Blood and sex, death and sex, cannibalism and sex, New Orleans and … sex.
Andrew Compton, escaped serial killer, lands in New Orleans, hot sweaty fuck me now New Orleans and meets Jay, another serial killer. They soon form a bloody bond, twined together in a death spiral of murder and lust.
19 year old Tran, a beautiful Vietnamese boy, still aching from his failed love affair with Luke, an infected writer, spins into Jay’s orbit and tempts him to break his golden rule: never kill a local boy.
Luke, thin and mad, infected and furious, wants to execute the breeders, to kill all those pushing for pairing and children.
Poppy Z Brite writes some truly fucked up prose.
Cannibals
If you ever wanted to read in gory detail about people eating dead bodies, this is the book for you. Poppy is detailed.
Poppy lingers.
“He sank his teeth into flesh that had gone the consistency of firm pudding. He ripped at the edges of the wound. Pulling off strips of skin and meat, swallowing them whole, smearing his face with his own saliva and what little juice remained in this chill tissue.”
Poppy embraces seeping liquids, our essential meatness and pulls us along from standard human behaviours (swallowing cum, revelling in vaginal juices, drinking from the lips of a lover) to further down the spectrum: swallowing blood, revelling in ichor, drinking from th
e throat of a lover.
It’s gross but a very well written gross.
The Mythical New Orleans
For anyone who has read Anne Rice, you’ll be instantly familiar with the New Orleans that perhaps only exists in fiction: hot, dark, luscious New Orleans. The French Quarter, the drugs, the beautiful waifs and doomed wanderers snuffing out like glowing embers floating from a midnight bonfire. The rich food, the good heroin, the wrought iron fences and clash of old money and new.
Poppy’s New Orleans is essentially Anne’s New Orleans. It seems impossible that it has a business district or playgrounds. Instead it has little restaurants where tourists flock, preyed on not by locals but by the excesses of the city itself. It is easy to imagine Anne and Poppy’s worlds overlapping: Lestat is stalking the streets just as Jay and Andrew are.
Her intense writing
Poppy has an amazing style of writing. It is both lurid but clean, over the top but balanced. She spends time on the details but moves her focus so we don’t tire of it. There is blood and death here but also love and relaxation.
“When morning light woke us, we rose aching and stinking, staggered into the house, and leaned on each other in the warm spray of the shower. Clean as babes we burrowed into bed and slept for the rest of the day, half unnerved and half comforted by the nearness of each other’s breathing body.”
Oh, and the fucking
This is a book of sex. A lot of sex.
Exquisite Corpse of another kind
An exquisite corpse is a surrealist technique where words and/or images are collectively assembled, resulting in a mixed piece of art. How does this relate to the book? I’m not really sure. The structure switches viewpoints as it moves from character to character but it is hardly a proper exquisite corpse: there are no multiple collaborators. I feel Poppy chose the name because she is into horror and the words have a beautiful pairing ring.
Jeffrey Dahmer
In 1991, one of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims escaped, heavily drugged, and encountered the police while wandering the streets naked. Despite the neighbours protesting, the police turned 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone over to Dahmer, who subsequently took him home and murdered him.
I won’t tell you who dies or who kills but this exact scene is written in the book and it is fucking chilling.
Why you should read it
Exquisite Corpse is beautifully written. As the story glides along we’re pulled into the simmering New Orleans, wading into it and leaping from one character to another, chapter by chapter. The serial killers are violent and maudlin, dark and terrifying, disgusting and wrong and then … we refresh with Tran, a cleansing of the palate before the next dish. The story is a meal, a dark and disturbed meal easily consumed.
How I got Exquisite Corpse
I have no idea so I’ll tell you something else instead: I once had a housemate who was really into Poppy Z Brite. She was also into internet dating. So she met this guy who had told her he was a sex addict and had a huge cock. She brought him home and he showed it to her. And apparently it was huge. They didn’t have sex though.
So think about that.
