Biologist and conservationist E. O. Wilson just released Anthill, a novel about… ants. (I imagine this will be better than the Woody Allen animated flick “Antz,” and can probably tell us a thing or two about human society.)

From Publisher’s Weekly:

A Pulitzer Prize–winning nonfiction author and Harvard entomology professor, Wilson (The Ants) channels Huck Finn in his creative coming-of-age debut novel. Split into three parallel worlds—ants, humans, and the biosphere—the story follows young Raff Cody, who escapes the humid summers in Clayville, Ala., by exploring the remote Nokobee wilderness with his cousin, Junior. In one adventure, sneaking onto the property of a reputed multiple murderer to peek at his rumored 1,000-pound pet alligator, 15-year-old Raff faces down the barrel of a rifle. Raff’s aversion to game hunting, ant fascination, Boy Scout achievements, and Harvard education all support his core need to remain a naturalist explorer. A remarkable center section meticulously details the life and death of an ant colony. Nearing 30, Raff’s desire to preserve the Nokobee reserve from greedy real estate developers galvanizes an effort to protect the sacred land and a surprise violent ending brings everything full circle. Lush with organic details, Wilson’s keen eye for the natural world and his acumen for environmental science is on brilliant display in this multifaceted story about human life and its connection to nature.

New Scientist’s Culture Lab has an interview with E. O. Wilson here:

Why would E. O. Wilson write a novel? He says he hopes Anthill - about militant ants and the coupled fate of humans and nature - will spark a conservation revolution

Why did you feel your novel, Anthill, had to be written?

This is the first time anyone has written about the lives of ants from their point of view. And I think this is the first novel set in the American South that pays close attention to the environment. I have made the environment, the treasured habitat that Raphael Semmes Cody fights to save, a character in the book.

You have said you wanted the book to lay out nature as it is. Why?

Over 90 per cent of novelists present nature simply in terms of its impacts on human emotions. I wanted to develop in vivid detail the living environment - which is so important for the fate of the human characters - as it really is. That’s something really new in this novel, and I hope it takes.

(CultureLab: E. O. Wilson Interview)

(Anthill: A Novel)

The first issue of Brendan McCarthy’s new Spider-Man series, “Fever,” is out today in comic stores. I want one!!!!

Richard Metzger and Grant Morrison both introduced me to the work of British artist Brendan McCarthy about five years ago—he truly is the secret chief of all comics. (His one-shot with Peter Milligan, “Rogan Gosh,” is, for instance, both my favorite comic and spiritual text of all time. Now that’s a two-for-one deal if ever one existed in this dimension—though good luck finding a copy!)

This should get me back into a comic store after, oh, a good couple years.

Comic blog the Outhousers has a review here:

Any comic that starts out with Dr. Strange getting a book that releases havoc onto New York City sounds like normal fare.  What about when that havoc is expressly some kind of spider demon who infects Spider-Man and carts him to what appears to be Fantastic Planet?

Yep, this is some seriously messed up psychedelic comics.  The art is the real star here with Brendan McCarthy melding some blend of Riley Rossmo style lines with the day glo world of Madman.  It looks like a spider comic on acid and honestly, it reads a bit like one too.

I’ll admit, I am unfamiliar with his work, but seeing that McCarthy has worked with Shade: The Changing Man scribe Peter Milligan comes as no shock.  The comic I just read seems like something that might have come out of that same deranged mind.

The plot is simple enough, Stephen Strange has ordered a book on Albion Crawley, a turn of the century occultist who wrote about some crazy spider gods.  Upon arrival, the book releases some spider demon who becomes involved in a conflict between Spider-Man and the Vulture.  Spider-Man appears to go tripping the light fantastic in Strange’s bath tub and all holy hell breaks loose.  No seriously, that’s about it for this first issue, other than an intriguing last panel cliffhanger.

How can you resist with a plot summary like that???

(The Outhousers: Fever)

(Brendan McCarthy on Fever)

(Spider-Man Fever #1)

An interview with Dr. Barbara Oakley, Ph.D, the author of Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend, an exploration of how genetics influence psychopathy. Are some people just bad seeds? Hear what the latest science has to say about nasty people and how they got that way.
 

 
I’ll definitely be picking up a copy of How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop, The Machine Speaks when it’s released later this month. It’s interesting to think about how nearly all of our beloved digital tools for art-making have their origins in military research. This tome seems like it might address that a little bit. In the meantime, listen to Holger Czukay indulging in some serious vocoder play.

via Stop Smiling

It’s the Man of Steel versus the man known as “The Greatest of All Time” in this statue that features Superman taking on Muhammad Ali. Based on the Neil Adams cover art of the original 1978 tabloid version of the book All-New Collectors’ Edition: Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, this surprising scene of the two greats squaring off against one another is available in 3-D form for the first time. The release of this statue coincides with the reprinting of the story in two hardcover editions.

Price: $209.99

Entertainment Earth

Via Letters of Note, this letter from 1957 reveals that “Burroughs has gone insane!”

Early 1957, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg travelled to Tangier to join William Burroughs; their mission to assemble and edit Burroughs’ many fragments of work to form a ‘readable’ Naked Lunch manuscript. Kerouac arrived early and, during a break from socialising with Burroughs, the ‘old familiar lunatic’, wrote to Lucien Carr and his wife Francesca in order to update them on the project’s progress.

