What are you reading right now?

[Jeff]

Rereading some old stuff that had been too long in boxes.



I've lived with some of the stories since I first read the anthology 30 years ago. Especially Patricia Highsmith's The Snail Watcher, Theodore Sturgeon's The Other Celia and Edogawa Rampo's The Human Chair.

[monster]

I love my ebook reader!

[§ê¢rꆧ]

oh, that is Teh Sexy, monster. I want one!

I'm feeling super-lowbrow at the moment, reading this "Hearts in Atlantis" by Stephen King. It's just that I read so much challenging/serious stuff on my computer it's nice to space out with a book sometimes



It's actually not so bad, King's take on the 60's. There seems to be a lot more going on thematically than his earlier work.

[monster]

My reading list:



(But before I begin reading these, I have to finish up the killer sci-fi novel I'm currently reading: Hyperion. It's freakin' excellent.)

[Alaya]

Supernatural

Graham Handcock

[Pierre d'Achoppement]

http://www.skwishmi.com/interests/baf.html

[§ê¢rꆧ]

Stuff I've been reading, skimming, and just meaning to read for the last few months..

[IanEye]

[monster]

Ooh, nice!

There should be an RI reading club so people can swap books by mail. Like a pooled library. Mis libros son sus libros.

[lightningBugout]

Ian how's the dancehall book?

[IanEye]

Ian how's the dancehall book?

to be honest, I have mainly just flipped through and looked at the pictures so far.

But when I saw it in the store I bought it without hesitation, because Ms. Lesser's 'King Jammy' book is awesome...

I am reading the 'Process' book right now. There is something about that particular cult that I find really intriguing.

[Ziggin' and a Zaggin']

While scanning the history section at my local library branch yesterday, this title caught my attention:



Of course, I couldn't resist picking it up.

[Sweejak]

This is a snip from the book The Cultural Cold War by Frances Saunders.

The founding of the CIA marked a dramatic overhaul of the traditional paradigms of American politics. The terms under which the Agency was established institutionalized the concepts of 'the necessary lie' and 'plausible deniability' as legitimate peacetime strategies, and in the long run produced an invisible layer of government whose potential for abuse, domestically and abroad, was uninhabited by any sense of accountability.

This experience of limitless influence was exemplified by the eponymous hero of Norman Mailer's monumental Harlot's Ghost: 'We tap into everything', says Harlot. 'If good crops are an instrument of foreign policy, then we are obliged to know next year's weather. That same demand comes at us everywhere we look; finance, media, labour relations, economic production, the thematic consequences of T.V. Where is the end of all that we can be legitimately interested in?... Nobody knows how many pipelines we have in good places - how many Penatgon Poo-Bahs, commodores, congressmen, professors and assorted think tanks, soil erosions specialists, student leaders, diplomats, corporate lawyers, name it! They all give us input.

Owning airlines, radio stations, newspapers, insurance companies and real estate, the CIA's presence in world affairs grew so prodigiously over the decades that people began to suspect its presence behind every thicket. 'Like Dorothy Parker and the things she said, the CIA gets credit or blame both for what it does and for many things it has not even thought of doing,' one Agency man later complained. Disastrous operations like the Bay of Pigs did little to improve the CIA's public image. A negative stereotype emerged of a CIA peopled by ruthless, Jesuitical, 'ugly' Americans whose view of the world was distorted by a wilderness of mirrors.

Certainly, history continues to validate this version. The Truman Doctrine and the National Security Acts which it inspired sanctioned aggressiveness and intervention abroad. But the scale of its imperial buccaneering tends to obscure some less calamitous truths about the CIA. In the beginning, it's officers were animated by a sense of mission - 'to save western freedom from Communist darkness' - which one officer compared to 'the atmosphere of an order of Knights Templars'. The dominant early influence was the 'aristocracy' of the eastern seaboard Ivy League, a Bruderbund of Anglophile sophisticates who found powerful justification for their actions in the tradition of the Enlightenment and the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

