From November 17, 2002 New York TImes Sunday Magazine:

By HERBERT MUSCHAMP

Why don’t you . . . give all your ideas away to other people, so that you’ll fill up again with new ones? Diana Vreeland, the great fashion editor, understood that this is how creative minds work. It’s fatal to be a hoarder. When you have an idea, get it out there. Pretend you’re Josephine Baker, tossing fruit into the audience. Hit someone on the head with a pineapple. Circulate the energy. Distribute the wealth. Rinse your child’s hair with dead Champagne.

    This is a gnostic way of thinking. Now relax. It’s Sunday. You won’t mind a bit of Gnosticism with your Styles. Glamour and knowledge both share the same root in gnosis (secret learning), so why shouldn’t Gnosticism be fashion’s true faith?

    The gnostics were a religious order, circa the year 0, but in modern times it makes better sense to view them as a personality type. Vreeland was one of them.

    “If you do not bring bring forth what is within you,” the gnostics believed, “what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” And I suspect Vreeland truly believed that if she had an idea and didn’t get it out there, it would kill her. Killer-diller. If she couldn’t come out with observations like “pink is the navy blue of India,” she would die.

    Thanks in part to those observations, she hasn’t. Or, rather, the point of view defined by Vreeland’s insights remains indispensable. It is the viewpoint of fearlessness, the stance of “Why not?” And if Vreeland’s legend looms larger today than it did during her lifetime, that may be because this particular stance has become harder to sustain.

    Vreeland is the subject of a new biography by Eleanor Dwight, and it is the first to explore the personality behind the histrionic public persona. The book rides a wave of printed material by and about Vreeland that did not begin until years after her retirement from Vogue. “Allure,” a coffee-table book, written with Christopher Hemphill, of black and white photographs punctuated ith Vreeland’s taped recollections of them, was published in 1980 and has been reissued this year.

    The first book was followed in 1984 by the editor’s memoir, “DV.” Two additional volumes of Vreeland’s musings have appeared in the last year: “Why Don’t You?” a collection of her columns for Harper’s Bazaar, and “Vreeland Memos,” an issue of the fashion periodical Visionaire.

       Why don’t you . . . buy Dwight’s biography and read it, so that I don’t
have to try your patience with one of those super-compressed summaries
that nobody reads anyhow? “Elegance is refusal,” Vreeland once pronounced.
I don’t know whether this is a gnostic idea precisely. But it appears to
be an essential antidote to excessive gnostic fecundity. If what you have
to bring forth is tedious, just leave it alone.

    Vogue
in the 1960’s was as much the creature of its time as it was the creation
of an editor. At the beginning of the decade, fashion magazines reflected
a relatively rarefied realm of elegance, style and social poise. Ten years
later, they had become a mass medium. Vreeland’s Vogue occupied the pivotal
place in this transformation. Herself a latter-day Edwardian Woman of Style,
she hit her manic professional stride in the postwar years, when people
were just beginning to grasp the full extent of changes brought about by
mass communications.

    These
circumstances are unrepeatable. That’s why it is pointless to complain
that no magazine quite like Vreeland’s exists today. No world like hers
exists today. When she started out, celebrity was tantamount to notoriety.
Now, the news media are glamorous in their own right. Today, everybody
knows who Diana Vreeland was. In her own time, she communicated to audiences
who never gave much thought to who an editor was.

    I know,
because I was part of it. When I started reading Vogue in my early teenage
years, I had little interest in fashion and knew even less about it. Rather,
like The New Yorker, and Ada Louise Huxtable’s architecture columns, Vogue
represented what I recognized as an urban point of view. I found my suburban
life confining. It was a relief to project myself into the escapist fantasies
offered by those texts. I wouldn’t know of the existence of Diana Vreeland
or William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, until many years later.
Now the situation has changed. We’re all regaled by the antics of editors
without magazines.

    Vreeland,
I later read in a biography of Alexander Lieberman by Calvin Tomkins and
Dodie Kazanjian, once described Vogue as “the myth of the next reality.”
The myth was accurate in my case. The next reality was relatively exempt
from the pleasures of cold war normalcy.

    People
were onto something when they called Vreeland the high priestess of fashion.
She was a gnostic priestess. In the gnostic system, there was an outer
mystery for the many and an inner mystery for the few. So it was with Vreeland’s
Vogue. Many readers may have regarded it as the leading fashion magazine.
Others, too few to constitute a mass readership, understood that glamour
has only incidentally to do with clothes. It has mainly to do with personality
structure, with the places we choose to dwell or avoid within the architecture
of our subconscious fantasies.

