With a winning plot, featuring a battle between an unstoppable monster and the lunatic who wants it dead, you’d think the book would be a page-turner. But after setting up the central conceit, it goes on for about four hundred pages describing the different kinds of knots and ropes that are used on a whaling vessel. It’s pretty boring, but if you want to sound smart, you can bring up the fact that it’s chock-full of homosexual themes. For instance, the narrator begins the novel by stating that he “set out to sail a little,” which was a nineteenth-century euphemism for cruising. Pretty much the entire thing is just metaphors for being gay. Back then you had to be on a boat to have sex with a man, so that’s the subtext for the whole book, which is summed up in its deceptively simple opening line: “Call me gay.”
MIDDLEMARCH BY GEORGE ELIOT
Set in the fictional English Midlands town of Middlemarch, this book is a sprawling and epic portrait of provincial life and social change in nineteenth-century Britain. Though written in the Victorian era, it has many of the hallmarks of modern novels, such as its refusal to conform to a given style, dense literary and even scientific digressions, and multiple and diverging points of view. So, yeah, our main takeaway is that George Eliot was a really great writer and probably didn’t get the recognition he deserved while he was alive.
THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN BY MARK TWAIN
Race relations in the nineteenth century were strained, to say the least—that is, until great strides were made in the field of white guys ironically using the n-word. In his classic satire of life on the mighty Mississip, Samuel Clemens—who posted under the screen name “Mark Twain”—created a comic masterpiece: a tale of a rapscallion named Huck and his friend who will be referred to in these pages as “Jim” and certainly nothing else. By realizing that a white author could get away with using racial slurs provided he didn’t use his real name and used the slurs only to point out that racism is bad, Twain created a distinctly American art form that endures to this day.
THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL BY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
In his book The Great American Novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald set out to write something that would be taught in American high school English classes forever, and in so doing created an indelible portrait of life during the “Roaring Twenties.” The book is about a reclusive millionaire bootlegger named Gatsby, who, despite his money, spends most of his time as beta orbiter to a woman named Daisy whom he met in Army training.
Gatsby spends his money on lavish parties he doesn’t attend at a house he bought across from Daisy’s so he could impress her, specifically in a way that didn’t involve making eye contact or conversation. Fitzgerald’s book is about the dark side of the American dream, suggesting that we can all be alpha players if we use advanced PUA tactics. But in reality, only a few of us are going to be born “great” enough to consistently score with straight-up tens. The rest of us are left to beat off, ropes against the current, jacking off ceaselessly into the past.
ANYTHING BY WILLIAM FAULKNER
It doesn’t matter which one you read, because they all take place in a terrible part of Mississippi where every once-proud family is riven with secrets about incest, interracial children, grotesques, suicide, financial ruin, abortion, or some combination of all of the above. Faulkner’s books often feature “stream-of-consciousness” and “nonlinear” narration, which are the techniques serious authors use when they’re trying to make fun of the mentally handicapped.
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD BY HARPER LEE
Much like the work of Faulkner, To Kill a Mockingbird is another great book about how the Depression-era American South was a rich, magical place full of colorful characters. With Maycomb, Harper Lee created an unforgettable portrait of a “tired old town” in an America gone by. Maycomb is the kind of place where you wish you could have spent the halcyon days of childhood summers with Jem and Scout, whiling away the days indulging in high jinks down by the ol’ fishing hole with loveable town drunk Bob Ewell, playing pranks on Tom Robinson or rounds of mini golf with man-child shut-in Boo Radley. To Kill a Mockingbird isn’t just a book for kids, though—it also has lots of lawyer jokes that adults can enjoy, too.