In this the CIA took its character from its wartime predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), set up in 1941 in the wake of Pearl Harbor and disbanded in September 1945 by President Truman, who said at the time that he wanted nothing to do with a peacetime 'Gestapo'. This primitive fear reflected little of the reality of the OSS, which had acquired the nickname 'Oh So Social' on account of its clubby, collegiate atmosphere. Columnist Drew Pearson called it 'one of the fanciest groups of dilettante diplomats, Wall Street bankers, and amateur detectives ever seen in Washington'. All OSS-ers carried a pack with a carbine, a few grenades, some gold coins, and a death pill.' recalled Tom Braden, who worked closely with OSS chief William ;Wild Bill' Donovan (the nickname had been earned for his exploits against Pancho Villa). 'Donovan once left his death pill in a drawer at the Dorchester Hotel and he made David Bruce send a wire from France to get the maid there to send it out. He was quite a character, Bill Donovan, a legend in his own time. He once said to me, "Braden, if you get in a tight spot, take your knife and drive it straight through his balls".

Governed by legislation which prohibited little and countenanced virtually anything, OSS-ers found themselves roving wartime Europe like latterday proconsuls. The first OSS man to reach Bucharest after the German withdrawal in autumn 1944 became a regular guest at meeting of the Romanian cabinet, and boasted to his colleagues, 'Before they vote on anything, they ask me what I think... They pass all my laws unanimously. I never thought running a country was so easy.' But running a country was precisely what most OSS-ers were brought up to do. Recruiting from the heart of America's corporate, political, academic and cultural establishment, Donovan had assembled an elite corps which hailed from America's most powerful institutions and families. Members of the Mellon family held espionage posts in Madrid, London, Geneva, Paris. Paul Mellon worked for the Special Operations Executive in London. His sister, Ailsa (once known as the world's richest woman) was married to his commanding officer, chief of OSS London, David Bruce, son of US senator and millionaire in his own right. J.P. Morgan's sons both in OSS. The families Vanderbilt, DuPont, Archbold (Standard Oil), Ryan (Equitable Life Insurance), Weil (Macy's department store), Whitney,were all represented in the ranks of Donovan's secret army.

Other OSS recruits included travel guide publisher Eugene Fodor; New York journalist Marcello Girosi, who later became the producer of Italian and American films starring Sophia Loren; Ilia Tolstoy, émigré grandson of the famous novelist, who was a member of an OSS mission to Lhasa; and Julia McWilliams Child, later a celebrity chef,who maintained OSS intelligence file at Chungking. Raymond Guest, a polo-playing socialite and cousin of Winston Churchill, cut a colourful swathe through OSS operations in France and Scandinavia. Antoine de Saint-Exuperéy was a close friend and collaborator of Donavon's, as was Ernest Hemingway, whose son John was also in OSS.

Although one critic complained of the many personnel 'who seemed to be rah-rah youngsters to whom the OSS was perhaps an escape from routine military service and a sort of lark', there was also an assumption that each member of the higher echelons of Donovan's service 'risked his future status as a banker or trustee or highly placed politician in identifying himself with illegality and unorthodoxy'. With the disbanding of the OSS, many of those future bankers and trustees and politician returned to civilian life. Allen Dulles, Donovan's brilliant deputy who had taken charge of OSS operations in Europe, went back to his law practice in New York, where he became the centre of an informal cadre of campaigners for a permanent American intelligence service. Nicknamed the 'Park Avenue Cowboys', this group included Kermit 'Kim' Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore; Tracy Barnes (who helped Allen Dulles retrieve the famous Ciano diaries from Countess Ciano); Richard Helms and Frank Wisner, bringing gossip from Army intelligence in occupied Germany; and Royall Tyler, soon to become head of the Paris office of the World Bank.

Far from having risked their 'future status', their period in OSS enhanced their reputations and offered another network to combine with the old school tie that had brought them together in the first place. This, and their initiation into illegality and unorthodoxy, was to provide a rich resource for the CIA. It was this historic elite, the Ivy-Leaguers who cast their influence over America's boardroom, academic institution, major newspapers and media, law firms and government, who now stepped forward to fill the ranks of the fledgling Agency. Many of them hailed from a concentration in Washington of a hundred or so wealthy families, known as the 'cave dwellers', who stood for the preservation of the Episcopalian and Presbyterian values that had guided their ancestors. Schooled in the principals of a robust intellect, athletic prowess, politesse noblige, and solid Christian ethics, they took their example from men like the Reverend Endicott Peabody, whose Groton School, run along the lines of Eton, Harrow and Winchester, was the Ama Mater of so many national leaders. Trained in believing in democracy but wary of unchecked egalitarianism. Reversing Willy Brandt's celebrated declaration, "We are the elected people, not the elect,' this was the elect who had not been elected.