    Now,
the point of Gnosticism is to be reborn to the divine within oneself. If
“the divine” is not acceptable, you can substitute the truth within oneself.
Or, as the psychotherapist D. W. Winnicott called it, the authentic self.
But Vreeland probably would be comfortable with the divine.

    Why don’t
you bring out that divine thing that is within you? If you don’t, that
divine thing will slay you.

    In any
case, you have to kill off the inauthentic, or at least not let it take
over the executive committee of the self. Vreeland was vigilant in this
regard. Of course, she was also a fabulist. She made up or grossly exaggerated
her accounts of her past and the world around her. But if she had stuck
to the facts, she would have falsified her self. She had “the wound” of
the creative artist: an unshakeable disbelief in her potential to be loved,
coupled with an iron determination to conceal this disbelief from herself.
From this stemmed her power as an architect of other people’s desires.

    Ms. Dwight’s
biography is, among many other marvels, a brilliant study in the relationship
between love and work. The book is a treatise of changing mores, too, of
course, but at heart it is a report from the front lines in the struggle
to craft new identities for men and women in the modern world of work.
The evidence suggests that Vreeland was not a feminist. She was, however,
a strong woman and a breadwinner who reformed the decorous world of fashion
magazines within her muscular grip.

    Vreeland’s
is the flip side of the “Lady in the Dark” story. This extraordinary woman
blossomed when circumstances forced her to create a world outside her marriage
to a man of limited emotional and financial resources. Reed Vreeland looked
the part of leisured money. The leisure part was real. He was a Ralph Lauren
ad campaign before a Ralph Lauren was even dreamed of, but evidently possessed
neither the earning power nor the work ethic of an average male model.
A woman who considered herself unattractive might see him as a catch.

    But what
a lot of hard work it must have taken for Vreeland to believe that he was
worthy of her devotion! The fantasies it must have taken to fill up the
vacuum between herself and a human version of the spotted-elk-hide trunks
she advised her readers at Harper’s Bazaar to strap on the backs of their
touring cars! She was herself the driver. And although it is pleasing in
life to travel with attractive luggage, greater rewards await those who
travel light. A higher quality of attention will be paid to the active
partner in the wider world.

    “I know
what they’re going to wear before they wear it, eat before they eat it,
say before they say it, think before they think it, and go before they
go there!” This astonishing outburst, once overheard by Richard Avedon,
could be taken as evidence of a fashion dictator’s disrespect for her readers.
But perhaps the woman was simply reassuring herself that she could trust
her instincts.

    What
else did she have to go on? It’s not as if she was dealing with anything
rational. In “DV,” Vreeland recounts the possibly apocryphal story of assigning
a photographer to shoot a picture against a green background. The photographer
strikes out after three attempts. ” `I asked for billiard table green!’
I am supposed to have said. `But this is a billiard table, Mrs. Vreeland,’
the photographer said. `My dear,’ I apparently said, `I meant the idea
of billiard table green, not a billiard table.’ “

    In other
words it did not pay to follow this dictator literally. Far better to respond
with instincts of one’s own. This, I think, was the core clause in Vreeland’s
contract with her readers. We expected her to know where we were going
before we went there. We were traveling to places deeper within ourselves.

From the Oct. 6, 2002 LATimes Magazine:

Metropolis / Chat Room

Antiquity’s Gnostic Church Is Enjoying a Renaissance

By AL RIDENOUR

Near the nexus of Hillhurst Avenue and Sunset and Hollywood boulevards, Bishop Stephan Hoeller has presided since 1977 at Ecclesia Gnostica, the tiny, incense-infused chapel of the Gnostic Society.

Gnosticism, an ancient form of Christianity that flourished in the 1st to 3rd centuries, rejects doctrines such as original sin and emphasizes transcendence through inward, intuitive knowledge (“gnosis”) of the divine spark in each individual. Condemned as heresy by early Roman Catholic authorities,
gnosticism has drawn renewed interest in recent decades thanks in part to the writings of Carl Jung and religious scholar Elaine Pagels.

Hoeller, 70, a Hungarian emigre whose parish extends to Portland and Salt Lake City, recently published “Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing” (Quest Books).

Where exactly do mainstream Christians and Gnostics part ways?

Where it comes to what is considered salvific, or what saves. We don’t proselytize. There’s no belief that coming to us you’ll be immediately saved and by not coming to us that you’ll be lost. Gnosticism has often been described as “salvation through knowledge,” but Gnosis doesn’t mean knowledge of particular
data. Rather, it’s an inner “knowingness,” a change of consciousness. Salvation through the death and suffering of Jesus is not part of our thought.

What is the place of Jesus in Gnostic tradition?

