishing a series on textual attribution with a volume on stylometry, I hoped this book could give me some useful research for this purpose. But it is anti-helpful, as it introduces some falsehoods as it ponders about this and that without a clear destination. Though a reader who is unfamiliar with etymology, and who does not have a research goal in mind might enjoy browsing through this book and reading the “cool” anecdotes and digressions.   

No: More Terrorism Does Not Counter Terrorism

Richard English, Does Counter-Terrorism Work? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, June 28, 2024). Hardcover: $32.99. 272pp. Index, 3 maps, 9X6”. ISBN: 978-0-19-2843-34-0.

**

“Offers an… interrogation of the effectiveness of state responses to terrorist violence from one of the world’s leading experts on terrorism. State responses to terrorism have shaped politics and society globally. But how far, and in what precise ways, has counter-terrorism actually succeeded? Based on the author’s experience of studying terrorism and counter-terrorism for over three decades… Previous analyses have too often tended to be polarized, simplistic, and short-termist; they have also lacked a comprehensive framework against which properly to assess the (in)efficacy of counter-terrorist efforts over time… Carefully defines what effective counter-terrorism would involve, and then tests that layered framework through cross-case, balanced, historically-focused comparison of important counter-terrorist campaigns. Drawing on a vast range of source material… assesses in detail the strategic, tactical, and personal or political achievements and failures evident this blood-stained field of work… Every one of us is daily affected by the choices made in counter-terrorist politics and policy.”

Before looking inside this book, I searched for a timeline of Islamic terrorist attacks. I had assumed this list would begin with perhaps with Christians’ terrorist military Crusades against Islamic countries occupying the Holy Land between around 1095-1492. These unsuccessful attacks led to the formation of a military culture in Islamic countries, and to growth of the Islamic Ottoman Empire with a peak in geographic size in 1683. It took many wars for European countries to push the Ottoman Empire out of the parts of Europe it had conquered. The map of Islamic countries’ borders kept shifting, leading to both direct military conflict and terrorist attacks by small groups without a rational or achievable geographic agenda. But different lists of the chronologies of Islamic terrorist attacks tend to begin right after the formation of Israel in 1948. The Jewish Declaration of Independence liberated the conquered Israel away from British invaders (who had won Palestine from the Ottoman Empire through direct military conflict), and reclaimed it for the Jews. Britain had suggested this statehood establishment, and did not resist, as it did in the war that followed America’s declaration of the same. Britain’s refusal to split Palestine into two states (Arab and Jewish) originated the need for Arabs who wished to gain citizenship in this ancestral region to rebel (violently or legally). Legalese nonsense followed that cemented the formation of a Jewish state without an Arab state, guaranteeing an endless war would plague this region. The National Counterterrorism Center begins its timeline in 1969, with the formation in Syria of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. One of the first terrorist acts of this and other groups in this effort was the assassination of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. The listed terrorist attacks have been launched across the world, as well as in targeted outright wars and flashes in Israel itself and its surroundings. The difference tends to be that Israel attacks neighbors that threaten its sovereignty with direct military engagement, whereas there are some militias that occasionally attack international targets with a political necessity or possibility of resolution. The change in the latest October 2023 attack was that the Palestinian Hamas group led a military invasion from Gaza with an army that killed 1,200 Israelis in a few hours, and took hundreds of hostages. If the militia came from a single geo-political location such as Gaza (which allowed its entry, gun-access, and did not interfere to stop its blatantly militant plan), this has allowed Israel to consider all of Gaza a political rival in open warfare with its very statehood at question if it allowed a similar attack to re-occur. If the Counterterrorism organizations firmly consider the foundation of the Jewish-only state of Israel as the motive for history of continuous attacks; then, shouldn’t somebody just redraw the map and immediately solve this move for violence? The Gaza Strip seems to have an exclusively Muslim population, so why would this region be logically a part of Israel (a Jewish-only state)? Aspenia Online features an “Ethnic Map of Israel and Palestine”, which shows that there are some sections of this region that have firm ethnic or religious divides. Gaza is entirely in green (Palestinian Arab Muslim/Christian). Judea and Samaria (i.e. West Bank) is mostly dotted with green. And Tel Aviv, Center and Halifa are mostly dominated by blue (Jewish Israeli). And most other regions have mixed populations. Out of the around 85 million people killed in WWII, around 6 million Jews were killed as part of the Holocaust, or specifically for their ethnicity/religion (other Jews could have died in this conflict from other causes). The knowledge that Jews could be killed for their ethnicity, and not merely exiled or banned (as they had been across the Renaissance in Europe), means there must be a state that Jews are in legal control of, so that they can have a refuge when they are under attack anywhere, as well as a military deterrent to fight for international Jewry in cases of new potential genocides. For example, if American far-right nationalists gain political power and begin a Holocaust to kill all Jews in America; then, I would need to migrate somewhere in the world where I would not be at risk of imminent death due to my ethnic status. In contrast, there are many states with Muslim majorities, or with Islam as their state religion. All this conflict might have been avoided if Jews had organized their savings in 1946 to purchase one of the US states, akin to US’s purchase of Alaska, but in reverse. But now Jews own property in Israel, having renovated the region to raise to be the 28^th largest economy in the world. Arab residents of Israel can become citizens, so Israel is not restraining the religious rights of Arabs that live or own property within its borders. Thus, regions with mixed Arab-Jewish populations should be able to coexist if they respect shared property-rights agreements. The regions with the highest Arab populations within the current borders of Israel, Gaza Strip and West Bank, were added due to the 1967 Six-Day War, and have apparently not been returned to the countries they were seized from because of the belief that their occupation is a deterrent to future invasions. Obviously, the opposite is true. Given that Jews have not moved into these Arab regions since 1967, there is no economic benefit to this occupation, and only an incremental cost in continuous military conflicts. And so this entire international terrorism and cross-religious warfare problem could theoretically be solved by a few lawyers sitting down to draw purely logically-driven borders that consider the economic and legal rights to territories. One obvious point that would need to be addressed is the report by AA that since the Gaza war began (a Civil War of Israel against its own territory), Israel has confiscated 27,000 decares or 42% of the total land in the occupied West Bank, with a plan to build 1,895 housing units in this region, at the cost of making homeless 220 Palestinian Bedouin families that lived there back in October. Half of the West Bank is depopulated because it is a desert around the Dead Sea. And the contested region is mostly mountainous, and thus also ill-suited for agriculture, and is not particularly appealing to those seeking housing. The Times of Israel reported back in 2022 that as soon as Israel joined the European Property Index it ended up in the top average most expensive place to live at $6,204 per square meter. So Israeli housing developers are extremely desperate to find places to develop to build new housing units. But would they logically be able to purchase land in the West Bank from rural settlers legally by offering them a fraction of these extreme per-meter profits? Texas is a gigantic place to which folks from the high-rent regions in California have been migrating, but the migrants just purchase land to build or buy existing houses; droves of them have not attempted to confiscate a county or the like from Texas for a cooperative development… Meanwhile, on American college campuses, students seem to have used this conflict to receive A’s without taking finals by blocking access to campuses with encampments. By calling for divestments from Israel, they are demanding a racist or antisemitic financial campaign that devalues Israeli businesses by taking American investors’ funds out. Why would divesting from Israeli pot-growers, or Israeli software developers help solve this conflict? And America has first approved a budget to send more military aid to Israel, and then refused to in fact send these weapons, potentially opening a hole in Israel’s protective anti-missile dome? All sides are clearly determined to create a state of constant terror for all sides. Having pondered on these facts, I am now ready to look inside this book to see what its author is recommending as a solution, and an evaluation of past “counterterrorism” efforts.