Happy reading,
Mat
tiny fish cleave the concrete path
Tags: death, Exquisite Corpse, gay, Horror, lust, murder, New Orleans, Poppy Z Brite, serial killer, sex
weird, sad, surreal, dark and fucking funny.
do yourself a favour and go to www.picturesforsadchildren.com RIGHT NOW and read the entire collection from the start. Then buy the book to show some love to john campbell.
i love this webcomic.
i love this book.
i love his little stick arm characters with their dots for eyes and strange problems.
my favourite comic from the collection:
http://picturesforsadchildren.com/index.php?comicID=107
lower-case weirdness
200 pages, softcover containing the first 200-ish pictures for sad children comics which runs sans punctuation. this collection has a lot of story comics – ongoing episodes completing an overall story arc mixed with single page stories. and man oh man are they funny. i’ve read through the online archive about six times i think and if i were a richer man i’d be buying some of john’s t-shirts as well.
beautiful minimalism
john campbell’s characters have so much character even though they have dots for eyes and no mouths. it’s amazing what excellent writing combined with the placement of two black dots can convey.
http://picturesforsadchildren.com/index.php?comicID=164
some of john campbell’s other cool stuff
his blog at livejournal called goodbye, foom (http://stereotypist.livejournal.com/)
his journal-diary style hourly comic http://www.hourlycomic.com/
my all-time favourite comic
it’s not in the collection but you can read it online.
http://picturesforsadchildren.com/index.php?comicID=257 (I would eat this comic if I could)
how i got pictures for sad children
ordered it online from john’s shop (signed edition). as soon as the paypal link went up i bought! if i had to choose between eating for two days or this book – the book wins.
happy (or sad) reading,
mat
–
the knife was fake as was the cut
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Twitter: www.twitter.com/mathewferguson
Tags: dark, funny, john campbell, online, pictures for sad children, sad, webcomic
This book is beautiful.
Forget gorgeous girls, celebrity portraits, amazing magazine covers and … the book is art.
Hardcover, gold endpapers with a subtle repeated Playboy bunny logo, excellent paper stock and a foldout section … the aroma of the pages is well worth buying for.
This is the aspect eBooks will never be able to replicate: the feel and smell of paper, the weight and heft, the physicality of the work.
But that’s not why we buy hardcover art books is it?
The Playmates, The Personalities, The Celebrities, The Lifestyle, The Art, The Covers
Playmates I understand. Beautiful girls getting their gear off. But what is the difference between a Personality and a Celebrity? Ah, that’s it. Personalities mean males who therefore don’t appear nude, partially clothed and we mostly only see their heads and shoulders. Celebrities means female actresses and models who do appear nude. So the difference between Celebrity and Playmate? A celebrity is famous for something other than being naked in Playboy. A playmate isn’t an actress or a singer … and doesn’t have any other skill of note other than beauty.
The text introducing the Personalities carries on about interviewing famous actors and musicians and sports figures until they exhaust their rehearsed answers and get down to truth – stripped of the aura and protection they bring in with them. Yeah … right. Hefner’s guidelines are repeated (remember these for any boring as hell copywriting jobs by the way): “Tell them what they’re going to read, tell them what they are reading while they are reading it, and sum it up for them. Tell them what they read. Help them along”. So Personalities (with that capital P) give honest interviews which are reported as given? I don’t think so. I suppose Playboy like to think so and want their audience to think so, too.
There are plenty of interesting black and white sections of Personalities, Celebrities or whatever you want to call them. Some dead, some disgraced, some still around and others looking ridiculously young and vital.
For some reason I always think of Christmas when I see this photo.
Playboy as ice-breaker
In the Celebrities section, the story of Playboy as the morality leader, the ice-breaker of foolish sexual suppression and hypocrisy starts to build up steam. They fancy themselves as cultural warriors rather than smut peddlers. They were the forefront of importing European freedoms into America rather than pushing sex to make a profit. I agree to a point but there is plenty they leave out – starting with the money to be made. Hugh didn’t start his magazine to be a cultural warrior – he started it for cash baby!
Oh, I forgot – plenty of naked girls in this bit. Actually, through all of it. Is that clear? This whole book is packed full of naked girls and a few male celebrities in black and white. 250 pages, full-colour chosen from ten million images.
The Lifestyle
Naah, forget it. You’re not buying this book for the words just like men don’t buy Playboy for the words either. The text is only slightly interesting and once you’ve read a few pages it’s pretty clear it is a biased retelling of the tale. Let’s move on.
