Trevor Blake (1)

review of
Trevor Blake's Confessions of a Failed Egoist
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 27-30, 2014

"Review is too long. You entered 145254 characters, and the max is 20000" - read the full review here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/370276-confessions-of-a-saturday-morning-em...

At what point were the bks of philosophers of yore considered IMPORTANT? Was it always in their lifetime? Or did the bks have to grow on what little portion of the population that they eventually reached? Were they mainly considered IMPORTANT by their friends & colleagues & publishers during their lifetimes? What I'm getting at is that I consider this bk to be important NOW, while its author is still alive. It's not that I think the author is a great intellectual, necessarily, it's that I think he's maintained his integrity as a Free Thinker w/o sliding into the unrigorous muck of subcultural conformity.

Before I go any further, I shd get out of the way that there's an entire chapter of this bk about me - &, yes, I'm happy about this. Nonetheless, unbelievable as it may seem to those of you who have less integrity than I do, who're shallower than I am (sez me), if I disagreed w/ the bk, if I found major fault w/ it, yes, I'd criticize it at the risk of losing one of the few supporters I 'have' in the world. Of course, I put "have" in 'single quotation marks' b/c I no more 'have' Trevor than he 'has' me. He's a Free Thinker & so am I - our friendship for each other ranks less than the value of 'having our own minds'. & for those of you who scoff at 'Free Thinker'?: Fine, make an argument.. but don't just scoff - opinions w/o buttressing, w/o logical or experiential argumentation supporting them, amt to nothing but yr own hot air. Trevor supports his arguments AND manages to be pretty fucking funny at the same time.

Trevor fits neatly into a legacy of thinkers of the last 40 yrs who've tried to take a look at their environment, narrow & close, far & wide, social & antisocial, & tried to think of it w/o cluttering pre-fab stereotypes that get in the way of clear perception. I think he's succeeded far more than most. Hence my saying this bk's IMPORTANT.

My also saying that the author's not necessarily a "great intellectual" is rooted in the idea that the type of analysis required for the above process isn't necessarily an intellectual one as much as it is one of introspective honesty. To be a "Failed Egoist" is both a 'paradox' of sorts & a way of avoiding the oversimplification of dogma that unintrospective egoism becomes in its more dreary & tiresome megalomaniacal form. A 'true' thinker, even an egoist, questions even themselves - Blake is excellent at this & I respect him for it.

Starting in 1978 I began to seek out interesting people in the world to correspond w/. By perhaps a decade later I was corresponding w/ about 1,400 people. Most of them weren't exactly as interesting for me as I wd've liked but the few that were were amazing & the rest were at least usually seekers.. Seekers after a deeper, more international, community than what was offered to them locally. Seekers after a stimulus from a broader gene pool than what was available locally. Seekers after free thinkers too rare in immediate environments, people that had to be found thru more intensive searching.

For better or worse, I probably most strongly identify w/ what might be called the Lunatic Fringe - something hinted at by the term Post-Left Anarchism. By "Lunatic Fringe" I mean people whose opinions are considered unacceptably extreme by even the people in the cultural/political milieu most likely to accept them. If I understand correctly, "Post-Left Anarchism" is meant to be a form of anarchism whose practitioners no longer associate w/ being the 'extreme' left - instead, something different, something separate. In other words, Free Thinkers, people beholden to no particular norms of no particular sub-culture. By "extreme" I don't necessarily mean 'terrorists', I don't mean people for whom maximum violence is the great transformer - I prefer Hakim Bey's "Poetic Terrorism": fight mind control w/ mind DEcontrol - not fire w/ fire.

I hope that my own most intensive engagement w/ the world-at-large hasn't ended as I've become more & more unacceptable to the young just by virtue of being older than them. As such, my time of maximal identification w/ broad issues & my attempts to clarify my position in relation to them may stretch from the late 1960s to the present. That sd, it wd be dishonest of me to pretend that I have the same level of international (or, as I prefer, "patanational") social immersion now as I did in the 1980s. SO, people I met in the 1980s tend to be the 'founding fathers' or 'founding motherfuckers' or founding 'fatherfuckers' of movements that're still IMPORTANT to me now. Of course, someone's bound to take exception to the male-centric "founding fathers" - perhaps I'll address that later.