  English’s book is divided into three parts on the “Post-9/11 War on Terror”, “Northern Ireland”, and “Israeli Counter-Terrorism”. The State Department has numerous designations for “Foreign Terrorist Organizations”, including mostly Islamic groups, but also a few otherwise affiliated groups, such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the Communist Party of the Philippines, and the Continuity Irish Republican Army. Given the complexities associated with some of these groups’ interactions with different nations and parties, it does make sense that English chose to focus on isolated geographic regions: Afghanistan, Iraq, Norther Ireland, and Israel. The map English chose to use for Israel focuses on the fact that Gaza and the West Bank in combination make up a significant percentage of the entire state of Israel, and thus their loss is portrayed as a geo-politically existential threat. The opening sentence of the Israel section begins with my own conclusion, but it sounds ominous coming from a Brit (whose ancestors first colonized Israel with centuries of warfare, and thus had the legal power to give “it” Independence to Jews alone, leading to the current predicament): “If Israel/Palestine provides an example of rival terrorisms, then it also embodies rival nationalisms from which the terrorist violence has emerged.” If Israel is as guilty of terrorist acts as Palestine; then, British, American and other countries military aggression across this conflict is just as terroristic. English begins his historical analysis not during the Crusades, but rather in the “aftermath” of WWI, and the drawing of “Middle Eastern boundaries” at that juncture, without mentioning that Britain was the drawer and conqueror. He observes that in 1914 Palestine had an overwhelming Muslim Arab majority. In the next paragraph he finally mentions the UK for the first time, or that it “conquered Palestine” in 1917. Britain actively promoted the in-migration of Jews to Israel, and this became a popular decision across the anti-Jewish attacks in Europe by the 1930s. But this migration triggered an early 1936-9 Palestine Arab Rebellion against Jews. Britain did not surrender Israel peacefully out of humanitarian good will, but rather after in the 1940s “Jewish terrorist organizations”, including the National Military and Fighters for the Freedom of Israel violently resisted British rule. During the 1948 establishment of Israel more Palestinians (700,000) were forced into exile as there were Muslim Arabs (582,000) in Palestine back in 1914 (121-3). The Gaza strip was won by Israel from Egypt, which recognized Israel’s claim to this region a few years later, and has been siding with Israel since, by taking steps such as also enforcing a blockade on Gaza amidst it being conquered by Hamas rulers. Egypt has even helped keep a dome over Israel that prevented Iran’s bombardment of Israel from penetrating major targets. English writes: “Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser was indeed a largely unchecked ruler”, and that this had led to the “1967 war”. This is an irrational and unhelpful generalization, as Britain still has a monarch, or, by definition, an “unchecked ruler”. A few paragraphs later, English finally mentions something directly relevant to the promised topic of this book, when he describes the “Rabin Doctrine”, or the Israeli tactic of “response to terrorist hijacking” that indicated that “if a military rescue operation were feasible then this should be the preferred option, but if such an operation were not possible then negotiations with the terrorists could be pursued to try to release the hostages.” He uses the “Entebbe raid of July 1976” as an example, when a “hijacking of a French aeroplane by a splinter group of the PFLP”, followed by an “impressive Israeli military rescue operation” that killed the terrorists and freed hostages (128). The puffery of this operation as “impressive” and with other flower words does not help with practically evaluating if this attack was necessary, and resulted in more lives saved than if they had waited for the terrorists to release the rest of the hostages themselves (since they started releasing them before the raid). I must stop this review here, as it is clear that this book is not a serious attempt to evaluate the causes of terrorism or the most rational approach to counter it.

This book has a pretty graphic cover that puffs the advancement of a technologically-savvy military (with spy-glasses with an attractive blue circle in the middle) as the solution to terrorism. By increasing the kill-rate with superior technology, this argument goes, one of the sides will eventually overpower the other, leading to peace through submission. Obviously, this strategy has been the cause of conflict in the Middle East that has been driven by Britain since the Middle Ages. The propagandized mythology of the righteous religious war spread by Britain and other western powers is a falsehood, and if all sides could step out of this fiction and enter a rational legal and economic dialogue, both the War on Terror and the Terror itself is likely to immediately come to an end.