There are only a limited number of faces in the world
If beauty is in symmetry and now we can record faces for posterity we will eventually see actors who remind us of actors and models of the deep past. Faces seem familiar … was she that actress? Wasn’t she in …? But no, they weren’t. They’re models, beauty queens, pin-ups …
As you look through the photographs you see these old actors and actresses long gone and can pair them up with their current incarnation. It’s quite strange to see someone who is almost George Clooney – but not.
The dimensions of women certainly have changed over the years as has the positions they photograph them in. The early photos are much closer to the dimensions of “real” women (although even the very first photographs are still of extraordinarily gorgeous girls). The later photos have proportions heading towards Barbie. Hips narrow, waistlines slim, breasts change shape and position. Girls stretch like gum on a hot day, extending at the waist. Facial features and teeth come into alignment. The expressions imply more and combine with the position. The sexual beat becomes stronger.
On the muff
In the fifties you can’t see anything … then comes the seventies and it appears! Muff for all. Move on a few more years and it vanishes again – not because it is demurely hidden like 1950s Marilyn but because it’s gone. Trimmed. Cut. Brazillianed.
It is perhaps this part of the book that is most interesting. Playboy is not a cultural warrior but a cultural record – perhaps the first photographic record of a changing society. The photographs change tone and quality as technology progresses but pay no mind to that – look at the content. There is a photo of two women on a sofa, close to kissing. Then we realise in the mirror above them we can see a man watching them. He is fully dressed – they are naked. It acknowledges voyeurism and sets the scene for a staged sexual experience. There are other photos of this type also – some appearing as perhaps frames from pornography. Instead of capturing the girl they now seek to capture the moment.
Will it get you jumped?
Hmm. I’m going to go with … no. It’s simply too big a book. Taking it off the shelf is like pulling down the encyclopedia. Smaller books like Eric Stanton’s work or smaller photographic journals are inviting. This is a tome – big and heavy and too much to be casually taken off the shelf.
How I got Playboy, 50 years: The Photographs
$95 from the Technical Book Shop in around 2003 I’m guessing. I think it was an impulse buy which just shows I was much richer and more impulsive back then. It’s a big heavy book so I suggest buying it from a shop rather than online – the postage will be a killer.
Happy reading,
Mat
–
Ponies were central to our mission
Follow me: http://twitter.com/mathewferguson
Tags: nude, photography, playboy
Is this the worst front cover of all time?
Yeah yeah so take the Road Not Taken and Stop by Woods on a Snowy Evening and I guess these two poems must be in every Robert Frost collection by law.
Imagine Frosty handing over a new collection of poems and the editor flipping through them looking for the next Road Not Taken. Is this poem the next Harry Potter of its time? Perhaps this one about roses. Goddammit I need more rhyming!
Index of First Lines
In the back of this collection is an alphabetical arrangement of first lines and it makes one very nice meta-poem. The first few lines:
A bird half wakened in a lunar noon
A boy, presuming on his intellect
A lantern-light from deeper in the barn
A scent of ripeness from over a wall
Some nice lines, which I suppose is one of the ways in which poetry is useful to the world. If not useful, perhaps beautiful. Like seeing a mixture of paint colours which the eye finds attractive but mean nothing, many of Frost’s poems are beautiful arrangements of words which also mean nothing.
This isn't in any of the poems ... I think.
If that’s too deep for you, don’t worry
Actually, you should worry. Normally I can assure you there is plenty of sex, drugs, burning down houses, mime-punching, catapults or anything to get past the boring stuff but not in this collection. It’s poetry. It could be talking about sex and loading a mime into a catapult but that’s just one interpretation of the line about the snow elf feeling sad.
How to enjoy the hell out of a poem
Poems work best if you don’t push too hard into overthinking. Let them be like a painting. Glance, look away. Think. Look back, notice more details. Think some more. Look at some other painting. Come back. Think some more. Repeat. Come back in six months, look again.
Sometimes I think poems are lyrics written by musicians who can’t play instruments. If only Frosty had had a guitar we might have had a number one hit: The Road Less Travelled.
Then Cobain could have covered it before he shot himself.
Will poetry get you jumped?
What the hell kinda images do you put with poems?