The letter reads:

Dear Lucien & Cessa — Writing to you by candlelight from the mysterious Casbah — have a magnificent room overlooking the beach & the bay & the sea & can see Gibraltar — patio to sun on, room maid, $20 a month — feel great but Burroughs has gone insane e as, — he keeps saying he’s going to erupt into some unspeakable atrocity such as waving his dingdong at an Embassy part & such or slaughtering an Arab boy to see what his beautiful insides look like — Naturally I feel lonesome with this old familiar lunatic but lonesomer than ever with him as he’ll also mumble, or splurt, most of his conversation, in some kind of endless new British lord imitation, it all keeps pouring out of him in an absolutely brilliant horde of words & in fact his new book is best thing of its kind in the world (Genet, Celine, Miller, etc.) & we might call it WORD HOARD…he, Burroughs, (not “Lee” any more) unleashes his word hoard, or horde, on the world which has been awaiting the Only Prophet, Burroughs — His message is all scatalogical homosexual super-violent madness, — his manuscript is all that has been saved from the original vast number of written pages of WORD HOARD which he’d left in all the boy’s privies of the world — and so on, — I sit with him in elegant French restaurant & he spits out his bones like My. Hyde and keeps yelling obscene words to be heard by the continental clienteles — (like he done in Rome, yelling FART at a big palazzio party) — I’ll be glad when Allen gets here. — Meanwhile I explores the Casbah, high on opium or hasheesh or any drink or drug I want, & dig the Arabs. — The Slovenija was a delightful ship, I ate every day at one long white tablecloth with that one Yugoslavian woman spy. — We hit a horrendous tempest 2 days out, nothing like I ever seen, — that big steel ship was lost in mountains of hissing water, awful. — I cuddled up with TWO TICKETS TO TANGIER and got my laughs, I read every word, Cess, really a riot. — Also read Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling which you should read, it’s down on your corner. — Right now I’m high on 3 Sympatinas, Spanish bennies of a sort, mild. — Happy pills galore. — The gal situation here is worse than the boy situation, nothing but male whores all over, & their supplementary queens. — Met an actual contraband sailing ship adventurer with a mustache. Etc. More anon. Miss you & hope you’re well. Jack.

(Letters of Note: Burroughs Has Gone Insane)

(William S. Burroughs: The Yage Letters)

Gina Welch is the author of In the In the Land of Believers: An Outsider’s Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church. Raised a secular Jew by a single mother in Berkeley, Gina spent two years “undercover” in Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, VA trying to understand, for herself, Evangelical Christians. Her insights will surprise you.
 

Via Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, here’s a review of “YES NO” by Dadaist painter Francis Picabia:

Hanuman Books are sweet strawberries covered in the most delicious creamy chocolate in this feast of literature. I adore them. They are petite and firm, exotic and very, very sexy little items, guaranteed to add secret glamour and sophisticated depth to even the most shallow of pockets.

“YESNO”, by “dadaist” and painter Francis Picabia, is 47 discerning midget pages of evanescent aphorisms. Gems of cynicism, melancholy observation and caustic comment, worthy of any aspiring, or asp-like, queen’s tiara of wit. The brief messages, warnings and considerations are drawn from his journals and notebooks over the period 1939-1957.

“Beauty is relative to the amount of interest it arouses.” quoth she.

This is an anthology from the revered lineage that includes the dandyish sublimity of an Oscar Wild; the fastidious camp of a Quentin Crisp; or even the more obscure English Edwardians like James Bertram and F. Russell whose Victorian misogyny and skepticism were illustrated more exquisitely than the “corpse” itself by Austin Osman Spare in “The Starlit Mire”. Yes, aphorisms are a justly grand tradition of which one can only approve, given that one is a reasonable person.  And, in this age of advertising slogans and soundbites; bumper stickers, and designer corporate logos as street fashion, a reminder of the priceless art of word games. The contradiction, collision and collusion in fresh revelation that twisting and pummeling the material of words can supply, in order for us “to see what they really say” as Brion Gysin so prophetically indicated in his “cut-ups”.

(Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: YES NO)

Yes No (Hanuman Book No. 39)

(I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation)

Thanks to Soft Skull Press for sending me an advance paperback copy of Daniel Radosh’s “Rapture Ready: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture.” This book is righteously demented—true to the title, it’s a voyage through the bizarre world of Christian pop culture, in a time where it is essentially one more underground scene, a pocket pop universe just like juggalos or furries (though slightly bigger—as Radosh points out, this stuff totals up to a $7 billion a year industry). Radosh takes us on a voyage through the cult of Left Behind, Christian rock, and the rest of the American Christian scene. Along the way we get some serious gems like “BibleZine” (!!!), bumper stickers reading “Any Sex that can Put You in Hell ISN’T SAFE” and Jay Bakker (Jim and Tammy’s son), who runs his own punk rock church.

I mean, reading this, it’s like… this is the alternate universe version of Dangerous Minds’ readers, like we went into a wormhole and came out with goatees and freshly baptized.

There are some absolutely jaw-droppingly great snippets of “Christian” lore from the book. For instance, Radosh includes a depiction of the Rapture from one of the “Left Behind” books:

“[M]en and women soldiers and horses seemed to explode where they stood. It was as if the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin… Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor, and as those around them turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ.

Gloria in excelsis Deo, motherfucker.

Awesome. Or try this one, from a Christian joke book Radosh finds:

One women’s libber started out a speech: “Where would you men be without us women?” A guy in the back shouted, “In the Garden of Eden!”

I gotta remember that one to impress the ladies with.

Anyway, excellent, hilarious, disturbing, sobering book. I imagine it would make a great read alongside Jeff Sharlet’s “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power” for a look at where the Christian right is, both in politics and in culture at large, at this moment. (Interview with author below!)

(Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture)

 

 
via Bookdwarf, Thx Ned R. !