Thorough Editorially-Assisted Edition of Dio’s Roman History

Cassius Dio; Robin Waterfield, translator, The Fall of the Roman Republic: Roman History, Books 36-40 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, February 8, 2024). Softcover: £10.99. 300pp. Index.

*****

“This book presents the first English translation to appear for over a hundred years of a key text, Books 36-40 of Cassius Dio’s Roman History, which is not only the fullest surviving account of the last twenty years before the Roman Republic collapsed (69-50 BCE) but is also a vivid and compelling historical narrative.”

By re-attribution research indicated that Britain’s earliest printed books were in fact printed nearly a century after their claimed publication years. And my translation of Verstegan’s Restitution in BRRAM indicated Verstegan’s forgery of Old English texts. This evidence in combination has made me very suspicious about just what is true about the still earlier history of the world, and what is purely fiction that was written as propaganda to support claims to conquer or to enslave enormous geographic regions without expanding military power for the effort. Why would people have had bursts of intellectual achievement, with active historians writing surviving texts once every few hundred years or in cluster bursts? Why would there have been “the fullest surviving account” written just before the fall of Rome, and just before the birth of Jesus? What percentage of the claimed events have been verified with corresponding carbon-dated or otherwise scientifically-dated evidence, and which events have no basis outside of them being believed by the public. Additionally, the version of history taught in modern history books for the period described by Dio is different because new fictions have been added in the centuries that followed. So, reading Dio’s account might be the most authentic version of history, or at least the variant that propogandists initially wanted to communicate to the world.

This edition of Dio’s history is professionally handled with researchers’ needs in mind. It includes a “Chronology of Events”, “Maps”, as well as other helpful components, such as an “Appendix: Roman Names; Money and Measures of Distance; Calendar”. The editor is likely to have realized these elements are necessary because the narrative is somewhat incomprehensible without these in our distant moment.

Clues that readers should not accept Dio’s account as true unquestioningly begin in the “Introduction”, which claims that Pompey had “suppressed piracy across the Mediterranean” by 62 BC (vii). It might have been possible to attack a few pirate ships, but piracy as an activity is just as unstoppable as stopping all thievery on land. There is also a clarification that Dio’s history has been believed in part because it is substantiated with others’ accounts from this period, including “Cicero’s speeches and letters”, and “Caesar’s Gallic War”. However, historians have not considered that this entire cluster of documents was ghostwritten and backdated by the same person or Workshop centuries later as part of some later European, Middle Eastern or African conflict.

A biography for Dio follows, with essential details to understand his perspective (assuming he was a real person) (viii). But then the discussion digresses into general pufferies, such as that “Dio aspired to the highest literary standards” (ix). Such phrases do not help researchers understand this foreign subject. A section mentions that the main body of Dio’s history covers books 36-60, but does not explain why this editor chose to only include 36-40 in this volume.

The section on “Sources” raises my own question regarding evidence in support of this version of history. But instead of citing any sources, the first paragraph imagines that Dio worked for “ten years collecting material”, and “accumulated copious notes”. And “for much of the history Dio probably had to make a coherent account of his own from notes drawn from a variety of sources”, such as “oral testimony”. “The only sources he names are the autobiographies of the emperors Augustus and Hardian.” But mostly historians have assumed that there are “lost” sources that existed at that time, but were destroyed, unlike Dio’s history. “The earliest Roman historical work to survive intact is Sallust’s account of Catiline conspiracy, composed after his retirement from political life around 42 BCE” (xii). There were obviously civilizations that existed in pre-history. The existence of the Old Kingdom of Egypt is documented in its surviving scientifically dated architecture as well as its writings. But if some texts that describe these civilizations are fictions, they might be misinterpreting the evidence. Has the early world truly been ruled my empires, dynasties and other familial-inheritance government structures, or could images of rulers have depicted those who gained these positions by their merit? For example, when the Holy Roman Empire formed in 1050, these Christians were rivaled by Chinese, Middle Eastern and other dynasties and empires, and they might have felt pressured to fabricate an ancient origin for their geographic claim to most of Europe. I am digressing in my own speculations because these introductory remarks are thorough and offer plenty of content for ideas for further research.

The chronology of events, maps and other guides provide details, even if some parts of the intro are too general. “Book Thirty-Six” begins with a summary from Xiphilinus epitome. It includes philosophical points, such as that Romans “came in small numbers to fight, but in large numbers to negotiate” (3). The text itself is a bit difficult to read because it is mostly a puffery of Romans, rather than a historic description of warfare. One method for achieving this nationalistic effort was by making the historian sound like a knowledgeable military tactician. “He ravaged some of the land, with the intention of drawing the barbarians into battle when they came to defend it, and when, despite this, they still made no move, he advanced against them.” Though some actions are hardly admirable, as when a leader withdraws because “men were being injured”, dying and being disabled, and they were running “short on provisions”; instead, of leaving to recuperate, he instead “marched against Nisibis” (5).

It would be very difficult to take a test on the contents of this book due to the variety of stories covered in these pages. But I would have enjoyed reading it as literature, if I had been assigned it in one of my undergraduate or graduate classes. I wish I had the time to read this book cover-to-cover now. I will return to it if my future research takes me to this period in Roman history. Thus, I recommend that teachers from the high school to graduate levels should consider this book for inclusion in their syllabi, but only after reading the whole thing themselves and figuring out if they could answer quiz questions or open-ended essay questions on this book if they had been students. And all types of libraries should purchase it, as this fragment of Roman history is the foundation of most of the Judeo-Christian mythology that is still deeply impacting modern lives.  