For guys, writing a few feeble lines is a risk. If you’re on the I was blue, she said boo, let’s go to the zoo level then stick with simply having a volume or two on your bookshelf. If your mad poetry skills are a little more refined then write something that is a bit hot, a bit funny, a bit cheeky and try it out. If it works then you can keep it for the next girl and the next girl and the next …
For girls … I’ve never seen a girl write poetry to a boy. I’ve never heard about it. I guess most girls don’t need to impress girls with some intellectual romantic side.
Where I got Robert Frost Selected Poems
Some second-hand shop for about twenty cents I suppose. You can find almost all his work online which is a good way to read poetry.
Happy reading,
Mat
–
we perfected our perception
Follow me: www.twitter.com/mathewferguson
Aww ... wubbsy.
Tags: poems, Poetry, Robert Frost
Four American college students (Eli, Ned, Timothy, Oliver) travel deep into the harsh desert of Arizona to undergo the trials presented by the Keepers of the Skulls. If they succeed then eternal life is theirs.
Of course, such a gift comes with a steep price: two of the four must be sacrificed … one by murder, one by suicide …
Ah … brilliant.
When Eli, a young Jewish scholar with a gift for languages, discovers an ancient manuscript (the Book of Skulls) hinting at the secret of everlasting life, he is soon enamoured with the idea of finding the immortals described within. He connects a strange compound in the Arizona desert with the cult and convinces three friends to set off on a road trip to find them.
Ned, the flaming homosexual, goes along because it is all a big joke. Timothy, the rich kid travels because he is interested in adventure – and what is more interesting than travelling with a Jew, a Queer and a Farm Boy? Oliver, the farm boy pulling himself up the cultural ladder travels because he wants to believe immortality can be his.
What starts as a bit of a joke, a harmless college student trip of drugs, fucking and hedonism on the way from New England to a desert compound in Arizona soon turns serious. The building adorned with skulls is actually there. The monks living within appear to be ageless. They will accept the four as a group willing to undergo the various trials on the path to immortality.
The manuscript was true.
Perhaps.
The monks within the compound give them a warning: they apply as a unit of four. Until the trial is complete, none may leave or the lives of the others will be forfeit.
Hey sure, that sounds ok. After all, it kind of a big joke anyway right?
The writing style
The text switches effortlessly between four first-person narratives, each chapter headed simply with the character’s name, picking up the thread of the story and pulling us along. The inner monologues spin out eloquent dissertations mixed with base thoughts about fucking and racial and social stereotypes.
Each boy represents on the surface one prime driving force. Eli is Jewish. Ned, a homosexual. Timothy, the rich kid. Oliver, the sporty jock farm boy. As we travel with them, this rather basic setup is transformed as we are privy to their inner thoughts.
Questions explored
Here is a familiar mythos: You can travel to a remote location to learn mysteries from monks carrying on the legacy of an ancient society. If you exercise in a certain way, eat in a certain way, meditate in a certain way you may enter into these hidden mysteries and be transformed.
This is why we have monks up in caves and other various holy men at a distance from society: distance is mystery. Lack of access is mystery. Quiet and non-explanation is mystery. All these mysteries must mean they have knowledge of a giant mystery!
The characters consider this point at various times: how do you know whether these monks are full of shit or not? To claim incredible knowledge is how religions seek to establish dominion and control over people unwilling to undertake the harsh rituals to attain this incredible knowledge.
The monks, fraters, reveal information throughout the long days and weeks of the trial. Hints of ancient societies and an eternal cult from the beginnings of time. Various mythologies are woven together and through each character we pick up pieces of the whole story.
If this sounds a little too deep …
Sophie Monk is not a monk
There is plenty of sex. PLENTY OF SEX. Hot girls out in the world and at the compound with the monks. Ok? So don’t worry.
A psychological mindfuck
Although this story appears on the surface to be about the pursuit of eternal life and the cost of such a pursuit, it is also a close examination of human behaviour within set rules. The monks have set the rules and Eli, Ned, Timothy and Oliver decide for a time to play within those rules. Sure, one of the rules is that one person must kill himself and another must be killed but that can be put out of mind for a while. In this way, the death of two of the boys is put into comparison with our own eventual deaths. If you were to think about it all the time then you’d be paralysed. If you don’t think about it at all then you risk death by not being aware of it.