... Through think-tanks to foundations, directorates to membership of gentleman's clubs, these mandarins were interlocked by their own superiority. Their job it was to establish and then justify the post-war pax americana.

... In a speech to the National War College in December 1947, it was [George] Kennan who introduced the concept of 'the necessary lie' as a vital constituent of American post-war diplomacy. The Communists, he said, had won a 'strong position in Europe, so immensely superior to our own... through unabashed and skillful use of lies. They have fought us with unreality, with irrationalism. Can we combat this unreality successfully with rationalism, with truth, with honest, well-meant economic assistance? he asked. No, America needed to embrace a new era of covert warfare to advance her democratic objectives against Soviet deceit.

On 19 December 1947, Kennan's political philosophy acquired legal authority in a directive issued by Truman's National Security Council, NSC-4. A top-secret appendix to this directive, NSC-4A, instructed the Director of Central Intelligence to undertake 'covert psychological activities' in support of American anti-Communist policies. Startlingly opaque about what procedures should be followed for coordinating or approving such activities, this appendix was the first formal post-war authorization for clandestine operations. Superseded in June 1948 by a new - and more explicit - directive drafted by George Kennan, NSC-10/2, these were the documents which piloted American intelligence in to the choppy waters of secret political warfare for decades to come.

[Sweejak]

A Spy In Time
A history in two acts by
M I C H A E L D O N O V A N
http://www.midcoast.com/~michael1/aspyintime.htm

[semper occultus]

Another take on The Process Church of the Final Judgment
Sunday, May 31st, 2009

Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment by Timothy Wyllie (Feral House $24.99)


provides a curious history of one of the minor cults that flourished on the fringes of the counterculture. That said, The Process has remained very visible to this day, thanks in part to claims it was the hidden ‘evil’ force behind both the Tate-LaBianca and the Son of Sam slayings. Wyllie insists that these claims, as well as salacious stories about Process founder Mary Ann MacLean having been married to American boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson and playing a role in the Profumo Affair, are false. All the available evidence would suggest Wyllie is correct on these matters, and while this adds to the credibility of his tale, it will probably do little for the sales of his book.

The book is a personal account of Wyllie’s time with The Process and the story he tells is more convincing than the portraits of the group found in books such as The Ultimate Evil by Maury Terry and the first edition of The Family by Ed Saunders, but it is also far more banal. Therefore, if you want to read sensationalist and ultimately fictionalised accounts of Satanic killing sprees, you’ll have to look elsewhere. There is plenty of that online, and a web search will also locate many Process writings and graphics.

The history of The Process is essentially this: in 1963 two former Scientologists Mary Ann MacLean and Robert de Grimston established a therapy business in Wigmore Street, London. Mary Ann MacLean was a former prostitute who grew up in poverty in Glasgow, while Robert de Grimston was from an upper class family and had served as an officer in the British army before becoming an architecture student and then dropping out three years into these studies. Wyllie first met de Grimston in 1959 when they both enrolled on the architectural course at Regent Street Polytechnic (renamed Polytechnic of Central London in 1970, with a further name change to University of Westminster in 1992). In 1963 McLean and de Grimston began using Wyllie as a guinea pig to test and develop techniques they’d learnt as Scientologists, adapting them to their own purposes.

Wyllie’s circle of student friends provided the initial recruits to what was then called Compulsions Analysis. In Wyllie’s account, those involved with MacLean and de Grimson recognised a sense of spirituality in their activities and the name of the group was therefore changed to The Process in 1965. My own impression is there was nothing spiritual about MacLean and essentially she conned the group into becoming her disciples and funding the luxury life-style she and de Grimston craved. Even from Wyllie’s rather misty-eyed account, it is apparent MacLean was a hard-bitten hustler who’d mastered the con game when she was working as a high class London hooker throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s.