A Potentially Fictional Biography of a Female Western-Genre-Founder

Victoria Lamont, The Bower Atmosphere: A Biography of B. M. Bower (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, March 2024). Softcover: $24.95. 190pp. 13 photographs, index. ISBN: 978-1-4962-3621-0.

*****

“B. M. (Bertha Muzzy) Bower was the first author to make a living writing popular westerns, creating more than sixty novels and hundreds of short stories that were read by millions of Americans. Bower’s were among the first westerns adapted to film, and the exploits of her cowboys at the fictional Flying U ranch established a tradition that flourishes to this day. A Montana mother of three, she began writing short stories in 1900, desperate for money that would allow her to leave her unhappy marriage to a cowboy employed by the McNamara ranch. Discouraged by her editors from publicizing her identity as a woman, Bower’s important contribution to American mass culture faded from cultural memory after her death in 1940. Based on extensive research in Bower’s personal archives and publishers’ records, as well as interviews with some of her descendants, The Bower Atmosphere recounts the remarkable twists and turns of Bower’s life, from her beginnings on a Montana cattle ranch to her success as a writer of serial westerns, all the while contending with the conflicting pressures of editors, husbands, children, and her own creative aspirations.”

In my re-attribution projects, I have concluded that the first English-language female author whose output has been canonized was Elizabeth Montagu, who began ghostwriting in the middle of the 18^th century. Then, there were two more female ghostwriters in Britain’s 19^th century. I did not test American authors, so I do not know if there were professional female writers operating in America. In Britain, aside for these few female ghostwriters, male ghostwriters began using female byline in the Renaissance when aristocratic or otherwise wealthy women sponsored or patronized their efforts. The 8 texts I tested from the 3 “Bronte” sisters 4 different ghostwriters (A, D, L, C), but not in a manner that corresponded with the assigned bylines; only 1 of these 4 ghostwriters, Maria Edgeworth, was a woman, and she was only behind “Anne” and one of “Charlotte’s” canonical novels, while other novels by “Emily” and “Charlotte” and the poetry assigned to 3 different sisters (only 1 linguistic signature in all poems) were ghostwritten by different male ghostwriters. Maria’s initial instinct was to assign her novels to male pseudonyms, “Currer” and “Acton Bell”, with Jane Eyre described uniquely as a true autobiography of the main character merely edited by the male “Currer Bell”. Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) appears to have been first re-assigned from “Acton Bell” to “Anne Bronte” by the 1914 J. M. Dent & Sons edition. Edgeworth died in 1849, publishing the 3 tested “Bell” novels in the last few years of her life intentionally under male bylines. Edgeworth deliberately published most of her otherwise-bylined novels under male bylines to avoid the stigmatism of carrying a female-byline; out of the tested C-group texts only her own novel and “Geraldine Jewsbury” and “Mary Prince’s” novels were released under initially female bylines. While femininity was something to conceal for profit in the middle of the 19^th century, it became a profit-driver at the start of the 20^th century, when re-attributions to the “Bronte” sisters peaked. Given this evidence, I would assume that “Bower’s” western novels were ghostwritten by a man. The note that she was “discouraged by her editors from publicizing her identity as a woman” suggests to me that a woman purchased ghostwritten novels and received a portion of the profits, and publishers later decided to re-brand these works by re-attributing them to a woman; only unlike the Bronte craze, this trick did not work, and sales of these novels dropped immediately after the female byline assignment. Preliminary testing indicated that “Emerson” and “Thoreau’s” texts matched, but perhaps ghostwriting became less dominant in the 20^th century. Thoreau also lived “in a tiny cabin”, though in Massachusetts, instead of Montana… and the underlying ghostwriter between these bylines chronologically could not have been “Thoreau”. So this bodes badly for Bower’s chances.

 The first chapter on “An Unbearable Servitude” explains that most of Bower’s biography as an author comes from claims she made about herself, or her ghostwriter about her (10). The claim is that the Authors Magazine was part of a “magazine revolution of the 1890s, which made writing careers more accessible to working-class people” (11). Though my research indicates that such magazines in the 19^th century tended to use as few as a single ghostwriter who created all variedly-bylined published texts. What seemed like accessibility was really designed with fictitious pseudonyms to convince readers they could get published by reading and studying techniques employed in stories included, when there was no actual point-of-entry due to its monopolization by ghostwriters. This biography suggests that a mother of three in a tiny cabin had the funds to purchase magazines, paper, ink etc. and to travel in a “bitter Montana winter to the post office” in a neighboring city to mail her first story to McClure’s. She supposedly had the funding to ship several stories to up to 11 different publications each for “almost two years” before her first story was accepted in 1902 for $12 by Authors Magazine. The $.02 postage price in 1902 is equivalent to .73 in 2023. The annual income of a farm worker in 1902 might have been as high as $1,500. It is odd that Lamont does not estimate or cite a record of how much her husband earned, while giving details about Bower’s finances. Shipping 200 submissions would have cost $4, or around 3% of the annual income. And with 3 children and a single working parent who was employed in only seasonal farming labor, the income is likely to have been lower, and the expenses for a stand-alone tiny cabin would have been high enough to max out the budget. At least the $12 would have covered the cost of postage, but would it have covered the cost of a ghostwriter… Authors Magazine paid Bower $12 four more times that year before it was forced (by these liberal expenditures) to close its doors (12). But then this biography turns to science fiction as Bower manages to be paid $35 by Ainslee’s for a story, and apparently similar sums for later stories. This entire account is made without explaining just when Bower or her publishers assigned a masculine byline to her stories, but given that there were multiple different publishers, she must have been the one using masculine bylines for stories that were later re-attributed to her by her self-attribution, rather than by having the publishers surrender their accounting books. For example, the closure of Authors Magazine means their archives probably disappeared with them. Instead, we are told, without a citation, that by 1904, Bower was paid $75 for a story. At the back of the book, most of the citations are for cowboy novels from different bylines and to Bower’s diary.