If you read the book thinking about cult indoctrination then it is a simply terrifying piece of work. It starts off harmless – a few exercises, a bit of meditation – but then slowly slides away from playtime towards murder and death. The rituals soon become habits and then take on deeper meaning, although they deserve none. The people involved in the rituals believe they achieve something which then pulls them further along.
That’s a key word there: believe. Through the rituals and instruction, the four characters start to believe to various degrees that they really can attain eternal life and that the cost of two lives is correct. As their belief in the promise offered by the fraters increases so does the tension between them. One must be murdered. One must commit suicide. They are stuck in a compound and know that two of them will die.
On the front cover it proclaims itself as a thriller fantasy but I think that was only because Robert Silverberg is most well-known for writing science-fiction and fantasy and this book really is neither. Sure, the elements of eternal life are a little fantastical but the realness of the world makes it believable.
I’ve read the Book of Skulls multiple times over my life (I think the first time was when I was sixteen) and read it probably every two years or so now. It’s an amazing story with an underlying tension that doesn’t let up. The moment you discover that two must die so two may live … mmmm tension.
How I got The Book of Skulls
No idea. It has $4 written in pencil on the first page so some second-hand shop I suppose.
It’s still in print and there are copies floating around second-hand bookshops (perhaps for $4).
Happy reading,
Mat
–
our diabolical machines fell in love
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Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mathewferguson
Tags: coming of age, fantasy, Fiction, novel, road trip, thriller
Not what you think ...
The title is suggestive, yes? You’re probably thinking hot girls and sex stories that start “I always thought being a postman was boring until the day I delivered a package to University student dorm …”
Yeah, no.
Back when the old Hef with his absurdly young girlfriends was young Hugh Hefner and he was launching Playboy (first issue 1953) he wanted to create a publication that “would reflect a masculine (though not hairy-chested) zest for all of life” and would be “urban and urbane (not jaded or blasé), sophisticated (not effete), candidly frisky (not sniggering or risqué).”
Good fiction was apparently part of this sophisticated magazine.
You know what I think? Good fiction was part of the sophisticated magazine but it had nothing to do with appealing to a certain “urbane man” or anything like that. Hef knew that he couldn’t get away with a whole magazine of naked girls and so he had to put something next to them. It was a ruse, a trick to confuse his critics.
I can imagine it:
“He’s got naked girls in the magazines!”
“Yes, but he prints literature from the greatest writers of our time next to them. It’s art not porn.”
“Do we protest it or not? Argh – morality fighting with free-thinking art appreciating part of brain. Zzzzap. (brain short circuit).”
I don’t care if it was a trick because Playboy really did print the short fiction of some of the greatest writers of our time. Recognise any of these names?
Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), Richard Matheson (I am Legend), Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451), Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House), John Updike (Rabbit), Jack Kerouac (On the Road), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude), Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita), Norman Mailer (The Executioner’s Song), Joseph Heller (Catch 22).
The Playboy Book of Short Stories contains more authors than I’ve listed here. Alice K. Turner (the editor) selected one story from each year Playboy had been published and in the course of doing so has created the best collection of short stories I’ve ever read.
Selected brilliance
The trouble with talking about short stories, as I’ve written before, is that they are so short that talking about them is sometimes telling them. I won’t tell them here, I promise.
Richard Matheson: A Flourish of Strumpets
Published in 1956, this story blew my mind. How could someone back in 1956 think like this? The story is hot … very hot and wickedly funny. It is short and fast and if you think people back in the 1950s were conservative just forget it.
Some descriptions:
The second one came that night; a black-root blonde, slit-skirted and sweatered to within an inch of her breathing life.
*
The next night it was a perky brunette with a blouse front slashed to forever.
*
It was a raven-haired, limp-lidded vamp that night. On her outfit spangles moved and glittered at strategic points.
*
That night it was a redhead sheathed in a green knit dress that hugged all that was voluminous and there was much of that.