The Gnostics have held that there are always messengers of light who come from the inner worlds as archetypes of transformation, though many feel that Jesus was perhaps the latest and the greatest of these. However, you’ll have no difficulty finding experiences resembling gnosis within other religious
contexts–the samadhi of the yogis, the nirvana of the Buddhists, satori within Zen Buddhism.

How would you explain the revived interest in gnostic thought?

I believe there are two reasons for this. The first is the so-called Nag Hammadi Library [1,500-year-old papyrus codices found in Egypt in 1945], the largest body of original Gnostic literature ever discovered. It was translated into English in the mid ’70s, giving us a more accurate look than we’d had through
hostile secondhand sources. This allowed people to see that gnosticism is really far less bizarre and marginal than has been assumed. The second issue is a certain harmony between this material and modern and postmodern thinking. Some of these convergences occur within the depth psychology of Carl Jung. I also believe we are beginning to find echoes of Gnostic philosophy within the study
of chaos theory or the approach of deconstructive thinkers.

Is Los Angeles “Gnostic-friendly”?

When I came from Hungary, I had a kind of poetic intuition that the city was re-embodiment of the cultural and spiritual diversity of ancient Alexandria where the Gnostics, the Neo-Platonists and all these old boys were. America enjoys exceptional religious freedom, particularly among those who have migrated to the West Coast and no longer feel compelled to simply follow the faith of their parents.

Gnosticism was mentioned in some discussions of the 1997 Heaven’s Gate cultist suicides in Rancho Santa Fe. Can you comment on that?

People in the press and even some scholars jumped to the unjustified conclusion that because Gnostics feel earthly life is a relatively lowly condition, they are therefore disposed toward religiously motivated suicide. But nowhere in our tradition do we find any indication of this. We believe in overcoming the
darkness, not plunging into it.

How does a Gnostic transcend worldly entanglements?

It’s sort of what our Buddhist friend Alan Watts called “the shifting of the psychological point of gravity.”
Gnostics aren’t exhorted to embrace poverty or chastity or vegetarianism. We look inward, but don’t deny the outer world. We can smell the flowers–maybe even pick a few along the way. But we must keep walking.

Where does Gnosticism fall in with the New Age movement?

New Agers are very much “in denial” of the dark side, and the Gnostics not at all. We feel that we must
recognize both dark and light.

Have you personally ever been called a heretic?

Not since my youth. When I’d have the occasional dispute with Catholic clergy and fellow students, I’d
hear, “Ah, there goes Hoeller the heretic.” Even then it was rather jocular.

http://www.locusmag.com/2002/Reviews/VanderMeer11.html

Edward Whittemore’s JERUSALEM QUARTET

by Jeff VanderMeer

Three writers, above all others, have served as touchstones for my own fiction. All three display
stylistic mastery, contain hidden depths, and reward repeated re-reading. Of the three, Vladimir Nabokov achieved fame during his lifetime, Angela Carter achieved fame after her death, and the third, Edward Whittemore (1933-1995), remains largely unknown.

Until this month, Whittemore was out of print as well, Old Earth finally bringing all five of his books back from the dead: Quin’s Shanghai Circus (1974)1 and the Jerusalem Quartet, Sinai Tapestry (1977), Jerusalem Poker (1978), Nile Shadows (1983), and Jericho Mosaic (1987). The Old Earth editions, handsome and colorful, come complete with introductions from writers such as John Nichols and forewords and afterwords from Whittemore’s agent and his editors.2

The timing of Whittemore’s resurrection could not be more fortuitous, although I cannot
ignore a mingled sadness and irritation that for almost 20 years such remarkable books were unavailable to readers.

The timing is fortuitous because this year, for the first time ever, I have begun to feel that the idea of cross-genre fiction3 ˜ unclassifiable and yet with a clearly fabulist, nonrealistic bent ˜ has become a concrete entity, expressed in physical form in a number of truly wonderful works.4 Between 2000 and the present, we have witnessed the emergence of a number of great writers. In addition, writers who have always been producing this kind of work ˜ including Rikki Ducornet (perhaps the finest fantasist currently alive on the planet) ˜ have written some of their best fiction yet. Factor in the appearance this year of not one, not two, but four anthologies or magazine issues devoted to cross-genre short fiction ˜ Conjunctions 39, my own (co-edited) Leviathan 3, Angel Body (BBR, UK), and Polyphony 1; almost 1,800 pages of cross-pollination ˜ and a sea change seems in the air.