Enter Trevor Blake. We started corresponding in 1985 or 1986. That was a little late in contrast to people who also continue to be important to me from that era: "Blaster" Al Ackerman & Ivan Stang, eg - Trevor was a bit younger, he seemed a little less 'formed'. Nonetheless, he was publishing a magazine called "Surreal Estates" & publishers usually have something to say & I'm usually willing to pay attn. Surreal Estates #6 had an interview w/ me in it. It came out in 1986 when I was still having trouble finding a tattooist. Things were different in those days, very few people had tattoos: it wasn't a nauseating trend like it is now. The 1st 2 tattooists I asked to tattoo the 3D brain tattoo on my head refused.

Surreal Estates, IMO, was a bit slovenly & underimaginative from a graphic design perspective but the questions he asked me were good & I was glad to have the opportunity to get my theories & opinions out there. It was the 1st interview w/ me not formatted to fit the superficial requirements of a 'news'paper (Pam Purdy, to her credit, had interviewed me in my Tim Ore identity for the BalTimOre City Paper in the spring of 1982) & to also be published independent of such mainstreams (2 other interviews had been conducted but neither were published).

Trevor Blake is open-minded, someone who's consistently sought out the unusual & carefully decided whether it was for him or not - Confessions of a Failed Egoist impresses me as his most articulate expression of this process that I've encountered to date.

Confessions of a Failed Egoist might be sd to be the latest bk in a lineage that includes, for me, in approximate chronological order:

Re/Search #6/7: Industrial Culture Handbook (1983) - edited by Vale

The Book of the SubGenius (1983) - most credit due to the Sacred Scribe Ivan Stang

The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (1984) - edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein

Chaos - the broadsheets of ontological anarchism (1985) - Hakim Bey

The Abolition of Work and other essays (1986) - Bob Black

Confessions of an American Ling Master (1986) - Al Ackerman

Re/Search #11: Pranks! (1987) - edited by Andrea Juno & V. Vale

Apocalypse Culture (1987) - edited by Adam Parfrey

High Weirdness by Mail (1988) - compiled by Rev, Ivan Stang

The Assault on Culture - Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War (1988) - Stewart Home

Rants and Incendiary Tracts (1989) - compiled by Bob Black & Adam Parfrey

T.A.Z. - The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (1985/1991) - Hakim Bey

The Blaster Al Ackerman Omnibus (1994) - Al Ackerman

footnotes (2006) - tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE

Anti-Media - Ephemera on Speculative Arts (2013) - Florian Cramer

These bks are both the creed of a new blatant pervert & a history of its lineage. These perverts have the audacity to not even kiss the asses goodbye of the parents that, like Chronos, wd eat them, wd smother them - but not as a natural aspect of the passing of time: instead these parents try to eat their children in the hope that they can then shit them out again as clay to be molded into Golems to fight their wars for them, to have no minds of their own. In defiance, this perverted new breed rips its way out of the parental throat leaving their wd-be controller & exploiter speechless. Or maybe these blatant perverts are just crowbarring the Doors of Perception open in a hurry to get to the Emergency Exit.

What's 'wrong' w/ this picture? Well.. maybe nothing. On the other hand, w/ the exception of Andrea Juno as the co-editor of Re/Search, there're no women represented in the authors & editors - there are women represented w/in the bks themselves. I cd've padded the above list by adding women to make myself seem more politically correct but that wd've been cheating. I cd've included the Andrea Juno edited Re/Search: Angry Women (1999) wch I recall as being excellent - but my copy of it was stolen or loaned out & never returned or given away before I got enuf of a chance to read it. Furthermore, while I had some slight correspondence w/ Vale I don't recall having any w/ Juno. This is a personal list, a list mainly centering around people I was (or still am) in contact w/ & around movements I've been mainly directly involved in. If I'd had as long an association w/ my friend Hyla Willis as I have w/ other people listed above, subRosa's Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices wd probably also be on the list.

Other issues of Re/Search are excluded from the list, eg, #10: Incredibly Strange Films (1986) & Modern Primitives (1989). The former b/c I don't perceive the films as being particularly "incredibly strange", I saw Re/Search as reviving a market niche; the latter b/c I've never particularly thought that tattoos & piercings et al were interesting as "modern primitivism" - again, I saw this as market-niche-speak. Now Re/Search has been as commercially successful & as widely disseminated as it has precisely b/c of the publisher's trend-savviness. Unfortunately, that's the same thing that made me lose interest in it. Prior to Modern Primitives only some "incredibly strange" people had tattoos & piercings, after Modern Primitives every moron wanted to be in on the fashion. I still like tattoos but the ones that truly interest me have to stand out in a sea of conformity.