The “Afterword” finally addresses just how this biography and the surfacing of the diary happened. Apparently, Dele, Bower’s daughter, held out to this diary and letters, and 23 years after Bower’s death, in 1963, began writing this biography, but apparently gave up and had an academic write a brief biography that was published in around 1971 in the Twain Western Writers series. “After Dele’s death in 1993, Kate Baird Anderson, is claimed to have attempted to continue the biography, but died with it unfinished in 2003.” And finally, a distant relative received these archives and worked with the current author to put this draft of the biography together. There are too many points in this history where a forgery could have been introduced. It could have happened for this published version, or decades earlier so that the final archivist might not have known it was a forgery. If this was an authentic biography, the first attempt surely would have resulted in a publication near the time of Bower’s actual fame (147-50). Apparently, Bower was cremated (146), so I guess assessing the truth would be difficult. There are photos included that register that Bower had a typewriter and where she lived, so it cannot be entirely fictitious. Though the note “typing it myself” regarding a novel that paid $1,400 in 1935 hints again at the likelihood that a ghostwriter or another hand created the novels assigned to Bower, as otherwise it would not have been noteworthy to specify self-typing (133).

It is interesting for me to read this perspective on likely ghostwriting in America in the 20^th century. It is relatively rare for academics to write new biographies for authors that have not had these potential fictions previously manufactured. So, this is a brave undertaking no matter what the truth of this matter is.

Works of a “Native”, “Female”, “Author-Publisher” Under Pseudonyms

Cari M. Carpenter, and Karen L. Kilcup, eds., The Selected Works of Ora Eddleman Reed (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, April 1, 2024). Hardcover: $95. 610pp. 17 photographs, 11 illustrations, 1 map, 3 appendixes, index, 6×9”. ISBN: 978-1-4962-1944-2.

*****

“Collects the writings of Ora Eddleman Reed with an introduction that contextualizes her as an author, a publishing pioneer, a New Woman, and a person with a complicated lineage. ‘Little Writer’ Ora V. Eddleman (pseudonym Mignon Schreiber) was only eighteen when she published her first work in the Indian Territory newspaper Twin Territories, which she edited for much of its brief run. This publication promoted the literary works of Muskogee Creek poet Chinnubbie Harjo (Alexander Posey), Cherokee historian Joshua Ross, and Muskogee Creek chief Pleasant Porter. In the advice column ‘What the Curious Want to Know,’ Eddleman Reed answered readers from around the country who had ignorant impressions of Indian Territory (and whose questions, notably, she did not include). Such columns were accompanied by pieces that amount to some of the earliest Native historiography by an American woman claiming Indigenous heritage. Twin Territories was directed at both Natives and non-Natives and had a national readership. The heterogeneous form of the newspaper gave room for healthy internal debate on controversial ideas like Indigenous sovereignty and assimilation, affirming Native Americans as a significant, diverse collective.”

The same questions I raised in the previous review trouble me about Ora Reed as well, though the odds are higher that she was an author because she also self-published the newspaper that carried her main byline.

The “Contents” advertise that this book is divided into sections on “Activism Writing and Journalism”, “Short Fiction”, “Poetry”, “Drama” and “Children’s Literature and Novel”. There is a biographical introduction and a timeline for Reed in one of the appendixes. Unlike Bower, Reed attended college at the Muskogee Indian Territory. As the blurb hints, there are doubts about Reed’s nativity, as the Daugherty family’s Dawes Roll application for citizenship in the Cherokee Nation was rejected in 1896. Reed did not start Twin Territories, which was started in 1898 before she began writing for this periodical in 1899, when she was 19, under the pseudonym “Mignon Schreiber” (Little Writer). There are a few hints here that make me doubt Reed was an authentic writer, but rather than her byline was assigned to these initially pseudonymous texts to give them authenticity. The goal could have been spreading propaganda to disenfranchise Native Americans under the guise of attempting to help their cause. Ora was first described as one of the editors in 1900, and simultaneously becomes “one of the youngest and the only female member of the Indian Territory Press Association (542).

Reviewing the texts themselves is clearly especially necessary. The first 1900 article from “What the Curious Want to Know” begins by accusing all other publications of falsehoods: “So much is being written and reported to the great daily and weekly newpapers published in the northern and eastern states concerning Indian Territory which is absolutely false and misleading” that this periodical is now attempting to “contradict” these “fabrications”. One of the best strategies when engaging in “fabrications” is to shift this blame onto rivals, so this is a suspicious start. The rest of this article does not mention any truthful specifics. Instead, she goes on to answer letters she claims she is receiving with stereotypical ideas. As the blurb noted, the letters themselves are characteristically absent. While this absent is suggested as a refusal to give voice to insulters, it actually allows the editor to summarize these insults without actually receiving any letters from anybody who has such negative opinions. For example, the first response states: “It is no more dangerous to live in Indian Territory than any part of the United States” (63). The main American Indian Wars ended in 1890, but there were occasional battles in 1898, 1907 and afterwards. One motive for such propaganda was the installment of the 1887 General Allotment Act that distributed Native Lands from communal holdings to individuals, with exceptions such as the 1902 “Dead Indian Act” that allowed for the sale of inheritance to non-Indian purchasers. The periodical in question could have been designed to convince Native Americans to sell their lands, or to not take advantage of allotments, or some other trick. Another response in 1901 states that when she visited the “home of” a “gentleman” she “didn’t have to ‘crawl around in a dirty wigwam”, but that the had “elegant paintings” and “choice books”, concluding that the writer has read merely “‘stories’—or the word might be stronger, if I weren’t a woman.” The author repeatedly takes advantage of the female byline to make disguised insults, and rude comments that are outrageous in an editor, but seem silly coming from a woman. In the next letter she writes: “None of the Indians… eat bugs and grasshoppers… You are surely thinking of the Philippine Islands”, as Scientific American has published an article on this (64). The next letter returns to the question of if one should “select to settle in a town in Indian Territory” (64). In combination, all of these really read like a brochure advertising land for sale, puffing the unique and civilized culture of the people. This hints that the sponsor of this periodical is likely to have been selling allotment land to non-Natives, and hired ghostwriters to fill this periodical with content with this intent. There could have been other motives for her later stories, or I can be mistaken, as this is only a guess based on my initial impression. A similar technique that fits in insults in the guise of outrage is used in “Modern Mistress Lo” in 1908: “That flippant bit of anachronism, ‘No good Indians but dead ones,’ is applied with no thought of what civilization may have accomplished for the red race.” The next paragraph claims that the “Five Civilized Tribes” living in the Indian Territory are “the most advanced in civilization…”, followed by other adjectives re-stating the same (129).