However, Whittemore, among others, got there a generation or two earlier5 ˜ and he remains one of
the best because his ambition was so much greater than that of most writers. With his Jerusalem Quartet, Whittemore set out to do nothing less than map a secret history of the world, focusing on the Middle East, where a welter of religions converge, sometimes with tragic results. The novels are loosely related, in that several memorable protagonists appear in all four, slipping in and out of the narrative as walk-on, secondary, and main characters. Inasmuch as The Jerusalem Quartet tells one story, it follows
the exploits of a man named Stern Strongbow, who hopes to create peace in the Middle East. It also covers the years 1900 through 1975, weaving together different times and places for a thematic resonance that far exceeds anything Thomas Pynchon accomplished in his excellent book V.6

 In Jerusalem Poker, for example, Whittemore launches his novel with a typically audacious image,
one of the great prologues in literature. The novel opens atop the Great Pyramid, where the sun rises on a summer day in 1914. A man named Cairo Martyr, at the time a male prostitute, has just helped a jaded, obese pair of Egyptian aristocrats achieve orgasm, when a triplane flies overhead:

Down, [Cairo] yelled. Down… But the delirious baron and baroness heard neither him nor the airplane. The great red ball on the horizon had hypnotized them with the heat it sent rushing through their aging bodies. Gaily the plane dipped its wings in salute to the most impressive monument ever reared by man, then gracefully rolled away and sped on south… Cairo Martyr got to his feet, not believing what he saw. The nearly invisible man and woman still stood on the summit with their arms outstretched, but now they were headless, cleanly decapitated by the slashing lowest wing of the triplane. The hulking bodies lingered a few seconds longer, then slowly toppled over and disappeared down the far side of the pyramid.

This image is followed by an even more audacious idea. On the last day of December 1921, the Moslem
Cairo Martyr, the Christian O’Sullivan Beare, and the Jew Munk Szondi, who each control part of Jerusalem, begin a game of poker, with the holy city in the kitty. The poker game lasts 12 years and as it unfolds Whittemore tells the stories of all three players, almost incidentally telling the history of the Levant as well. The intertwined tapestry formed by the present interacting with the past is stunning in its complexity, but also in its ability to entertain us. To call Jerusalem Poker One Hundred Years of Solitude
with spies would be entirely accurate. Nor can I overstate the way in which absurdity and the serious commingle in this novel. And, although all three main characters ˜ and the possibly 3,000-year-old owner of the antiquities shop in which the poker game takes place ˜ seem larger-than-life when the novel opens, Whittemore shows us that, in fact, they have lived extraordinary lives. They have earned their colorful eccentricities, often quite poignantly.

Whittemore also earned his extraordinary life. While the dual tragedy of Whittemore’s life was the relative brevity of that life and the short half-life of his books on bookstore shelves, many of us would trade ours for his, I think. After attending Yale University, Whittemore served as a Marine officer in Japan and “spent
10 years as a CIA operative in the Far East, Europe, and the Middle East,” as the biography on the back of the Old Earth editions reads. “Among his other occupations, he managed a newspaper in Greece, was employed by a shoe company in Italy, and worked in New York City’s narcotics control office during the Lindsay administration.” One is tempted to ask if Whittemore worked for the CIA while managing a newspaper in Greece and employed at a shoe company in Italy.

Regardless, Whittemore’s CIA work, his first-hand experience in the Middle East, clearly informs the novels. It is what distinguishes them in many ways from other espionage fictions: a level of verisimilitude, the sense of someone who has peered beneath the surface leading you through the canyons and up the mountains of history.7

The character Stern Strongbow, a visionary and sometimes spy, who inhabits all of the Jerusalem Quartet in some guise, displays complexities to his character that only someone with Whittemore’s background could have rendered properly. Stern, the son of Plantagenet Strongbow, an English adventurer, hopes to one day create a homeland shared in peace by Muslims, Jews, and Christians. That he never accomplishes this goal, that he descends into the irony of running guns between different groups, always still hoping for the peace that becomes more distant with each new mission, is one of the book’s saddest statements about the Middle East.

The discovery of “the oldest Bible in the world” that “denies every religious truth ever held by anyone” in the first book of the Quartet, Sinai Tapestry, is yet another of Whittemore’s statements. When I say “statement,” I don’t mean in any didactic sense ˜ Whittemore’s books are anything but didactic. Instead, he gets his point across with such extended absurdities as a bible created by a madman or through the actions of characters whose ideals become diluted through time, experience, and disappointment.