Gabriel Garcia Marques: The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World
Along with The Lottery by Shirley Jackson (not in this collection), The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World is one of the best short stories ever written. That it was originally written in Spanish and reads perfectly in English is a marvel in itself. This story made me want to learn Spanish simply so I could read the original version. If you do nothing else with your life, I urge you to hunt down this story – on the web, in the real world, read it standing up in a bookshop, wherever you can. Every line of it is a miracle. FIND IT AND READ IT NOW.
Vladimir Nabokov: The Dashing Fellow
A married man seduces a married woman – how dark and devious and shocking can it possibly be? Way dark. Way devious. Way way way shocking. No woman should ever read this story for they will never trust a man again. No man should read it because he will instantly feel bad and regretful for every sneaky thing he has ever done (and all men have done sneaky things, guaranteed). To read this story is to be filled with the desire to apologise for every male who has ever lived. It is a stunning piece of work, a jewel of perfection.
609 pages, no waiting
In any collection of short stories you’ll love some, like some and skip over or outright hate some. There are stories in this collection that I had a hard time reading but it wasn’t because the stories themselves were bad. The structure of writing, how stories are told, the phrasings and so on change over time and I am reader living in 2009 – some fifty years after a few of these stories were written. The mental fit I need to digest these stories can take a little adjustment. It’s like attempting to read Pride and Prejudice after reading a book written this year – it’s a bit of a jolt.
How I got The Playboy Book of Short Stories: Salvation Army store in Camberwell, Melbourne. I cannot believe someone gave this away because it is an amazing collection. I’ve looked around for it online but it is out of print and you can only pick it up on eBay or in other second-hand places. I suspect changing the title (removing that Playboy) would have kept this book in print (as in, I was embarrassed to be seen reading it and often hid the cover).
(Oh yeah, for those who were actually looking for Playboy stuff … enjoy the totally non-book related images.)
Happy reading,
Mat
–
i may be grey and featureless but i’ve got this glowing heart
Follow me
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Tags: Fiction, Short stories
If you don’t feel like reading my awesome and altogether brilliant book review of Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaimen then perhaps some videos reviews suit you better.
What is with the black and white? Urgh.
She does eventually get to the review
Tags: Comedy, Fiction, must buy, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, video book review
Anonymous book reviews by teenagers wearing masks! Gold baby! ha ha.
Want to buy it? Head on over to da Amazon.
Tags: Children's, video book review
Okay … this guy has that little bit of crazy believer thing about him. When I hear phrases like “a limitless being” I know I hearing from a loony tune. His selection of books confirms he is in the “if you just believe then maybe it’ll come true!” group.
Hey, who am I to judge?
Oh, that right. I’m a rationalist who doesn’t believe in BS like The Secret (well, at least not for the reasons like universal abundance).
Anyways, enjoy.
Have you bought into raw foods, abundance, spiritual whatever? Check out Loving Raw’s list of must-read books.
Tags: Health, Self development, video book review
We have immortals amongst us. Or at least, people who have a better chance of immortality that you or I because they are not made up of flesh and bone but rather contracts and ideas and legal documents maintained by an ever-changing team of real live humans.
Meet The Corporation.
The Corporation has only a sole reason for existence, woven into its very being: to relentlessly pursue without exception its own self-interest, regardless of the harmful consequence it might cause to others.
Joel Bakan’s central premise is that the legally defined mandate for corporations to pursue profit makes them psychopaths.
What kind of person would a corporation be?
The kind of person who acts without regard for safety. The kind of person who can murder and kill with minimal consequence. The kind of person who is immortal and does not have an actual body to be imprisoned.
Bakan’s case is compelling and as the evidence piles up so does the feeling of intense anger … and then depression, which I suppose is the acknowledgement of problems and our near total inability to do anything about the situation.
We go to Nike sweatshops and the cold calculations of how many pieces of clothing must be made per minute in buildings surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled by guards. We go to children’s fetes where corporate sponsorship has covered everything with logos. We see over and over again the crimes of corporations and just how little they have been punished.
This girl has no business here ...
The first chapter detailing the rise of the corporation has a kind of unstoppable inevitability to it. Humans working together started to make devices to help us in our work. One device was the use of legally binding documents to raise money for a certain purpose (like building a bridge). The bridge would be tolled until the money was paid back and this was written into law. The corporation building the bridge only existed for as long as the task did. Once completed, the corporation was dissolved.