The main thing I learned from this review is that modern Native Americans need to do as much writing as possible in independent magazines and book publishers of their own, in case past accounts assigned to Native bylines have been propaganda that has failed to portray their authentic beliefs. If this was a poorly constructed collection, I would not have been able to reach a conclusion about it as briskly as I have, so this is a well-written scholarly book. Authorship has just been a corrupted profession across much of literate human history. I recommend this book for purchase by academic libraries, trusting that scholars will be able to separate truth from fiction as I have.

“Blackwood’s” Founding Horror Genre Stories

Algernon Blackwood, The Wendigo and Other Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, February 9, 2024). Softcover: $9.95. 450pp. Notes. ISBN: 978-0-19-884888-2.

*****

“‘See!… The woods are alive! Already the Great Ones are there, and the dance will soon begin! The salve is here! Anoint yourself and come!’ One of the greatest writers of the strange and weird, Algernon Blackwood evolved from a teller of ghost stories to a pioneering master of such emergent fictional modes as cosmic horror and nature Gothic. In tales whose settings range from the eerie North Woods of Canada to the mysterious sands of the Egyptian desert, Blackwood blurs the boundaries between human and nonhuman, living and dead, beckoning the reader into strange borderlands where alien forces lurk, waiting for the chance to break through into our world. This new selection of Blackwood’s shorter fiction constitutes the most comprehensive critical edition of his work to date. Included here are such undisputed classics as ‘The Wendigo’, ‘The Willows’, and ‘Ancient Sorceries’, as well as two superbly unsettling novellas, ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ and ‘A Descent into Egypt’, and ten other stories short and long, drawn from collections spanning Blackwood’s long writing career. Aaron Worth’s introduction and notes situate these tales in the context of Blackwood’s own upbringing in an evangelical Victorian household, as well as in relation to such topics as late-imperial British history and the emergence of modern ecological thought. Draws upon Blackwood’s own copious essays, radio talks, and TV appearances, some of which have only recently become available.”

This book has relatively short introductory comments and notes to leave room for the stories themselves. The “Introduction” begins with a puffing PR appearance of Algernon on BBC. The narrator stops at this particular appearance because Algernon had staged a disappearance at the end of a reading (ix). The next section begins with his birth. What is missing here is an explanation of why Algernon is being canonized with this book. There are few authors who were still active post-WWII that are covered in Oxford’s World Classics. And instead of exploring this, his biography mostly ponders about his family’s theological beliefs. The Chronology of his life begins with a single year he spent at the Edinburgh University in 1888-9 (at 20) before dropping out, when he had his first story, “A Mysterious House” published in Belgravia, and he left for New York to work as an invisible reporter across the following decade, while trying morphine and cannabis. He only publishes a short story upon returning to England in 1899, and publishes his first collection of stories in 1906, at nearly 40. Though it seems be published the other stories in this collection during his newspaper years.

A brief stylometric test on “Blackwood’s” Empty House indicated that it was composed of stories created by different ghostwriters, of which A was the dominant signature. A, or Francis Cowley Burnand (1836-1917) also ghostwrote “Conrad’s” Heart of Darkness. The Heart of Darkness has not been classified as part of the horror genre, being instead placed into a canon above genre-fiction, but there are clearly formulaic and stylistic echoes between these works. In the “Introduction”, Aaron Worth explains that “Blackwood” tended to be categorized by BBC as the “Ghost Man”, but he viewed this as “almost a derogatory classification”. The multiplicity of genres represented under “Blackwood’s” byline in fact includes a “small portion of… conventional spectres or revenants”, with most major works, including “The Willows” and “The Wendigo” fitting in the “Nature Gothic” or “Cosmic Horror” categories, and there are some stories that are “fantasy”, and others that are “science fiction” (xi). Some of these generic lines can be drawn by chronology, as, for example, “the only autobiography Blackwood ever wrote”, called Episodes Before Thirty (1923), focuses exclusively on” the decade he spent in America between 1890-9 (xv). Blackwood’s primary occupation during this period was as “a model, posing for artists including the American illustrator Charles Dana Gibson” (xvi). Who Blackwood in fact was is explained by this modeling career in combination with his salesmanship when this “Ghost Man” disappeared after reading a horror story yet again on BBC in 1947. Blackwood was a salesman, who was creating a horror-writer or Gothic persona that was designed to attract readers. He did not write the stories, but rather purchased closeted stories from the Workshop’s collection.