In this sense, Sinai Tapestry could be termed the most hopeful of the novels, the most like an eccentric adventure or journey, at least at the beginning. It follows the exploits of Plantogenet Strongbow, “an English-born adventurer who becomes a Muslim holy man and finally, on the eve of World War I, the secret ruler of the Ottoman Empire.” In this pre-World War I milieu, Whittemore seems to say that there exists more hope of an individual’s actions leading to substantial results. That Strongbow’s son Stern may fail in his goals does not seem assured. There is also the wonderful sense of humor Whittemore brings to
Sinai Tapestry (as well as Jerusalem Poker and, to a lesser extent, the last two novels of the Quartet). Among Strongbow’s exploits is his documentation, in 23 volumes, of Levantine sex:

Strongbow’s study was the most exhaustive sexual exploration ever made. Without hesitations or allusions, with nothing in fact to calm the reader, he thoughtfully examined every sexual act that had ever taken place from Timbuktu to the Hindu Kush, from the slums of Damascus to the palaces of Baghdad, and in all the shifting Bedouin encampments along the way?All claims were substantiated at once. The evidence throughout was balanced in the Victorian manner. Yet the facts were still implacable, the sense and nonsense inescapable, the conclusions terminal.

However, despite these touches, Sinai Tapestry ends with the brutal intrusion of history. Some scenes,
such as Whittemore’s portrayal of the bloody genocide at Smyrna in 1922, shock as much as anything in literature.

 If the final two volumes of the Quartet are more subdued and more thoughtful, then it may be due to the change in the time of the setting. Nile Shadows takes place mostly in 1942, in an Egypt threatened by Rommel, while Jericho Mosaic details the life and exploits of a deep cover agent between 1959 and the late 1970s. As the novels progress toward the present, they begin to take on more “reality” and shake off the veneer, the exotic gloss, of the earlier novels. In a sense, this makes them of less interest to fantasy readers, but I find it unlikely that anyone who has read Sinai Tapestry and Jerusalem Poker will be able to resist them.8 Further, the changes in Whittemore’s work mean that in an odd way the books encompass the entire literary spectrum, from the fantastical to the realistic, while retaining their intra-book cohesion.

Nile Shadows may be the most dialogue-rich of Whittemore’s novels, but it also has the most explosive
opening pages. After a grenade is lobbed into a Cairo bar, British agents must investigate the identity and purpose of the only man killed by the explosion. The depiction of the initial intelligence gathering, and the
event itself, is breathless and has the effect of a 360-degree camera sweep in a movie, with shifting points of view. As Publishers Weekly noted, Nile Shadows is “one of the most complex and ambitious espionage stories ever written?[that] plunges the reader into a hall-of-mirrors world.”

 In Jericho Mosaic, the world-spanning perspective becomes reduced in scope to that of a double agent active during the many Arab-Jewish conflicts. Whittemore’s CIA experience is even more palpable in this book as we are initiated into the rituals and the dangers of such work. Others have said it before, but there’s no harm in repetition: This may be the most haunting portrait of a spy in the history of literature. Every nuance, every description feels ultra-real. Of all the books, Jericho Mosaic, despite the discussions of three mystical men in a Jericho garden, has the least magic realism element. I have the sense, re-reading the Quartet, that the books were a kind of progression from the deep waters of a well, up into the light, with Jericho Mosaic the most personal book, from Whittemore’s perspective.9 That he was finished
writing about the Middle East is not certain, but he planned to set his next, unpublished novel in the United States.10

* * *

I remember that after I read Jerusalem Poker, I used to imagine Edward Whittemore sitting in a café in the holy city, working on his next novel. It did not occur to me, given the authority displayed by the text, that he lived anywhere but Jerusalem. I imagined that he was much like one of his characters ˜ setting down his thoughts in fiction form after having first led a life of great adventure.11 Some writers conjure such adventures out of a vivid inner life, but in Whittemore’s case, I was convinced that he must have experienced, on some level, what he wrote about. Such is the way that a favorite book can convince
us.

While it is difficult to tell you exactly how influential Whittemore has been on my work, or on me personally, I can tell you that I wrote three-fourths of a novel set in South America that attempted to replicate Whittemore’s brand of decade-spanning fiction.12 I can also tell you that I still find myself, at some level, grasping for superlatives like “amazing” or “mind-bending” even while realizing
that these words have been devalued by a glut of book reviews over decades.

In the end, all I can tell you is this: If you believe in fiction much as you would a religion, or
if you think that great works of fiction contain insights and wisdom that can literally change your life, or if you have known books that took you on strange but wonderful journeys, then you should read Edward Whittemore. He will not disappoint you.

——————————————————————————–

Footnotes:

1 If I ignore Quin’s Shanghai Circus in this article, it is only due to limitations of space and focus. Quin’s Shanghai Circus is a stunning short novel, filled with indelible scenes of Shanghai during wartime, and featuring characters that you will rarely encounter again, in life or on the printed page.