NAKED LUNCH BY WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
“Agents of unconsecrated insect semen corporations repent! The control you seek is in your own prolapsed asshole!” Who can forget the first time they read those immortal lines in William S. Burroughs’s classic book about shooting heroin into your dick? Naked Lunch was the first American novel to not be a novel or “readable” in the traditional sense. Extremely controversial upon its initial publication, it faced a long battle against censorship for violating nearly every social convention of the day in its depiction of drug addiction, homosexuality, and actually, for-real killing your wife. Naked Lunch follows William Lee, the literary alter ego of Burroughs, through a series of loosely connected vignettes or “routines” as he travels to the fictional country of “Interzone,” a place where it’s okay to have sex with teenage boys. In addition to expanding the American literary consciousness around issues of drug use, murder, and ephebophilia, it also has a long and rich legacy of inspiring people to start rock bands and do heroin.
DUNE BY FRANK HERBERT
Probably the most important book ever written outside of the Holy Koran, Frank Herbert’s Dune is a sprawling sci-fi epic about a war between two powerful galactic dynasties who battle for control of a planet that’s too spicy. The planet in question, Arrakis, is a giant political allegory that contains the universe’s most precious resource—except instead of oil, it’s the cum of giant space worms. The worm-cum is called “spice,” and it’s both an energy source that bends space and an extreeeemely dope fucking hallucinogen. Dune created a huge universe with dozens of characters and long story arcs carried out over a whole series of books and helped inspire the sci-fi/fantasy megafranchises of today, like Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Game of Thrones, which all borrowed heavily from Dune in that they’re also thinly veiled calls for their young readers to martyr themselves in a holy jihad against a corrupt and decadent American empire.
BLOOD MERIDIAN BY CORMAC McCARTHY
See the book—It is thick—Sentences short—Landscapes bleak—Glanton gang—Doing genocides to Indians—War is good—Yonder bald man is large—Universe is indifferent eternal violence—It is also good—The men tell the women to read the book—Sometimes they don’t—Then men cry
WHITE NOISE BY DON DELILLO
This book is good to know about because it’s a satire of academia, and if you want to pursue a postgraduate degree, it’s important to keep this one in your back pocket so you can impress your peers by being “in” on the joke about how they’re full of shit and their career choice is pointless. The book follows professor Jack Gladney and his family in the small midwestern college town where they live. Gladney is a professor of “Hitler Studies,” and though the book was written in the 1980s, DeLillo had an uncannily prescient vision of the “irony occupations” that would become prevalent in the twenty-first century. The book channels a lot of the broadly felt anxieties surrounding consumerism, mass media, divorce, and train derailments that cause huge leaks of airborne chemicals that undergird so much of modern American life.
GARFIELD: HIS 9 LIVES BY JIM DAVIS
There are many classic Garfield collections that belong in the American canon, such as Garfield: Bigger Than Life, Garfield: The Big Cheese, and Garfield: Origins, but Garfield: His 9 Lives warrants special consideration for the astonishing and groundbreaking questions it poses about the very nature of literature and authorial intent. Organized into ten short stories, each differing wildly in content, style, setting, and tone, the book completely recontextualizes the Garfield character and, by extension, the reader’s shared experience of Garfield the Cat. His 9 Lives contains meditations on the creation of cats and the role of large, surly cats throughout history, as well as stylistic digressions into detective fiction, slapstick, and William S. Burroughs–style cut-up exper
imentation. The effect can be jarring, and indeed, His 9 Lives was savaged by critics upon its first release, but with time it has come to be recognized for the work of genius it truly is.
Painting Products
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Paintings get a bad rap for being boring, but it is nevertheless important for you, the callow and stupid reader, to embrace the visual arts, as communion with paintings opens you up to unique experiences and sensations. It also trains the mind to notice small details and contemplate what lies beyond the surface.
BAL DU MOULIN DE LA GALETTE (PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR, 1876, OIL ON CANVAS, MUSéE D’ORSAY)
Impressionists sought to capture moments in time through swift brushstrokes, wet-on-wet intermingling of colors, and careful attention to natural light. Renoir’s masterpiece depicts a moment in the Montmartre, a district where working-class Parisians would dress up, drink, and dance. The patrons are dappled with blotches of light shining through the canopy, imparting a vivid sensation of motion to the tableau as the eye imagines trees swaying over the dancing couples in the middle distance and the young raconteurs in the foreground.
