Puck

Donald Rumsfeld told us that the people of Iraq would greet the conquering “Coalition” forces with “chocolates and flowers.” In retrospect–and even at the time, to many of us–that sounds completely idiotic. But maybe Rumsfeld was counting on something that, like the best laid plans of chickenhawks and neo-con-men, went didn’t happen. In this context, consider this excerpt from Dr. Lester Grinspoon’s 1975 book, The Speed Culture: ” ‘Chemical warfare’ or ‘drug pacification’ by MDA would probably suppress the fighting instincts of soldiers (or civilians) and make them expansively warm, friendly, and concerned for the welfare of their ‘enemies’.” MDA is an early version of MDMA or, as it’s better known, Ecstasy, the “love drug” and a member of America’s beloved amphetamine family. Grinspoon goes on: “no one (except perhaps for a very small and close-mouthed circle of Defense Department researchers and their employees) seems to know what the effects of massive doses of MDA on large groups of soldiers or civilians might be” (59). Rumsfeld is, of course, a longtime member of the U.S. defense-intelligence community. And the military tested MDA on civilians starting in the 1940s (and continuing into the 1970s–that is, if the experiments have ceased) in a series of projects, the most notorious (or at least the most well known) of which was MK Ultra. MK, you know, is spook-speak for “mind kontrol.”

review by Brian Charles Clark

Kafka on the Shore
Haruki Murakami
Vintage, 2006

Haruki Murakami is Japan’s fiercely imaginative novelist of memory. Memory is dramatically apposite right now, as Japan and China duke it out over Japan’s role (and seeming lapse of memory) in brutalizing China during World War II and before. In Murakami’s previous novel, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, the theme of atrocities committed during war time is explicit: by means of an inexplicable (or anyway unexplained) time warp, the late-twentieth-century protagonist of the novel finds himself taking responsibility for forgotten crimes during the war. In Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World the two plots of the novel are conjoined in the memory of a shadowy narrator living in a cyberpunkish Tokyo. In Murakami’s debut in English, A Wild Sheep Chase, it is a photograph that is the repository of the unnamed narrator’s memory of a Blow Up-like mystery. Murakami is a sumptuous and generous writer who explores deeply moral terrain without pointing fingers. Instead, he is a master of the deadpan sideswipe which, a few pages later, leaves us aching with sorrow or joy, depending on the contest, but anyway reading with new eyes. Read the rest of this entry »

review by Brian Charles Clark

The System of the World: The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 3
by Neal Stephenson
Publisher: HarperCollins, 2005

We’ve been around the world with Jack Shaftoe, the King of the Vagabonds, and his Solomonic-gold pirating crew. We’ve sat on the edge of our seats while Daniel Waterhouse, friend of Isaac Newton and Godfreid Libniz, made his way back to London from pirate-infested Boston Bay. Dark conspiracies have unfolded before our scarce-believing eyes. Oh! The early seventeenth century never looked like so much fun!

Neal Stephenson is a brainiac monster, and it is futile to resist the tentacles of his imagination. Although some are better than others, he’s never written a dull book. Few, however, have written a more exciting piece of historical fiction. At roughly 2,500 pages, and spanning three fat volumes, few have written longer ones, but the pages flow like a fast moving river along the entire course of The Baroque Cycle. It is intimidating to speculate about the IQ of a writer who can hold so much historical detail in mind, but that figure must been in the low zillions. For not only is there a tremendous amount of detail, but Stephenson messes with history as well, rerouting the river for the sake of a wondrous tale. Read the rest of this entry »