2 I don’t want this article to be about the man rather than the books, but I should point out that the Tom Wallace’s introduction and Judy Karasik afterword (available in all five of Old Earth’s reprints) present remarkably personal accounts of Whittemore as a person and as a writer. Tom Wallace was Whittemore’s editor at Henry Holt and W.W. Norton, where the novels were first published between 1974 and 1987. Wallace subsequently became Whittemore’s literary agent, and then his literary executor. Judy Karasik edited the last two novels of the Jerusalem Quartet.

3 “Cross-genre” is preferable to me as a term to “slipstream.” Slipstream means nothing. It is nothing.
The authors on the “slipstream” list would stare blankly at the word if shown it on a page.

4 Perhaps writers felt something similar during the New Wave, perhaps not.

5 Again, not to mention the New Wave, although the New Wave was often formally experimental.

6 Despite rumors to the contrary, fueled by reviewer comparisons, Whittemore does not write like
Pynchon ˜ his themes sometimes dovetail with Pynchon’s, but as a stylist, Pynchon and Whittemore are worlds apart. If, like me, you had difficulty with Gravity’s Rainbow, you will have no such difficulty with Whittemore. This is not to suggest that Whittemore is a lesser stylist than Pynchon, just that such experimentation and floridness did not interest him. As a storyteller on a grand scale, he clearly did not want the narrative obscured by the way in which he told a tale. Ironically enough, Anthony Heilbut,
wrote in The Nation when reviewing Sinai Tapestry, that “Whittemore is a deceptively lucid stylist. Were his syntax as cluttered as Pynchon’s or as grand as Nabokov’s… his virtually ignored recent novel might have received the attention it deserves, for his imagination of present and alternative worlds is comparable to theirs…” Could it be that Whittemore’s deceptive lucidity has caused his obscurity up to now? It is certainly an interesting theory, and there’s some merit in it, but it is more likely that Whittemore simply suffered from bad timing or bad luck.

7 That Whittemore’s books can simultaneously be called “fantasies” and “espionage” novels may explain
why his work, with its clear, unobtrusive style, has been so difficult for some reviewers to categorize. Such categorization is anathema to work like Whittemore’s, but it does help sell books.

8 However, because of their lack of a fantastical element, relative to the first two books, my examination
of the final two books is cursory in this review.

9 It is always a mistake to presume to know the author’s mind, of course; nonetheless, mistakes can be interesting.

10 According to an informed source, this novel may be published sometime in the next few years.

11 Given the classified nature of his position in the CIA, we may never know just how much excitement
Whittemore experienced first-hand.

12 And, in all candor, I stole a Whittemore technique by which he describes carnage perpetrated in Shanghai (from Quin’s Shanghai Circus) for a similar scene in my novella “Dradin, In Love”.

——————————————————————————–

Jeff VanderMeer’s upcoming books include Veniss Underground, out in April 2003, and the co-edited
The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases (July 2003). In February of next year, he will teach workshops at the Suncoast Writers’ Festival in St. Petersburg, Florida, along with such writers as Salman Rushdie and Li-Young Lee.

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:

(An ad in Christianity Today magazine shows a plaintive Jesus next to a clogged superhighway.)

ADVERTISING

A Group Links Fuel Economy to Religion

By DANNY HAKIM

DETROIT, Nov. 18 ˜ A broad coalition of religious groups is preparing a grass-roots campaign linking fuel efficiency to morality, with some ads going so far as to ask: “What Would Jesus Drive?”

    Leaders of the effort are coming to Detroit on Wednesday to meet with William Clay Ford Jr., the chairman and chief executive of the Ford Motor Company. They will also meet with executives at General Motors.

    “We are under a commandment to be faithful stewards of God’s creation,” said Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, an umbrella organization of Christian and Jewish groups. “This is a crisis in God’s creation at the hands of God’s children.”
    Leaders of many groups within the partnership have signed a letter to the Big Three’s
chief executives asking for improvements in fuel economy. They say they
have a biblical mandate to be good stewards of God’s creation and a responsibility
to the poor who are especially harmed by pollution. And they decry supporting
“autocratic, corrupt and violent” governments that produce oil.

    “We write
now to ask you in the automobile industry a more explicit question,” the
letter said, “what specific pledges ˜ in volume, timing and commitments
to marketing ˜ will you make to produce automobiles, S.U.V.’s and pickup
trucks with substantially greater fuel economy?”

    The letter
was signed by an array of denominations, including American leaders of
the Serbian Orthodox and Swedenborgian churches; Frank T. Griswold, the
presiding bishop of the Episcopal church; David A. Harris, executive director
of the American Jewish Committee; and the Rev. Mark S. Hanson, presiding
bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

    The letter
says the groups will send study materials to 100,000 congregations of varying
faiths and “train hundreds of clergy and lay people as spokespeople for
energy conservation and fuel economy.” Mr. Gorman said he hoped the meetings
on Wednesday could begin a civil dialogue with Detroit.