Like all impressionist artworks, Bal du moulin de la Galette invites the viewer to imagine these patrons naked if he or she gets bored. The figures depicted all appear fairly attractive—the fluid brushstrokes obscure any imperfections, much like an Instagram filter—and it is not beyond the bounds of belief to think they could all strip off and have an impromptu orgy, considering the sexual mores of urban Paris at the time. Careful observers will note that Renoir inserted fellow painters Pierre Franc-Lamy and Norbert Goeneutte in the lower right as voyeurs nursing glasses of grenadine, dreamy expressions on their faces, almost certainly picturing Monet being beaten with a riding crop.
GUERNICA (PABLO PICASSO, 1937, OIL ON CANVAS, MUSEO NACIONAL CENTRO DE ARTE REINA SOFíA)
The destruction of the small village of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War heralded a modern horror that the entire continent of Europe would soon be acquainted with: terror bombing. Pilots sent by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to aid Franco’s Nationalists reduced the town to rubble, killing hundreds of civilians and paving the way for ground forces to march in amid the chaos. Having received a commission from the Republican government to create a work of art for the Spanish display at the World’s Fair in Paris, Picasso responded to this atrocity with a twenty-five-foot mural in the cubist style depicting the experience on the ground during the raid. Employing simple lines and a black-and-white palette, Guernica is a raw depiction of humans and animals panicking, suffering, suffocating, and dying through the horrors of war. The skewed perspective—a hallmark of cubism that seems in this case to perhaps dehumanize the figures, or to emphasize their captivity—and the incorporation of newspaper print indicted contemporary viewers for being passive observers to human suffering, an early critique of the mass media that remains strikingly relevant in the digital era.
Guernica has resonated through the ages as the most profound visual encapsulation of man’s inhumanity to man in the era of mass communication and mechanized warfare. It has also resonated as a hugely erotic work of art. The emphasized hands and feet on the wailing human figures are an obvious nod to fetishists, but what makes Picasso’s masterpiece truly revolutionary is his incorporation of highly sexualized cartoon animals whose bodies intersect with other figures. Modern-day vore, furry, and even hentai subcultures can all trace their lineage back to Guernica, which, along with Betty Boop, Li’l Abner, and George Orwell’s Animal Farm, was for millions of people the World War II–era precursor to DeviantArt.
FOUR DARKS IN RED (MARK ROTHKO, 1958, OIL ON CANVAS, WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART)
Rothko’s later work consisted of abstract “multiforms,” canvases featuring little more than overlapping layers of color. He once said of his paintings, “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on—and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions.”
Four Darks in Red, with its horizontal swaths of black and red hues, presents no conventional narrative to interpret but instead exists as a form in and of itself, containing its own meaning through imparting an experience to the observer. The central, primal emotion aroused by this experience is horniness, as the observer cannot help but be sexually excited by the bold colors arranged in rectangular shapes whose juicy borders and low-key thiccness call to mind throbbing red cocks and big-ass pussies. The real subversion of Four Darks in Red is that, despite its lack of recognizable human figures, no one can observe this composition without getting so profoundly horned-up that they lose their job.
GREY LINES WITH BLACK, BLUE, AND YELLOW (GEORGIA O’KEEFFE, 1923, OIL ON CANVAS, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON)
These are some pretty flowers. The colors are interesting and nice. Not much else to say about them.
Elevator Products
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We’ve discussed film, television, literature, and painting, but are you ready to get higher than you’ve ever been before—and then seamlessly and safely travel right back down again? Then prepare yourself to appreciate an often overlooked form of human creative achievement: elevators.