Otherwise excluded, perhaps 'wrongfully so', is Semiotext[e] USA (1987). This was a disappointment to me b/c by the time it came out it already seemed 'out-dated' b/c I'd seen so much of its contents elsewhere already by then. It was really only a few yrs 'behind-the-times' but I was a harsh critic in those days. Also excluded, again perhaps 'wrongfully so', is Yael Dragwyla's The Book of the Outlaw (1986). This is the smallest of the publications listed & the most derivative one insofar as it's a take-off of Aleister Crowley's The Book of the Law (1904). Neither of these characteristics are adequate justifications for rejection - it's more that The Book of the Outlaw doesn't strike me as being as sweepingly visionary as the other bks do.

Possible future inclusions might be 2 bks by another friend of mine, Anna McCarthy: Ambient Television (2001) & The Citizen Machine - Governing by Television in 1950s America (2010) but those are both bks on my excessively long must-read list that I haven't gotten to yet. However, these latter 2 bks by Anna may be rejected b/c they're probably more academic media analysis published in the academic environment than they are howls from the Lunatic Fringe - wch then brings up the somewhat uneasy inclusion of The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book & Anti-Media - Ephemera on Speculative Arts.

The most important birthplace of these blatant perverts is from outside academia, from outside the art world, from outside the approved gathering places for difficult thinkers. Aliens are in yr midst! We're outside the pre-fab contexts for challenging thinking b/c those contexts are too safe to be truly challenging.

For that matter, the 'uneasiness' of my list shd be qualified by my mentioning that I'd forgotten about Chaos until I just now went looking in my library & I've never even read T.A.Z. in its bk form - I'd just read small photocopies that Bey had sent me in the mail that led up to it.

In other words, don't take the above list as some sort of definitive 'these-are-the-important-revolutionaries-heretics-visionaries-of-my-lifetime' list: it's more 'these-are-the-important-revolutionaries-heretics-visionaries-of-my-personal-social-circle-(&-slightly-beyond)-that-I-feel-philosophically-closest-to' or some such - even that's misleading insofar as I've had close to no contact w/ the Industrial scene (although I cd be considered an 'elder' of sorts of the related noise music scene) & have very little contact w/ Adam Parfrey. Most or all of the people are so-called 'white' (Lardy how sick of that description I am!) & North American or European. Even more importantly, in terms of correspondence networks, is that we all speak English - hence communication was easier between us than my networking w/ people in Japan, eg.

On the verso of Confessions of a Failed Egoist's title p it's written: "The author thanks tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE for technical assistance on "Co-Remoting with the Thunderous."" (p 2) That means that Trevor was considerate enuf to send me an advance copy of the article by email wch I then replied to. In an email that I sent to him on March 28, 2013 I wrote:

"Ok, I've revised/corrected the article you sent me & I'm both including it in the message body here & attaching it. I tried to not interfere too much w/ the tone of yr text but there were a few things I changed significantly: 1st, I'm not now nor have I
ever been a thief. I am, actually, an exceptionally honest person & any problems I have are more likely to be associated w/ that. 2nd, the bkstore I cofounded
has been a stunning success. 3rd, I actually work for a living & always have. Currently I do tech work for multiple museums & other exhibit-related institutions
such as universities. Also, while I certainly travel, I own my house in Pittsburgh & have lived here for the last 17 yrs. As such, much of what you've written is entertaining but somewhat 'romantic' & inaccurate. 4th, I don't consider myself to be in the least bit cruel - in fact, having been VERY cruelly treated by many, MANY people my whole life I find cruelty to be despicable. Most likely, anyone who says that I'm cruel, indifferent, or a thief doesn't know me & is just a malicious gossip wanting to exploit me for their own dubious purposes - definitely NOT someone to be trusted.

"As for the description of the way I live? Well, it's true, I don't know ANYONE who lives like I do - but these days the differences revolve more around my utter dedication to intellectual pursuits & research while most people around me cd care less about much of ANYTHING (w/ a few highly remarkable exceptions, of course)."

I appreciate Trevor's giving me the opportunity to critique his article before its publication in this bk b/c it gave me the chance to counteract some of the unfortunate flak that a person like myself, a minor controversial celebrity, has to deal w/ from time to time. After all, while Trevor & I are certainly friends, we've only met in person once, in 1989 (as I remember it) - as such, some of his impressions of me are bound to be gleaned from suspect 3rd party sources.