    A spokesman
for Ford, Jon Harmon, said: “We know that environmental issues are important
to a lot of people for a lot of different reasons. Our first thing is that
we want to make sure they have an understanding of the good things we have
done,” including Ford’s pledge to improve the fuel economy of its sport
utility vehicles by 25 percent by 2005.

    The campaign
could create complications for G.M.’s Chevrolet brand, which makes S.U.V.’s
like the TrailBlazer and has been courting religious conservatives by sponsoring
a Christian concert series. Mr. Gorman took a dim view of the relationship,
saying “Chevrolet is encouraging people to buy automobiles which are poisoning
God’s creation.”

    One of
the smaller groups in the religious partnership, the Evangelical Environmental
Network, is behind the “What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign. But much of
its effort will be done pulpit-to-pulpit by disseminating bumper stickers,
pamphlets and magazines on the topic of Christianity and fuel economy.
An ad in Christianity Today magazine will show a plaintive Jesus next to
a clogged superhighway. TV spots will be shown in four states ˜ Indiana,
Iowa, Missouri and North Carolina ˜ but distribution will be limited with
an initial shoestring budget of $65,000.

    “When
we look at the impact on human health, it’s significant, and when we look
at global warming, the projected impacts are going to be hardest on the
poor,” said the Rev. Jim Ball, the head of the evangelical group, who drives
a Toyota Prius hybrid. “How can I love my neighbor as myself if I’m filling
their lungs with pollution?”

    Such
views are not typical of religious conservative leaders. An article on
the home page of the Christian Coalition questioned the wisdom of Mr. Ball’s
advertising campaign and echoed Detroit’s claims that toughening long-stagnant
fuel economy rules would lead to safety risks with only minimal environmental
gains.

    Some
postings on Mr. Ball’s Web site, http://www.whatwouldjesusdrive.org, were more
pointed.

    “Jesus
would drive a Hummer” read one message, referring to G.M.’s
gas-guzzling S.U.V., while another said, “This is a Web site with a liberal
agenda and this has nothing to do with the Bible!”

    Rabbi
David Saperstein, the Washington representative of the Union of American
Hebrew Congregations, the central body of Reform Judaism, said, “The letter
raises the issue of urging the automobile companies to engage with the
ethics and human impact of what it is they are producing and to think about
the values beyond the profit line.”

    Not all
members of the National Religious Partnership have signed onto the effort.
The Catholic Conference of Bishops, which last year drafted a lengthy statement
asking for more action on global warming, is not taking an active role.

    “We share
some of the goals and welcome the dialogue,” said John Carr, the director
of social development for the conference.

    “We would
be less likely to talk about what would Jesus drive,” Mr. Carr said, “and
more likely to talk about how to advance the common good of workers, consumers
and the poor, who pay the greatest price for environmental degradation.”

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:

By LISA BACON

RICHMOND, Va., Nov. 17 ˜
The authorities are investigating whether vandals who have swept through
here in recent months, slashing tires, defacing businesses and damaging
construction equipment, were members of the Earth Liberation Front, an
environmental organization considered by the F.B.I. to be one of America’s
most prolific domestic terrorist groups.

    “Police
are trying to determine if there are any links to other incidents around
the country,” said Wade Kizer, Commonwealth’s Attorney for Henrico County.

    In September,
vandals used a corrosive cream to etch the letters E.L.F. on the windows
of 25 cars and three fast food restaurants. Lawrence Barry, chief counsel
of the Richmond division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, confirmed
that his agency was helping to investigate the incidents.

    Mr. Kizer
said he had no reason to doubt the authenticity of the calling cards supposedly
left by the Earth Liberation Front. “But it might be some local people
who have just heard of the organization,” he said.

    The group
may have struck again Saturday night, when five sport utility vehicles
had their tires slashed here. S.U.V.’s have been a target of the group
in the past.

    The authorities
said the Richmond incidents fit the profile of the group’s operations in
the United States. The group has no formal leadership, just a Web site
and a virtual press office to handle inquiries. A former spokesman for
the group, Craig Rosebraugh of Portland, Ore., once described it as having
only a shared commitment to take aim at “anyone who is destroying the environment
for the sake of profit.”

    An e-mail
message from the North American Earth Liberation Front press office said
Wednesday: “As for why Virginia, it simply means that there is an active
cell that has chosen to operate in that area. There are cells in operation
from time to time all over North America.”