One echo between “Blackwood’s” Empty House stories and the Heart of Darkness appears in a story called “Skeleton Lake: An Episode in Camp”. This story appeared for the first time in the 1906 collection. The Heart of Darkness opens with a scene where a ship comes tragically to “rest”. “The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.” Similarly, in the middle of “Skeleton Lake”, a story is recalled where Jake and Silver Fizz (the narrator’s “guide”) were “in a nine-foot canoe” that had overturned “in the middle of a lake”, so they “held hands… for several hours” to keep warm in “the cold water”. “They were miles from shore, and the wind was drifting them down upon a little island.” But then “they realized to their horror that they would after all drift past it.” An argument begins regarding what they should do, as Jake is “terrified” of “regaining consciousness in the dark”. Both passages use the phrase “the wind was”, personifying the wind as a character who is actively performing mischief on the terrified boaters. Both use the threat of darkness while stuck in an unmoving floatation-device on a body of water. The horror-genre tactics in both stories are almost identical, but the Heart of Darkness is taught in most high schools, while “Skeleton Lake” is only reprinted with this collection, and is rarely mentioned by critics. This indicates just how arbitrary the selection of canonical texts has been, as the puffery of Famous Authors and Famous Novels for their vague “greatness” has overtaken the rational formulaic or stylistic analysis of texts as equal until they are proven to be distinct.

One echo between “Blackwood’s” Empty House stories and the Heart of Darkness appears in a story called “Skeleton Lake: An Episode in Camp”. This story appeared for the first time in the 1906 collection. The Heart of Darkness opens with a scene where a ship comes tragically to “rest”. “The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.” Similarly, in the middle of “Skeleton Lake”, a story is recalled where Jake and Silver Fizz (the narrator’s “guide”) were “in a nine-foot canoe” that had overturned “in the middle of a lake”, so they “held hands… for several hours” to keep warm in “the cold water”. “They were miles from shore, and the wind was drifting them down upon a little island.” But then “they realized to their horror that they would after all drift past it.” An argument begins regarding what they should do, as Jake is “terrified” of “regaining consciousness in the dark”. Both passages use the phrase “the wind was”, personifying the wind as a character who is actively performing mischief on the terrified boaters. Both use the threat of darkness while stuck in an unmoving floatation-device on a body of water. The horror-genre tactics in both stories are almost identical, but the Heart of Darkness is taught in most high schools, while “Skeleton Lake” is only reprinted with this collection, and is rarely mentioned by critics. This indicates just how arbitrary the selection of canonical texts has been, as the puffery of Famous Authors and Famous Novels for their vague “greatness” has overtaken the rational formulaic or stylistic analysis of texts as equal until they are proven to be distinct. And The Wendigo and Other Stories opens with “Blackwood’s” “A Haunted Island”, which begins with a similar description of a lake “as the north winds and early frosts lowered their temperature”: this again personifies the wind as a haunting presence that is influencing the fish and the people on and in the lake. And again, night falls and “the loneliness of the situation” terrifies the narrator, who realizes “There were no other islands within six or seven miles” (3). The narrator then moves on to examining the creaking house (4), but this lingering terror of abandonment or separation from safety matches the mood set by such mentions of wind manipulating water in Heart and “Skeleton”.

There are dozens of novels and numerous short stories that have been credited to “Joseph Conrad” in intersecting years with “Blackwood”. If anybody reaches the end of “Conrad’s” horrors and wants to read more by the same ghostwriter, they would find a great source in this Oxford Classics collection. These are the best or the most puffed “Blackwood” stories, so reading these should clarify misconceptions about the ghost or horror genre that is still with us in generic echoes today. This is a collection designed for the general public or for home libraries, as well as a textbook that can be taught in literature classes from high school to grad school. If my professor assigned this book, I would be delighted to explore its contents and to discuss structural patterns and tricks that generate fright in readers in these pages. This book should also be carried in most types of libraries, as it is a part of the British canon that has not been as widely accessible as other canonical bylines, such as “Conrad”.

The Foundation of the “Starving Artist” Trope with a Counter

Knut Hamsun; Terence Cave, translator, Hunger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, February 8, 2024). Softcover: $8.95. 172pp, 7.7×5.1”. Notes. ISBN: 978-0-19-286284-6.

*****

“‘It was at the time when I was wandering around hungry in Kristiania, that strange city no one leaves before it has set its mark on them…’ Hunger is the first-person story of a young man desperately trying to establish himself in the city as a writer, living in shabby lodgings where he can seldom afford to pay the rent, eating almost nothing, and engaging spasmodically and manically with landladies, eccentric elderly men, policemen, shopkeepers, pawnbrokers, and others on the way. He wanders around the streets, sits on benches trying to write, spends a night locked in a pitch-dark police cell, thinks, slides into remarkably inventive reveries, speculates on his mental health, his ethical comportment, his relation to the divinity, the topics he might write about. The traces of a consistent narrative logic are uncertain and blurred; the voice of the narrator keeps shifting between pragmatic appraisal of his situation, wild fantasies, manic outbursts, anger, and despair. This is a story that lies on the threshold of modernism, anticipating many of the dislocations that narrative will be subject to in the decades to come. This new translation seeks to restore the startling freshness and epidermal unease of Hamsun’s breakthrough story of 1890. It remains faithful to the style and voice of the text, the shifts of tense, the indirect free style, and the constant changes of register as the inner monologue moves between poetic sensitivity, wild fantasies, manic outbursts, and hyperbolic emotion. Tore Rem’s introduction provides an updated… account of the genesis of Hunger, its book history and its reception. Provides a new perspective on the novel in the light of Hamsun’s ‘poetry of the nerves’ by discussing not only the affective life of the narrator in this perspective but also the urban context which embodies his ‘extended mind’.”