THYSSENKRUPP
You’re on the fifty-third floor of a skyscraper overlooking downtown Raleigh, North Carolina. Your partner and infant twins (one girl, one boy) are on the forty-seventh floor. You hear a loud bang. The building shudders. Ceiling tiles fall. Smoke fills the room. Sirens wail. You come to on the floor and realize that another 9/11 has happened. How do you get to the ground floor safely and efficiently? You could take the stairs, but that’s a lot of stairs. That’s when you remember that this is a Thyssenkrupp building. You pick yourself up and march to the elevator bank and hit the down button, secure in the knowledge that a century of German engineering has ensured that even in the event of catastrophic architectural failure, goddamn it, these elevators will make it to their destination.
The doors open. The building lurches and groans as you step into the car. The doors shut so quickly that you wonder whether you’ve died and entered a conveyance to hell, because surely only the devil himself would be capable of achieving such a short door-closing time.
People in the car are crying, diarrheaing themselves, that sort of thing. But your eyes are glued to the state-of-the-art LED display showing each floor you pass by, an amenity you’ve come to expect from a modern elevator. The only thing more shocking than the accuracy of the digital indicator is the celerity with which this car is approaching the ground floor.
You exit the car into the lobby and run outside the building. Your partner and kids are there. They also took a Thyssenkrupp-manufactured elevator to escape. You embrace them. You look up and discover that the building isn’t actually collapsing. It was all a false alarm, a fake 9/11 meant to test the integrity of the building’s elevators in the event of a national emergency. The Thyssenkrupps passed with flying colors. You and your partner look deep into each other’s eyes. No words are needed. Your look says it all: “I will always love you. Thyssenkrupp, whose elevators are unsurpassed in terms of efficiency and reliability, will keep us together, no matter what.”
OTIS
The year is 2152 AD. The world’s resources have been nearly exhausted. A corrupt ruling class maintains control over the last scraps of the earth’s bounty through elaborate systems of violent repression. Your “name,” were such a thing conceivable to you, is Quantum-291. You have no parents, no heritage that you know of. You have not been permitted to have a personality. You have known no life but servitude to the Directorate as a menial laborer in the cobalt mines. There is very little cobalt left in this vein. Each week you and your dozen fellow laborers must show quota. The one who mines the least is sent to University. No one has ever returned from University.
Last week Quantum-285 was sent to University. You knew him for nearly two cycles. He was the closest thing you ever had t
o a “friend.” He once risked his life by sharing his 500 milliliters of soy slurry with you when you were being punished with starvation for glancing at the Overseer’s console.
You were bred to know nothing, but now you have learned something. Now you have a rudimentary understanding of kindness, which has led you to conclude that something like “justice” exists. Using subtle gestures and miners’ argot, you are able to communicate this concept to your fellow Quantums.
At the appointed time, you collectively turn your laseraxes and cyberdrills on the Overseer. The man you once watched personally zap a miner to death for singing off-key at grueltime now begs for his life. It brings you nothing but pleasure to watch his life force be torn into tiny shreds of flesh.
Klaxons blare. Reinforcements are coming. The only hope for you and your nascent freedom force is to exit the mine as fast as possible. The odds may be long, but if you can get aboveground in time, you and your comrades have a chance to scatter across the surface and spread your revolution to drone warrens throughout the Cryptosphere.
You and your fellow rebels make a break for the mine elevator. You press the button. You wait. You hear the elevator creak and groan as it descends toward your floor. The Klaxons grow louder. Overseers from surrounding tunnels are closing in on you. You press the button again and again and again. Your comrades start to panic. What’s taking so long?
Psychoblaster shots fizz around the corner. The elevator finally settles on your floor. The doors slowly open. You shove your way in and slam the S button. The elevator shakes. Panicking, you hit the button over and over again. The doors start to close but stop a quarter of the way. Beyond the elevator doors, a team of black-suited Troublers has appeared, their psychoblasters aimed squarely at you. You wave good-bye to them, expecting the doors to close at that second, saving your life and the lives of your friends.
The Chapo Guide to Revolution Page 17