    On Sept.
27 or 28, vandals used a glass-etching cream to damage the fast food restaurant
windows. Thirteen windows at each of two McDonald’s and 25 windows at a
Burger King, all in Richmond’s affluent West End, were damaged beyond repair.
Around the same time, vandals used a similar substance to scar the surfaces
of 25 S.U.V.’s at a West Richmond dealership.

    Then
on Oct. 5 or 6, as central and northern Virginia were focused on the sniper
attacks, vandals hacked two S.U.V.’s with hatchets in a suburban subdivision
and left notes on each saying it was the work of the front.

    Similar
notes had been found on July 11 when there was a string of S.U.V. tire
slashings in the city’s historic Fan District. The authorities in Goochland
County, another Richmond suburb, said that two months ago the front may
also have been responsible for the destruction of construction equipment
and damage to the interior of a house being built in a subdivision. A burned
American flag and a message about environmental concerns were found at
the scene.

    The Earth
Liberation Front press office said it was unaware of the Virginia vandalism
until a reporter filed an inquiry via e-mail.

    “We have
received no statement of claim for those actions at this press office,”
it said, “so we are not able to pass along the motivations of these acts,
other than to say that they are in keeping with other E.L.F. actions that
have targeted pollution, roads and vehicle culture through attacks on vehicles
such as S.U.V.’s.”

    E.L.F.
began in England in 1992 as an offshoot of Earth First, an environmental
advocacy group. While Earth First promotes mainstream ecological campaigns,
elves, as they are often called, take a more direct approach, sabotaging
research, burning buildings and placing spikes in trees to fend off loggers’
chainsaws. The group says it has caused $50 million in damage in the United
States.

    The group
first went to work in the United States in 1996, claiming responsibility
for the torching of a Forest Service truck in the Willamette National Forest
in Oregon. Within a few months, the group said it had joined forces with
the Animal Liberation Front to destroy millions of dollars in commercial
and government buildings and research. In 1997, the two groups burned wild
horse corrals overseen by the Bureau of Land Management in Oregon, causing
nearly a half-million dollars in damage to structures and equipment. The
next year, the front claimed responsibility for the largest act of eco-terrorism
in United States history, burning three buildings and four ski lifts at
a Vail, Colo., resort. Damages were estimated at $12 million to $24 million.

    The group’s
actions do not always succeed. In an October 2001 firebombing at a Federal
Bureau of Land Management corral near Susanville, Calif., vandals caused
about $80,000 in damage but failed to free the 160 horses. The group has
set minks free from mink farms, only to see them run over by cars. After
one such raid in Sweden, when group members painted minks’ fur so that
they would be useless to profiteers, the minks died of exposure.

FROM http://www.826valencia.com/store/facade.html

Our Facade

Well, it‚s finished. As
you may know, Chris Ware, one of the world‚s great artists, designed this
mural specifically for 826 Valencia. It depicts the parallel development
of humans and their efforts at and motivations for communication, spoken
and written. It‚s a very complex mural, and requires its most devoted viewers
to study it for about an hour, from the middle of Valenica Street, by far
the best vantage point.

The mural was applied by
skilled artisans according to Ware‚s specifications. The bottom half of
the building, which has been painted black, features gold lettering that
states the name of the place. Over the window is a nice burgundy awning.

 

826
Store

“Definitely one of the top
five pirate stores I’ve been to recently.”

˜David Byrne

The Store at 826 Valencia
is San Francisco’s only independent pirate supply store. We
offer a variety of goods, including lard, flags, eye patches, mops, glass
eyes and the like. We also sell all McSweeney’s-related items. All proceeds
from the store go toward the writing center resting directly behind it.

New items for sale in the
store:

· Swashbuckler hats

· Cavalier hats

· Tri-cornered hats

· Treasure chests

· 826 t-shirts

· Sixteen vintage
pirate cards from the 1920s

· Four ancient Roman
coins

PEOPLE

Title:
Ceremony — Buddha Meet Rock

Label: P-VINE RECORDS (JAPAN)

Format: CD

Price: $26.00

Catalog Number: PCD 1414

First reissue of this totally unknown Japanese freak-out album, originally issued in 1971. Opening in
unique fashion with various street sounds collaged into a sampled excerpt of David Axelrod’s “Holy Thursday” (from his 1968 masterpiece Song of Innocence), this flows into exceptional heavy psych from the group People, lead by the pure wah-wah excess of guitarist Kimio Mizutani (Love Live Life, Satoh Masahiko & Soundbreakers). Mixing Buddhist chanting, chirping birds and religious ecstasy, this one beats B.O.R.B. to the doughnut hole by 2 decades plus. One of the finest P-Vine 70s rock resurrections to date.