{"id":71753,"date":"2022-09-16T10:29:35","date_gmt":"2022-09-16T14:29:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=71753"},"modified":"2022-09-16T21:47:52","modified_gmt":"2022-09-17T01:47:52","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-32","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2022\/09\/16\/i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-32\/","title":{"rendered":"i arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Memorial plaque in Berlin for Dr. Salamo Friedlander “Mynona”<\/p><\/div>\n

I arrogantly recommend…by Tom Bowden <\/strong>is a monthly column of small press and books-in-translation reviews by our friend, bibliophile, and retired pavement inspector Tom Bowden, who tells us, ‘This platform allows me to exponentially increase the number of people reached who have no use for such things.’<\/p>\n

Links are provided to our Bookshop.org affiliate page<\/a>. Bookshop.org is an alternative to Amazon that benefits indie bookstores nationwide. If titles are unavailable, please call, we’ll try to help. Most of Bowden’s reviewed books are stocked at Book Beat. Thank you for your support! Read more arrogantly recommended reviews at:I arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Astounding Secrets of the Devil-Worshippers\u2019 Mystic Love Cult<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

William Seabrook
\nSnuggly Books<\/p>\n

During the 1920s, Detroit\u2019s salad days as an American metropolis, magic came to town in the form of British mystic Aleister Crowley. Crowley headed a church he called the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) whose credo was \u201cDo what thou wilt,\u201d a libertarian theology that appealed to prominent Detroit Masons who, according to Crowley\u2019s biographer Richard Kaczynski, wanted to establish an OTO order here. As with other things libertarian, when the bill comes due for doing what thou wilt, personal responsibility turns out to be an onus dumped on the hapless rather than taken up by the \u00fcbermensch. In the case of Crowley, the bill amounted to a highly publicized scandal whose ideas were alleged to have precipitated but were enacted by those who took them seriously.<\/p>\n

Not the title of an album by the Acid Mothers Temple, Astounding Secrets<\/strong> was published serially in the second quarter of 1923 as an explanation to Americans of Crowley, who in this book makes trips to the Motor City, including stopovers to the publisher Albert Ryerson, which lead to three divorces for Ryserson from his increasingly young wives. (Wife #3 was 19 when Ryerson was 51. You can Google it.) William Seabrook, who claims to have known Crowley for decades, assures us that his is an authentic account of what Crowley gets up to.<\/p>\n

Not surprising for a writer claiming acquaintance with Crowley, the tone of Seabrook\u2019s prose is set to carney barker bombast, littered with hyperbole, redundancy (was he paid less than a penny a word?), titillation, and scandal, in which one\u2019s response the revelations\u2014such as they are\u2014rarely rise above the \u201cmeh\u201d (re: i.e., recreational drug use), except for suggestions that numerous women (only one is presented as an actual case) ask Crowley to brand and slice their flesh and a case Crowley admits was wrong to do in which he had a cat slaughtered for a ritual. So, mostly a bit of nasty S&M (between consenting adults) among the smoke and mirrors, of which there are plenty, metaphorically speaking.<\/p>\n

What to make of Crowley? He seems to have been separated at birth from his brother-in-spirit, P. T. Barnum. Whereas Barnum made his scams family-friendly, Crowley\u2014perhaps more an introvert\u2014saved his best stuff for jaded members of what passed for American aristocracy. As a result, no one\u2014not Crowley himself, let alone devotees from his flock\u2014knew how seriously to take the spells, rituals, and incantations that just suddenly ended, with nothing happening except a rising sense of creepiness. The power of suggestion, confidently suggested, to those asking what he suggests\u2014the pay was good, apparently, and no publicity was bad publicity. Why a mode of living\u2014do what you want\u2014requires oogie-boogie spiritualism to accompany it is beyond me. Many of the rituals are simply re-enactments of Christian rituals but with different nouns, and in that regards it\u2019s merely reactionary rather than the next step in spiritualism.<\/p>\n

Seabrook recounts smoking \u201chasheesh\u201d with Crowley and a group of well-heeled acolytes. More specifically identified by Seabrook as cannabis indica, it never induces laughter or forgetfulness among the group but produces hallucinations tinged with paranoia (before LSD was discovered) lasting only about two hours, instead of the six to twelve hours induced by such hallucinogens as mushrooms, peyote, or LSD. So, perhaps these \u201challucinations\u201d were merely suggestions eagerly taken up to stave off social embarrassment. After all, in the hour leading to the unexpected hallucinations, Seabrook reports, \u201cCrowley repeated the supposedly magical words. As if from a great distance one heard the repeated, booming, \u2018Padma oom!\u2019 like some great faraway, muffled, brass band.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for the rest of us, we began to be, frankly, a little bored. There we lay, in the dimly lighted, quiet room\u2014and nothing whatever happened.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you feel anything yet?\u201d the Englishman asked the Russian girl.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, monsieur,\u201d she responded in French \u201c\u2014unless a slight tingling in my toes, but I think that\u2019s just because my foot\u2019s gone to sleep.\u201d And so we talked, intermittently, rather stupidly, it seemed to me, for some time.<\/p>\n

Astounding Secrets<\/strong> makes for a quick, entertaining read, slowed down for me only by frequent eye-rolling in reaction to the ludicrous and salacious prose describing the antics of an erstwhile PTL Club for the well-heeled.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a> Fantasia for the Man in Blue<\/a><\/strong>
\nTommye Blount
\nFour Way Books<\/p>\n

Detroit-born and -bred poet Tommye Blount made his debut with Fantasia for the Man in Blue<\/strong> in 2020, a collection that is both very good and a National Book Award Finalist. That\u2019s<\/em> a debut. In it, Blount explores the fraught psycho-sexual terrain of a Black homosexual who enjoys subordinate positions in rough sex with white policeman, or white men in general. The sex fuses orgasmic volatility to 500 years of racial dynamics and intense, self-abasing rage in the service of a bottom\u2019s gratification.<\/p>\n

From \u201cBlood Harmony\u201d:<\/p>\n

. . . our bodies, together,
\nare the only capable instrument;
\na fine instrument of brutality\u2014
\na double-minded man of muscled
\nrage, reluctant tenderness. We dance . . .<\/p>\n

From part VI of \u201cFable of the Beast\u201d:<\/p>\n

No, it is not violence
\nif I ask for touch
\nas purposeful as
\nthe softest caress. If not
\ntenderness, then
\nlet me wear his
\nbruises
\nand not be ashamed to heal.<\/p>\n