While Process acolytes panhandled for money and lived in abject poverty, the group rented properties it could barely afford in an attempt to trick the outside world into believing they possessed wealth and power. De Grimston and MacLean were the only Process members to live in style. While de Grimston provided the theology, MacLean was the real power running this cynical money-grabbing hierarchy. Over the years the group expanded and at various times had chapters in Rome, Paris, New Orleans, San Francisco, Munich, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, New York, Boston, Chicago, Toronto and Miami. Chapters were sometimes moved from one city to another, and the membership never seems to have stretched beyond the very low hundreds, although The Process claimed to have tens of thousands of members.

Process theology was based on the unification of opposites, and a reading of the Bible that took Christ’s injunction to ‘love thy enemy’ to mean love Satan. Much of this gnostic garbage was confected in group sessions and then written up by de Grimston, and even Wyllie admits it didn’t read well on the printed page. After an Idris Shah book fell on his head in a Notting Hill bookshop, Wyllie convinced himself that de Grimston and MacLean were disguised Sufi masters, and like other members of the cult was also prone to viewing the latter as a human incarnation of the Goddess! The original core of The Process consisted chiefly of over-privileged and privately educated brats, and it seems to me that much remains to be written about how an upper-class upbringing renders individuals peculiarly susceptible to the brainwashing techniques of religious cults.

The Process fell apart when de Grimston and MacLean ended their marital relationship in 1974. De Grimston attempted to revitalise The Process without success. MacLean led the disciples who stuck with her into The Foundation, which adopted increasingly conventional Christian doctrines before reinventing itself as a secular animal charity called Best Friends. MacLean died in 2005, de Grimston is still alive.

Wyllie’s account of his 15 years with The Process is supplemented by the stories of various other members. The most shocking thing to come out of this is the criminal neglect of children whose parents belonged to the cult. The overall impression I’m left with is that life in The Process was very dull, and you had to be deluded to join it in the first place. The Process memoirs gathered together here also show that those conned by guru-figures are very slow to give up their illusions, and will often attempt to off-set the fact they were ripped-off with the desultory claim they enjoyed some kind of spiritual adventure in ‘the process’.

In addition to these memoirs, this book also contains a selection of unimpressive texts by de Grimston, and a very silly essay by Genesis P. Orridge about how he modelled Thee Temple Ov Psychic Youth on The Process. The image section in this tome is rather more interesting, since it illustrates the strong design sense and corporate-style marketing of The Process as a self-consciously totalitarian cult. From Wyllie’s account of the group it is clear why The Process chose to project itself as a totalitarian ‘elite’:

“Mary Ann (cult leader Mary Ann MacLean) never made any apologies, for instance, about having considerable sympathy and respect for the Nazi regime. Doubtless it suited her authoritarian personality. A story I have heard her relate more than once is of her as a small girl of nine or ten, who found herself leaving her physical body and being transported into Hitler’s bunker during World War II. There she would slip around the table in her astral form whispering into the generals’ ears. Whether she ever claimed to observe der Fuehrer’s legendary rages, I don’t recall, but if she had I can only imagine she would have egged him on in his carpet-biting frenzies.” (Page 56).

Elsewhere Wyllie recalls:

“Michael and I stopped in to visit George Lincoln Rockwell, the ‘American Nazi’, out of allegiance to Mary Ann’s interest in extreme ideologies…. Rockwell sat in the only armchair… He looked younger than I thought he was going to be, with a buzz-cut and a surprisingly open, pleasant, face, marred now by a fixed scowl that didn’t leave him while we were there… He had a military bearing but was clearly a frightened man… Later I found out that Lincoln Rockwell was killed in August of 1967 by a disgruntled ex-member of his party and only days after our visit. I should add that Michael is the scion of a wealthy Jewish family and I can only imagine that Mary Ann instructed him to visit Rockwell as a way of testing his mettle…” (Pages 80-81).

Elsewhere in his narrative Wyllie tells tales of counterculture figures like Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman and Simon Vinkenoog, assisting The Process. He also writes about a few of the celebrities the group attempted to shake down for donations; they range from Miles Davis to Salvador Dali. Sadly, he has nothing to say about Funkadelic frontman George Clinton, who okayed the reproduction of Process material on the art work to a couple of his albums. Mostly this is a book about the internal dynamics of The Process and as such it makes for curious but nonetheless extremely depressing reading; it appears that most of the ‘former’ cult members contributing to it are still deluded about their experiences years after the group broke up.

http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/?tag=maury-terry