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would adapt rather than persist in attempting to draw attention to their outrage i wonder if he is answering me in this paragraph a fat green lizard slowly crawled up the wall in no way was our knee to knee dialogue altered by this he was there and we were here only a misguided hegemonist would have attempted to exploit these discrete phenomena symbolism gone berserk is a malady of our times phenomenological chastity is the only known cure that or inkless pens or if it is as simple as richard nixon s response to the announced national essay contest on how napalm has helped me love god upon hearing which nixon whipped out his cock grinning wildly and started fucking a big bowl of mashed potatoes more or less this novel follows a social scientist around the world from northwestern europe to nicaragua washington dc and most oddly minorca where the book ends one of mantras that was delivered up by the war was bomb them back to the stone age and in that there may be a clue to brossard s mad methods actually more oddly is probably mont blanc where he must deal with the overdue crisis the sexual needs of mountain climbers which establishes the mix of absurd research text haunting warriors of repute such as maxwell taylor and mcgeorge bundy us pop culture with its characteristic white phosphorous economics and straight out of the mouth comments on the progress and tactics of the vietnam war the question as to how to read the book has something to do with the familiarity readers born during the reagan years and onwards may lack with the full football squad of names that are each resonant in their own particular ways to those who lived through those years and or studied the war in vietnam remember the war began in 1953 when ed lansdale the quiet american arrived in anticipation of french defeat which occurred in 1954 he was sent by the dulles brothers and the names flow on through the kennedy and johnson years rusk mcnamara rostow each of whom is as memorable in one way or another as dick cheney is now to have lived through all that and witnessed negroponte rising from the grave under baby bush is a horror difficult to get across then of course the folie à deux of all follies nixon and kissinger my own hatred of kissinger runs so deep that if there is no hell one will have to be created with room enough for his corpse and my soul this guy is so odious and so beloved by evil forces he has survived full length books by both seymour hersh and christopher hitchens brossard limited by the sheer number of fascists on the team hasn t much time to mock henry but establishes his credentials and as we certainly suspected reveals that kissinger s great disappointment was that a nobel prize is by no means an oscar less ironically than i would like it is to film i must turn to begin to guess what contemporary readers bring to a book like brossard s i can think of two pop culture films that have established bland saccharine lies that brossard would not tolerate yet would welcome into his satirical absurd take on the world of us empire first the ken burns 10 part documentary on vietnam which i turned off as soon as i heard the narrator s second sentence it was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings american overconfidence and cold war miscalculation i could read that in brossard s book if spoken from a vagina that sends radio program speeches from politicos but i can t hear that presented as history the war was begun by people who maintained faith in colonialism throughout and despite the humiliations of the second world war meaning the french who refused to give up their indochinese colonies despite the peaceful entreaties of ho chi minh and the fact that they could not afford a war if that s what it came down to as it did because of their imperial intransigence and the very accurate cold war calculation by the united states that money in europe was well spent by the emergent imperial power the war picked up significantly in 1946 by 1950 the us was paying for at least 80 percent of the cost of the war to the french good people with good intentions in 1954 when the french set up their defeat in the mountains at dien bien phu the us struggled with the decision whether or not to use nuclear weapons to alleviate the pressure on the french if they did not it was because they had the cia at work in the south and plans of their own that excluded the rest of the world following the defeat a conference in geneva established a plan for a peaceful transition to a democratic vietnam that would be inaugurated by the national election of 1956 knowing that in that election ho chi minh would win fairly and by a landslide hard not to type lansdale there the us frantically sought to establish a regime that they could prop in the south that they could establish as an anti communist country that slicing had appeared to have worked in korea they found ngo dinh diem who through manipulative effort unmatched in the conflict they kept in power until 1963 which brings us to the second popular film oliver stone s jfk which forcefully makes an argument that kennedy was killed by plotters in his own government for which of course there need be motive and which stone finds in a single tepid memo from an ambiguous context of ambiguous content that runs contrary to all of kennedy s own behavior the memo suggested to stone what is as such accepted as fact by far too many people that kennedy was killed because he intended to begin withdrawing from vietnam this despite something our man brossard brings up twice in his novel that a month before he was assassinated kennedy gave the order to have diem and his brother brought down by coup and subsequently assassinated burns and stone are not right wing propagandists yet what they and a series of inevitable failures of thought or victories of oligarchic scheming have brought about is an hallucination that passes for reality though brossard does take a couple swipes at the press this vietnam war was their heyday and if they only uncovered one my lai when we now know they were quotidian affairs they did report atrocities leap ahead in time to baby bush and his push for the iraq war which every journalist knew was bogus though none dared speak up what happened did the weight of horrific subversion of thought break the capacity for thinking steven moore credits brossard with foresight for his scene in nicaragua i wonder if moore noticed that brossard made reference twice to jelly beans reagan s favorite fruit which one who suffered grievously under reagan could not fail to see as visionary yes the lasting disease of the vietnam war is its droning presence its fine tuning into the elevator music score to our history which miracle was effected by the fairy dust brought to the overtaxed teary eyes of the guilty only by fated accident of time and place did reagan not put hitler s death factories back together again and so we have chandler brossard unloosed national purpose panties columbia gem of the ocean played by two monkeys on a machine gun kissinger wiping his steaming brow with a piece of an old nonaggressive pact flicking a dirty scruple off his sleeve undeniable truths such as that the entire nation of laos is not worth the cock of one kansas farm boy hard to argue with that new things to scream upon orgasm like my new one furiakisaki wants some seafood mamma jackie kennedy getting doggie fucked in her first porno film