In this chapter we see what has come before and we see the moment it all went bad: a court case where a corporation was declared a natural person who could behave like a real live human.
The Corporation is an excellent companion piece to Fight Club and covers the same territory: why is society arranged the way it is? If people created everything we have today, why can’t we remake it or uncreate it? Why do we tolerate companies who clearly engage in evil by propping up illegitimate governments or poisoning thousands upon thousands?
(Oh, and go to page 63 of the soft-cover version of The Corporation and you’ll see the cost-benefit analysis the narrator of Fight Club applies in his job as a recall expert for a car company. The car company in this case is General Motors who asked an engineer in 1973 to analyse fuel-fed fires in General Motors vehicles. The engineer multiplied the five hundred fuel-fed fire fatalities that occurred each year by $200,000 (the estimated legal damages for each potential fatality) and then divided this figure by 41 million (the number of GM vehicles on the road). He calculated that each fatality cost GM $2.40 per car. The cost of ensuring the fuel tanks did not explode in crashes was $8.69 per car. The company could save $6.19 per car if it allowed people to die in fires rather than alter the design of vehicles to avoid fires. So this is what they did.)
Nor does this one ...
No Death Penalty for the Immortal Corporation
If a person commits a terrible crime such as murder then they may be put to death themselves as punishment (depending on the country the crime is committed in). If not killed, a person can be physically locked up for thirty years and only released when they are old (or they die in jail).
Why is there no death penalty for corporations? Corporations often are fined for their crimes but while their profits from crime exceed the punishment it is a clear benefit to continue to commit crime. Make $300 million and happen to poison 10,000 people – get fined $4 million. That’s still $296 million in profit!
The overwhelming anger builds
The Corporation doesn’t stop with the obvious crimes like sweatshops. We take a grim tour of marketing, privatisation and the unchecked ability of corporations to manipulate governments, alter laws and generally overrule and warp democracy. If you’ve never read about lobbying this is a good book to blow your mind out with (also check out Don’t Eat this Book by Morgan Spurlock, the guy who ate McDonald’s every day for a month in SuperSize Me – he covers food lobbyists getting sugar and fat into schools and everything we eat. Did you know there is a salt lobby? I own this book and will be reviewing in the future.).
Are all Corporations Evil?
Consider the beef industry. Cows are raised for their meat which feeds millions of people around the world. This is good in terms of feeding people. People want meat, they deliver meat. All fine (unless you’re PETA or a vegetarian but we’ll get into that some other time) … until some problems are detected with some meat. The quality is a bit down … or there are high levels of antibiotics in the meat. Now, does the beef industry and the corporations therein work to reduce the levels of antibiotics or improve quality? These measures will cost money which will reduce profits. Or do they hire lobbyists who exert power on government to manipulate laws so they can continue to sell contaminated meat? Of course they do! But it doesn’t stop there. Some country in the European Union has high food safety standards and won’t import the beef? Use the lobbying power to influence the government who in turn attempt to make free-trade agreements and strike down the food-safety laws of the other country.
Some parent group is campaigning against you for pushing high-fat beef products on its children? Lobby lobby lobby!
Now, the people in the beef industry are probably not evil themselves. They care about people and health but when it comes to crucial decisions they will choose hard profits over soft and hard-to-define and measure human values. As these decisions accumulate, the behaviour of the corporation slides further toward evil and for as long as the beef industry is directed exclusively towards profit without consideration for people, it will behave in an evil manner.
I admit it is very hard to look at corporations that exist and not see them through the lens of negativity once you’ve read this book. The unchecked greed that we are surrounded with is hard to take.
The Cure for our Ills
Bakan finishes with a list of recommendations for change and as corporate scandals hit over and over you can’t help but pull this book out and see which of the changes would have prevented the latest mass destruction idiocy. The recommendations are systemic ones which all make sense … so very much so that you know they won’t be implemented until the near destruction of our entire economic system.
Accompanying the Corporation is a very excellent documentary covering the various chapters of the book. It is essential watching!
I’m not linking to a corporation to buy this from. Go to your local bookshop and ask them to order it!
Happy reading,
Mat
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does your boyfriend know you have entered into a dark compact?
Tags: business, ethics, Non-fiction