Confessions of a Failed Egoist, like many bks I like very much, struck me as so quotable that I cd (im)practically repeat the whole bk here - merrily, merrily commenting on it all the way. Just the chapter titles, as given in the Table of Contents, give a pretty good idea:

Confessions of a Failed Egoist
Co-Remoting with the Thunderous
Infinite Material Universe
It's a Sin
Lan Asalem!
Multiple Name Identities
My Crowded Fist Theater Shouting Fire...
Objectvisn't
Really
Shot from the Egoist Canon
So You Want to Meet an Alien?
Trajectory Through Anarchism
Triumph of the Wilt
Why Should I Speak of Them?
Wm. Trevor Blake
Yes You Can Say No!

Most, or all, the work I like has a sense of play, a sense of fair-play, a cents of fare-pay, a sense of humor - Trevor's exceptional.. but not an exception to what I like. Consider the opening 2 paragraphs:

"I am an egoist, a circular thinker of the most self-contained philosophy. Keep reading, though, and you'll see I'm not a very good Unique One. I see rusty rivets and loose lashings in the HMS Egoism. Egoism is the contrarian's philosophy, and so of course I begin this book with a broadside against it.

"Egoism is the claim that the individual is the measure of all things. In ethics, in epistemology, in aesthetics, in society, the Individual is the best and only arbitrator. Egoism claims social convention, laws, other people, religion, language, time and all other forces outside of the Individual are an impediment to the liberty and existence of the Individual. Such impediments may be tolerated but they have no special standing to the Individual, who may elect to ignore or subvert or destroy them as He can. In egoism the State has no monopoly to take tax or to wage war." - p 5

An egoist is a person who thinks of themself 1st & foremost - most people do this but in a way that's severely moderated by fear of negative consequences from the larger social whole. Only the brave (or devious) dare to challenge external society's 'right' to try to reel in the Individual's pursuit of their desires & self-definition. Self-definition is crucial to me & to most people I can relate to. The beauty here, for me, in Trevor's beginning is: "Egoism is the contrarian's philosophy, and so of course I begin this book with a broadside against it" - no cow (or water buffalo) is sacred - not even the one you ride in on, cowboy.… (plus d'informations)

This book showed me in many ways that I have become a very bitter woman. I don’t think I am an egoist because I am sort of filled with self-loathing and seldom know what the right thing to do might be, but I can still see the charm in this book of short essays and articles dealing with everything from egoism to the sexual lives of the disabled to selling used books.

Blake’s style is erudite yet irreverent and breezy, almost to distraction at times. And god this book could have been better edited. It actually fell outside of my bitchy upper limit of what I can endure in regards to errors in books, but it was charming and intelligent enough to make it still worth discussing. You will also encounter words like “siphonophore” (a sort of man-of-war water creature) and improving your vocabulary via arcane words is a good thing.

Let’s begin this discussion with Blake’s definition of egoism:

Egoism is the claim that the individual is the measure of all things. In ethics, in epistemology, in aesthetics, in society, the Individual is the best and only arbitrator. Egoism claims social convention, laws, other people, religion, language, time and all other forces outside of the Individual are an impediment to the liberty and existence of the Individual. Such impediments may be tolerated but they have no special standing to the Individual, who may elect to ignore or subvert or destroy them as He can. In egoism the State has no monopoly to take tax or wage war.

Yeah, yeah, I see the appeal but in this respect I’m a pedant and anti-intellectual to boot – if I can’t see it working in real life I can’t really discuss it in much depth. Philosophies that end up stating that one of their tenets is that the State cannot tax or wage war cause me to want to discuss whether or not Ariel the Mermaid should have exchanged her fins for legs and if the exchange was worth it. Both discussions occupy the same head space in my brain. Let’s discuss how many mermaids can dance on the head of a philosopher!

But even if I am philosophically stunted these days, there is much in this book that resonated with me.

“My Crowded Fist Theater Shouting Fire at the End of Your Nose” is a very short essay on the egoist approach to freedom of speech. It’s an important chapter in an increasingly baffling world where people who claim to be liberals insist that limiting speech they don’t like is, in fact, a democratic good. That calling a fat person a fat person, however pointless or nasty such a statement may be, should be a hate crime. That college law classes need to censor the word “rape” in legal courses so as to avoid triggering rape victims who presumably decided to attend law school knowing that crime exists and they would need to know about legal remedies afforded rape victims and the legal defenses offered to accused rapists. Again, Blake’s glib tone can seem distracting at first but he summarizes very well much in modern discourse that annoys the everloving fuck out of me.

You can read my entire, very long discussion here: http://www.oddthingsconsidered.com/confessions-of-a-failed-egoist-by-trevor-blak...… (plus d'informations)