while jack arm wrestles ari onassis while getting a lengthy blow job from a redhead continuing even as he gets the damning report on diem that leads to the death order all of which we certainly had coming as please admit it we paid for more rounds of drink than wellington fired at waterloo happily some collateral damage occurs j edgar hoover swishes by in drag this written long before hoover s homosexuality was public knowledge but only about seven years before it was known in academic circles for coincidentally i was told at a sociology conference in boston of a sociologist who had been jailed by the fbi on the black until he agreed to remove the chapter in his book that revealed not only that hoover was gay but how he operated at work he sucked but wouldn t be sucked executive toilets rick harsch zen and the art of buggery by zachary tanner i m not sure that it s even fair to ask you to write a foreward introduction or whatever because i would not want to put what i experience with brossard into words you know uh long drag of a cigarette be like sip of coffee like fucking someone who s telling you as you re going along what you re feeling and why rick harsch it is no coincidence that i share a first name with the bearded zen master of wake up we re almost there as you are he as you are me and we are chandler all together constantly falling into and out of the abyss of one another s eternal and fathomless human consciousness zachary i you he she we they reminds his pupils the mind flows out as it naturally enters into contact with any environment and we ve all been ruined by aristotelian logic everybody except april who s april the most notorious vixen since juliette for one but more pertinently a single player in a bizarre troupe of everymen conspiring over 500 some odd pages in the grand delusion of staging reality by the magic of sensual clairvoyance and osmotic kinesics as the novelist within the novel george says i am someone else or several people as we go on and boy do we go on next year will mark 50 years since the first hardcover edition of wake up richard w baron 1971 and 49 years since the last paperback edition harrow 1972 you may wonder why have i never read this book why did it take the great anti american novel a half century to be repatriated by an infinitesimal nonprofit press in slovenia part of it is retaliatory suppression by a gatekeeper from the new school 1 in april 1971 anatole broyard brossard s former friend and lifelong literary nemesis published an obscene review of wake up in the new york times titled a truly bad book just doesn t happen 2 the review opens here s a book so transcendently bad it makes us fear not only for the condition of the novel in this country but for the country itself what a preposterous sentiment surely by 1971 any decent american citizen was beyond zeitgeist crisis and had personalized the horror wondering how the fuck do i get out of this filthy wasteland the prudish review complains of the novel as sexual circus of its revolutionary rhetoric and well over 500 pages of copulation cunnilingus and fellatio call me pervy but i ve never read a negative review that buttered me up quite like this one have i been desensitized by too many dirty french books with talking cunts and naughty frontispieces perhaps later broyard is also quite humorously baffled by the indiscriminate couplings of brossard s prosody and gives four examples of befuddling language some of us would call poetry the set of which steven moore later reclaimed as synesthetic zen koans 3 the coup de gr â ce is in the penultimate paragraph when broyard invalidates not only himself but the entire ass wipe publication in dismissively lumping wake up together with joyce céline genet henry miller günter grass thomas pynchon and john barth a stacked roster to be sure surely anybody whose home library contained even worn paperbacks of these works would be a fast friend of mine but more likely a reader who has heard of any of these authors has a few hcdjs from each how unfortunate that even in 2020 such dreamboat intellectuals are less common than flat earthers what is more broyard fails to note the marquis de sade who is mentioned more than once in the text or marguerite young their greenwich village contemporary whose landmark miss macintosh my darling scribner s 1965 is equally dense phantasmagoric and forgotten two years after wake up when brossard published his manifesto distinguishing literature from fabulous fiction a public indictment against the rampant fraudulence of the mod lit scene he aligns himself no less with homer hugo melville proust queneau jünger kafka and musil among others 4 it also calls to my mind nabokov s transgressive masterpiece ada or ardor a family chronicle mcgraw hill 1969 or the 8mm mud shark pornos and monster dicks of the mothers fillmore east june 1971 though it seems unlikely broyard would have been loose enough to enjoy either of those nor could he have known that the nazi orgies in this transcendent doorstopper predate those in the national book award winning gravity s rainbow viking 1973 by two years and the complex sociological motion of mcelroy s women and men knopf 1987 by sixteen sadly not everyone shares brossard s and my contempt for conventionality and the review virtually banished the dear author to the borgesian labyrinth of little presses finally itis coming back across the atlantic in photocopy paperback of the first edition in all its sic glory as if via wormhole from an alternate utopian reality without copy editors or record company tycoons in which the grateful dead were actually able to title their second live double album skull fuck 5 but wake up is more than the masterpiece that the counterculture forgot what better time than now to bathe in its indifference to difference here s a book for anyone with a respectable amount of self contempt it is a tool like the i ching or a tarot deck to free your mind from the shit of the bourgeois world it is an escape from the cultural diarrhea of the zonk box in which the reader participant is welcomed on equal footing as an intellectual and a compassionate human being dream with me brossard screams through his characters and together we can subvert society for its lack of love rim jobs can save the western world leave behind this cannibalistic inhuman culture where the kids are brought up to hustle each other and real human emotion and contact are regarded as some awful disease that must be stamped out by crash programs to develop a vaccine against it if life is to be lived to a ripe age even sex that ultimate diamond is tarnished into human commercialism and thus is turned into a crummy zircon to be worn around the ankle remember the first law of humankind we are all each other floating in and out of each other s dreams and fantasies and everyday acts even the most intimate moments being crowded with dozens of others no man is alone if that cat only knew the half of it i have been hector on the trojan barricades and will be the first woman on the moon four months gone with a homosexual night club singer moonblood moonooze not an artichoke here that doesn t call me by my first name sheer need drives multiple claims of an affinity for bosch but here we have a book that is actually worthy of its several allusions to the infernal visionary they may want to obliterate your infinity but don t fret for you are as free as your own imagination and circumstances allow you refuse to be a...