Extracted from Sensitive Skin Magazine. This piece was published May 12, 2019. Link to full text follows. Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933/1943) poses a question familiar to many Americans bewildered by the presidency of Donald Trump and the igneous qualities of his base. That the question was answered so …
“It would be fine to see you in Santa Fe & if you possibly change your mind, address is: Hotel La Fonda, Santa Fe, New Mex. for the next two weeks at least. I keep thinking about that idea we had for a couple of murders.” (Highsmith, p.47) Patricia Highsmith’s …
It suffices to understand the mirror stage in this context as an identification, in the full sense analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes [assume] an image—an image that is seemingly predestined to have an effect at this phase, as …
UPDATE: This essay was nominated for a 2017 Pushcart Prize. Thank you to Bernard Meisler at Sensitive Skin. Sensitive Skin Magazine published my essay Jack the Ripper, Performance, Participation, Fans and Trolls. The introduction is reproduced below, but you can read the full essay HERE. “During the autumn of 1888, the …
FICTION ADVOCATE’S Brian Hurley interviewed James Reich about his latest novel Mistah Kurtz! A Prelude to Heart of Darkness (Anti-Oedipus Press). Read the Q&A HERE.
Galeano Lives! Painting a Zapatista Teacher from Schools for Chiapas on Vimeo. In solidarity with the Zapatistas and Schools for Chiapas, I dedicate this Mexican Independence Day to the recognition that independence, if it is an honest idea, is not monolithic, that it contains pluralities. The Zapatistas want a world …
Literary magazine site The Rumpus published James Reich’s review of Dodie Bellamy’s When The Sick Rule The World. Here’s an extract, and a link to the full review, that itself garnered praise from The Poetry Foundation. “Dodie Bellamy’s latest work, When The Sick Rule The World, is a series of biting, …
Published in full at the literary/cultural magazine The Weeklings: “Arthur Cravan Cravan’s father, Otho Lloyd, was the brother of Oscar Wilde’s beard/wife Constance; therefore, Cravan was Wilde’s nephew. Throughout his turbulent and transnational life, Cravan assumed and performed multiple aliases, of which several —Dorian Hope, Sebastian Hope and B. Holland— are …
NORTHERN ZAPATISTA: New work at Bold Type Magazine. Bush-Clinton, Resistance to Neoliberalism, Hillary’s prevarication over TPP, what the pundits don’t get about the nature of the leftward swing of the north, understood through the indigenous revolutions in the south…zeitgeist, history and holograms… (Extract)…Now we come to the key to understanding …
Pete Campbell: American Sniper by James Reich was first published as one of a series of Mad Men ‘eulogies’ by The Weeklings, and was subsequently picked up by Salon.com and The Good Men Project. “It took me a while to like Pete Campbell. Campbell, as anonymous as a soup can, …
It’s ninety years since André Breton — re Surrealism and the extravagant possibilities of ‘marvelous’ literature — wrote: “At an early age children are weaned on the marvelous, and later on they fail to retain a sufficient virginity of mind to thoroughly enjoy fairy tales. No matter how charming they …
Glenn Branca and the Lost History of Cyberpunk James Reich, Published by Fiction Advocate, May 29, 2014 I first connected to the Internet in 1998. There was nothing hip about it, no mirrorshades, no chilled Kirin, no hacker’s cant, no rude-boy antagonism against the frozen walls of malefic corporations, but …
ON THE BEACH – Dali, Ballard, Neil Young and Cadillac Ranch James Reich, First Published by The End Of Being, August 21, 2011. The warped pataphysical pocket watches of Salvador Dali’s small canvas The Persistence of Memory continued to mark molecular time from 1931 until the spring of 1974, when their position …
H.P. Lovecraft, Herbert West: Reanimator, and Boxing James Reich April 25th, 2014 Of the grotesqueries depicted in Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s Herbert West: Reanimator, beyond the ambivalent reclamation by the Anglo-Saxon war dead of Herbert West the Aryan “scientific automaton”, the “ice-cold intellectual machine”, the most appalling is the appearance of …
FREUD: THE PENULTIMATE BIOGRAPHY by D. Harlan Wilson, Reviewed by James Reich April 10th, 2014 Ceci n’est pas une livre… This is not a book. It is an algorithm. D. Harlan Wilson’s trilogy of Hitler: The Terminal Biography; Freud: The Penultimate Biography; and Douglass: The Lost Autobiography are Magrittesque artifacts. Certainly not biographies in the conventional …
FICTION ADVOCATE February 1st, 1014 Two hundred years ago, in the spring of 1814, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin began her romance with Percy Bysshe Shelley—a romance shadowed by dreadful mortality, but which birthed Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus in 1818. February 1st is the anniversary of her death in 1851. The name Frankenstein as a unit …
INTERNATIONAL TIMES: Malcolm Mc Neill interviewed by James Reich January 23rd, 2014 In February 2014, William S. Burroughs will not be 100 years old; like Ronald Reagan before him, he will be dead. The fingernails will have trailed out a little further and the hair may test subtly at the …
THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN – Frank Browning interviewed by James Reich January 22nd, 2014 To read Frank Browning’s latest book The Monk and the Skeptic: Dialogues on Sex, Faith, and Religion is to eavesdrop on series of confessionals, and to be party to the converse positions and erotic agreements of Browning and Brother …
SPECTRE BY LAURENCE A. RICKELS, Reviewed by James Reich December 19th, 2013 Laurence A. Rickels, The Man With The Golden Pun, has turned his cryptic genius on the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming, specifically the occult, neurotic currents flowing beneath those works where 007 battles SPECTRE, headed—baldly—by Ernst Stavro Blofeld. …
