Ken Hollings
London: Strange Attractor Press, 2008, p/b, £11.99
This is a fascinating book but I found it terribly hard to write about. Looking for the opening thought to kick-start this I read again the introduction by Erik Davis.(9) He writes:
‘Hollings has collected together a mass of real signs and symptoms drawn from a myriad of fields: suburban architecture, psychology, Hollywood B-movies, military history, cybernetics, flying saucer lore. At first these items may seem disjointed, almost scatter-shot, but the networks they form together reflect the profoundly inter-connected process that characterises the Zone, a place where televisions deliver electroshock therapy and UFOs pop out of microwave overs. Applying a dream logic to real events, treating pulp fictions as history, and history as myth, Hollings ignores the con-ventional logic of cause and effect that you find in most nonfiction books about the past.’ (p. xii)
Yes, it is something like that; but it is difficult to convey how this works except by quotation – or more lists.
1945 was the American moment. Producing about half the world’s GDP, no empire has ever been as powerful (nor will be again, I suspect). And alongside – or underneath – the official (white) story of America were the other stories. Some were the horror stories with which we have become familiar: for example MK-Ultra and Ewen Cameron’s insane experiments with reprogramming the human mind which Hollings discusses. But also: by 1959 Cary Grant had taken LSD over 60 times as part of a Hollywood set who were using it with a therapist (and Grant talked about it to the press). And on the same page as the Grant snippet Hollings writes of the shooting death of George Reeves, the actor who played Superman on TV; the appearance of the first ever Barbie doll that year at the American International Toy Fair; and quotes the newly appointed president of the University of California, Clark Kerr, as saying: ‘Employers will love this generation. They are going to be so easy to handle.’ (Close but no cigar.)
Similar juxtapositions are found on every page. On p. 259, the page after the Cary Grant LSD story, I found this:
While Edward Hunter, the man who coined the term ‘brainwashing’ back at the start of the decade, becomes a prominent member of the John Birch Society and Elvis Presley ships out for West Germany after completing his basic training at Fort Hood in Texas, where debris thought to be from the crashed Roswell saucer was first examined, a nineteen-year-old US Marine arrived in Moscow declaring that he wishes to defect.’
Significant? No. Interesting? Yes.
The most striking material to me is the UFO contactee stories of the early 1950s. I hadn’t grasped how widespread this was, how many guru-contactees there were (in California in particular), how much ink it received and how many cheap sci-fi movies were inspired by the aliens-are-coming theme. Many Americans growing-up in the fifties and sixties must have seen this alien schlock on television and were thus primed to receive later intimations of alien abduction.
So Hollings has written? assembled? a kind of (sub)cultural history of America in its pomp, but presents it as a mosaic, trying to show rather than tell. Eric Davis again:
‘Hollings plays connect-the-dots between monster movies, nuclear submarines and LSD, between Sputnik, brainwashing and TV dinners, he is tracing the wires of our own unconscious, and filtering the electronic aether that we breathe.’ (p. xiii)
It is that mosaic thing which might put some people off, accustomed as we are to books which lay out propositions, assemble evidence and draw conclusions. Hollings doesn’t draw conclusions. He writes a chapter called ‘Conclusion’ that is spectacularly inconclusive. And maybe that’s appropriate.
This either rings your bell or it doesn’t. Mine it did, big time. (But then there’s a bit of me that will forever be Fortean.) And, nota bene, it comes with endorsements from no lesser personages than Jacques Vallée and Adam Curtis. And those guys are in my A team.
A big ‘thank you’ to Central Books in London who have distributed Lobster with exemplary efficiency since issue 16. Without Central Books this magazine would have folded years ago.
Notes
- His blog is at <www.realitysandwich.com/blog/erik_davis>