“A Chronology of Knut Hamsun” is a good place to start evaluating this book for somebody unfamiliar with this subject. It clarifies that Hamsun was born in Norway in 1859, and died in 1952. He attended school until he was only 15, and held a few jobs as an assistant or clerk before publishing his first novel, The Enigmatic One: A Love Story from Nordland, in 1877, at 18. I reviewed Hamsun’s Pan in a previous issue of PLJ; it was also published in Oxford’s World’s Classics series, and I thought it was curiously abstractly-modernist, and thus refreshingly unlike other fictions I have reviewed. Hunger was published in 1890, four years before Pan was published in 1894. Terence Cave’s “Introduction” to Hunger clarifies that Hamsun was resistant to the label that he was a “leading figure of the… ‘Modern Breakthrough’”, and argued that Hunger was “not… a novel”. In a letter, Hamsun explained that it was “an attempt to portray the special, distinctive life of the mind, the mystery of nerves in a famished body” (vii-viii). Cave argues that the “Genesis” of this non-novel began when Hamsun arrived in Copenhagen on July 17, 1888, after “two years in America and returned poor and disappointed. He came to Copenhagen penniless, he pawned his raincoat, and got a room in St Hangsgade for the six kroner he got for it, in his later version of events”. The idea that somebody truly penniless could have spent weeks, months or two years in a hotel room writing an experimental non-novel is contradicted by the reality that pennilessness is not equivalent to endless-money-fullness, as it would have taken longer than one night to have finished this work… The editor is right to question that this is Hamsun’s “version of events”, as opposed to the truth of this “genesis”. The first fragment “Hunger, Story” was published in Ny Jord in November 1888, and immediately “caused a literary sensation” that made him a lot of money from this and later books. The claim to extreme poverty was part of Hamsun’s publicity campaign that led to these eventual record-sales.

The “Introduction” also includes this work’s critical reception, and other elements necessary for both a student and a scholar to receive brief overviews to begin their own research into this curious experiment. There is even a “Map of Kristiania (1900)”. The book is divided into four fragments, which are called “First Fragment”, etc.

While there were “starving artists” that began appearing in 18^th century stories, continued through the 19^th century (as in Henry Murger’s Scenes of Bohemian Life (1851) about four starving artists), Hamsun’s Hunger tends to be cited when this phrase is used by literary critics. This work opens with the narrator describing the smell of baking bread, as he “spent the day in bed with a dizzy spell”, as he hoped to be paid “five kroner out of some newspaper or other for a literary piece” (3). While a few paragraphs that keep mentioning this character being hungry and failing to win jobs he is applying for are sympathetic and believable, by the end of the second page, readers are likely to get the impression that the narrator is being ironic, or that he is satirizing the woes of a starving artist instead of presenting a struggle he faced himself. For example, he writes that the “worst thing” was that his “clothes had begun to be so shabby that I couldn’t present myself for a job like a decent person.” It takes a very long time for clothing to become extremely shabby, and since this character still lives in a rented space, he could not have reached this point. I tend to purchase 1-2 new pieces of clothing per year. Most of what I wear I have had for a decade. If I look shabby to employers, I have not cared the least about this. Folks who are concerned with how they look are likely to become ghostwriters, or otherwise profiteer from writing, instead of creating art-for-art’s-sake. He continues with absurdities such as: “I didn’t even have… a book to read”. There are libraries: these are places with free books. And the 1890s was a peak for the construction of free public libraries, as Carnegie alone built 1,700 libraries in the US between 1881-1919, and the US was generally behind its European intellectual competitors. Then, for the task of “composing articles for the paper”, he claims he spent “the summer” at “cemeteries or up to Palace Park, “writing” about “weird imaginings, whims, notions dreamt…” No professional writer would walk (while hungry) to cemeteries or parks to write, when this is a task that must be done near a desk (and books). Then he describes a butcher shop, and instead of salivating there with hunger, he reports that he lost his appetite just by seeing a woman with a single tooth eating a sausage. If he was truly hungry, he is not likely to have lost his appetite so easily. Then, he encounters Hans Pauli, and decides not to beg him for money, while recalling that he had “borrowed” a “blanket” from him “a few weeks ago”, and was unwilling to return it. How can somebody have the money for rent, but not enough to have purchased a “blanket” when he first moved into this apartment? Why would somebody be okay with borrowing a blanket, but not money? On the other hand, this narrator might be truthful when he recounts a deep repulsion from an “old cripple”, who is annoying him because he seems to be deliberately walking in front of him. This non-novel really seems to present the starving-artist in a manner similar to this “old cripple”, hoping to convince readers to be repulsed by a writer who is living in poverty for art’s-sake. This ethical and art-committed writer is not the author, but is rather a character who repulses the author, as he has chosen to be a profiteer from hack-writing. The narrator stops this cripple, and the first dialogue begins. It is not properly punctuated with quotation marks, but the lines are separated into individual paragraphs. The cripple asks the narrator for money for “milk”. The cripple reports that he has not “eaten anything since yesterday”. The narrator plays the hero and goes to a pawn shop and gets a “krone and a half” for his coat. On the way he considers this is a good idea because it would cover his own food, so he could finish his “dissertation on the crimes of the future”. He returns to the cripple and gives him some of this money, but after looking over his poor appearance the cripple returns the money. He insists, and then purchases expensive food items, and eats them, and they give him ambitious ideas for a writing project. But before he can execute this project, he realizes he had left his “pencil” in the “waistcoat pocket” that he had just pawned. He narrator’s thoughts are confused, as he walks around, and is too afraid of just going to the pawnbroker to retrieve his pencil (4-9). At this point, I think I understand this novel. The reason the claims made are incoherent and contradictory, and at times seem to be making fun of starving-artists is because the author is likely to have written them while somewhat hungry, allowing ideas to be naturally jumbled. It is indeed easy to forget a pencil, or to be mad at a cripple, or to lose appetite despite starvation when blood-sugar is low and clarity-of-thought is missing. This is a great literary trick, as describing the impact of hunger on the creative mind is a very highbrow experiment, which is achieved superbly here.

This is a deserving classic that needs to be analyzed closely by a clear and full mind. Given the commonality of the phrase “starving artist”, and just how few artists are willing to starve for their art in our modern times, this is a philosophical study of a condition that is foreign to most, and thus is a necessary perspective. This book is recommended for purchase for home libraries, and for all types of libraries. It would make a great textbook for creative writing classes with some scheduled reading, allowing potential future “starving artists” to contemplate this condition in contrast with the image of the profiteering artist, to decide on their preferred path.