James Garside
The man loved his footnotes.1 Shit, did I say that out loud? Sorry, wrong meeting.2 If you like DFW then you'll probably love this.3 And even if you don't, you should still read it.4 Read it and lament the loss of a great talent in American letters.
1. Obviously.
2. Token Bill Hicks reference.
3. This is known as pandering to your audience.
4. Because I said so, alright?!
5. I've barely scratched the surface of DFW's work and I'm already sad that he's gone.
First read in 1995 whilst drunk on red wine sat in a friends room on a mattress on the floor.
Reread at least a hundred times since then.
Read when I wanted to be a poet.
Read when I decided that all poetry is bullshit.
Read when I realised that I wasn't a poet but I still knew what I loved.
Listened to on recordings of Ginsberg.
Listened to on documentaries about the beats.
Read aloud by other people.
Recited by some godawful jazz students on the anniversary of his death.
Recited by myself on the anniversary of his death.
Read to myself sometimes late at night when I just can't sleep.
Reread after I saw the film at a film festival in 2010.
Reread December 2013 for no apparent reason.
Listened to again just now.
This isn't so much a discussion of ‘The Magic of Israel Regardie' as ‘the half-assed opinions of Christopher Hyatt, who lived and worked with Israel Regardie, with a brief discussion of what he thinks Regardie thought about magic and the occasional name-drop of Regardie thrown in for good measure.' I say that with love.
The recording comes across like a long-ranging discussion between Christopher Hyatt and some dumb stoner kid about magic, aliens and the Golden Dawn. That said, any Regardie is better than no Regardie and you do get some sense of Hyatt's working relationship with him.
It's an interesting discussion in its own right and covers many topics including Crowley, Thelema, Rosicrucianism and the various uses of magick with a k as a tool of self-improvement, empowerment and psychotherapy. There's a wonderfully nutty discussion of the extraterrestrial origins of mankind, according to the work of Zecharia Sitchin, and how we were created by aliens as a slave race.
I enjoyed listening to this a lot more than I'm letting on. It's an obscure recording and an interesting discussion. Scholars of Israel Regardie would be better served by going to Regardie's work directly — if you want to know about a tree, go to the tree. But there's much of value here if you accept it for what it is.
It doesn't matter if you believe in magick or not. We're all just space-monkeys, really.
Hate self-help but read it anyway. Some of the basic tenets of ‘Feel the fear and do it anyway' are sound. And the first few chapters, devoted specifically addressing fear, are worth reading. I've just got sand in my dreamcatcher and draw the line at nonsense like the law of attraction. Of which there is plenty in this book. Including the half-baked notion that anger causes cancer, all negativity is evil and wrong and the usual Pollyanna rubbish about positive thinking. It may be horseshit but horseshit has its uses — like compost.
