Phillip Freedenberg's and Jeff Walton's AMERICA AND THE CULT OF THE CACTUS BOOTS: A DIAGNOSTIC

I have a very special category on my reading tracker app which I call "On Dead Tree Despite the Pain," which, if I have actually finished a book, actually says more about my regard for said book than, say, whether I've managed to write about it here at Kate of Mind. I was not only interested enough in the book to start it despite the pain I knew it would cause me (long time readers of this here blog know that physical "on dead tree" books are extremely uncomfortable for me to read and trade paperbacks are the worst of all), which I only undertake if there's no other option, but also so engaged by said book that I actually suffered its physical effects just to completely experience it at first hand. 

I'm undertaking a modified "read what you own" type challenge*, and have acquired over the last many years a pretty significant stack of books that I really really really want to read but are either only available on dead tree or are unreasonably priced in digital or audio editions (charging more for an ebook than for a new copy in hardcover or paperback will never be ok), so you're going to see quite a few of these in the next few months.

America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic is a relatively recent acquisition for me, but the very idea of this book and the buzz around it in my very favorite weirdo literary corners of the internet meant that of all the physical books that I'm ready with which to torture myself, this was the one that most elicited cries of "hurt me, daddy" from my imaginal lips. 

I mean, look at it, for a start. And this is just the front cover, mind.

America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic is going to be a very difficult book to talk about because very difficult to do justice to, but it's a book that simply must be discussed at enthusiastic, bewildered, what-the-fuck, best medicine on paper lengths. 

Especially in year one of The Re-Trumpening Muskification, aka the Enshittification of the country about which this novel chiefly concerns itself. 

We learn from the jacket copy that it was written in the last year of our first overtly felonious POTUS' first term, while we all anxiously hoped and waited and worked to get the felon the hell out of there and as we ultimately succeeded (more or less), but the time it now feels like America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots is most needed for is right now.

At least until something even worse happens. 

And look; while this is ultimately a therapeutic and a hopeful read, the fact that this book exists in any form also makes me a little nervous, because the current regime could take some mighty terrible ideas from its pages, if they can persuade anybody with enough smarts and soul to understand it to explain it to them. Like the Total Information Control Initiative, which not only seeks to completely eliminate the written word from humanity's present and future (and even its past inasmuchas once the written word is successfully eliminated, so is most of our collective memory), but has a truly diabolical means of doing so that tells Ray Bradbury's Firemen to not so much hold its beer as go on permanent furlough the better to cross the entire supercontinent of the Americas on foot to fetch a whole new kind of beverage the likes of which do not exist as yet. By which I mean the whole enterprise of destroying books and printing presses and whatnot is not nearly the priority our reading lives have led us to prepare for. Instead, the TICI promulgates a high tech electro-psychotropic screen that the user straps on right over the face, a device so entertaining and so pleasurable to use that nobody (or almost nobody) really needs to be forced to prefer it to reading or possibly even speaking. Supplied free of charge, it is, of course, also subject to constant tinkering and updates to ratchet up its addictive properties and its ability to spy on and later replace the contents of the users' very minds.

I mean, Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. Neurolink, everyone?

Never mind that, kind of like Roko's Basilisk, there's not actually any guarantee that such a thing is even possible given stuff like resource availability and the universe's tendency toward entropy and sheer individual human cussedness and the actual feasibility of getting everybody to always react to the same thing in the same way in a world where, for example, people can have paradoxical reactions to medications and some people are actually repelled by sex and some people are genetically disposed to perceive cilantro as tasting like soap ...

Which, of course, is how, within the world of AatCotCB, at least on its Most Pathetic Level of Reality, there are still some dissidents here and there who cling to their books and underground newspapers and shampoo bottles to read on the toilet, including the novel's dual heroes, Phillip Freedenberg and Jeff Walton, who yes, happen to be the metafictional avatars of the author and visualizer/illustrator of this book. On the Most Pathetic Level of this book's Reality, they are employed at a Buffalo, NY print/lithography shop and have, as the story begins, just recently completed a large order of high quality protest signs that demand we all MAKE AMERICA READ AGAIN and seem destined to reap some terrible consequences at the hands of U.S. President RALPH's new Total Information Control Initiative, rumored even now to be approaching their building. 

While this and related tasks had been ongoing, the pair have been eagerly awaiting the arrival from faraway Slovenia (yes, this is more corona/samizdattery) of a novel by Rick Harsch entitled The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas** an actual book in our own world which, at the time of AatCotCB's writing, could only be acquired by emailing the author, one Rick Harsch, sending him the price and shipping costs via an Internet payment service, and then sitting back and waiting for the author (who is also corona-samizdat's publisher, warehouse manager and shipping clerk) to send the book from Izola, Slovenia to your own dear personal mailing address.

While they waited, they were inspired to begin writing and illustrating AatCotCB, which Harsch had already expressed willingness to publish, both in our real world and in the novel's MPLoR.

But so, even as the pair have begun to conceive of this work, it is already bursting into this work and into their world, sometimes in relatively tame ways like their sudden discovery in the attic of their shop a cool antique radio by which they can occasionally receive "Messages from the Great Beyond," more mundanely regarded as weird bursts of very targeted shortwave radio transmissions from none other than the author of the book they're waiting for and who has already agreed to publish AatCotCB, Harsch, who seems eeriely omniscient about their predicament and eager to warn them not only of the imminent approach of the Total Information Control Initiative but also of the presence, just outside their office door, of a full camera crew preparing to shoot the opening scenes of the film adaptation of AatCotCB.

And then the book starts getting weird. 

Like descriptions of competitive clothes ironing as extreme sport weird. Like a giant, near-infinite information processing network constructed on and between the brains of a vast herd of cattle (unknown whether dairy or beef cattle) living in a vast underground facility in the Midwest weird. Like one of the character's two hands disappearing from his body and much later being found, the hands, living independently and working as a park ranger in Alaska weird. Just a pair of youngish male human hands giving you directions and cleaning the latrines and telling you not to pet the grizzly bears. Ho hum.

And there are illustrations. Glorious, glorious illustrations from the demented genius mind and hand of Jeff Walton, who combines the painstaking, detailed realism of a scientific illustrator with his deep insights into the imagination of his longtime friend, author Phillip Freedenberg and a powerful sense of psychedelic whimsy to create the kind of works that belong, in poster form, on every college kid's dorm room wall and many of which would make utterly amazing tattoos if you could find an artist who could do them justice without taking psychic damage. 

And hey, you ergodic literature fans, you freaks pining for a new House of Leaves-style bibliographic experience, AatCotCB has you covered. See, Phillip and Jeff and sometimes a cute little homunculus of Rick Harsch wind up traveling through the "word tunnels" of AatCotCB, The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas, and an unfinished novel Freedenberg started writing some 20 years ago, and the reader must really on subtle textual clues to determine in which book's lines through which they are currently moving or, occasionally, being chased. And one form of attack they occasionally experience takes the form of a "word fever" in which Phillip begins spouting lines and lines and sometimes pages and pages of surreal... I almost want to call it word salad but it's kind of... word salad that hasn't been tossed yet? So it's got defined layers and just enough hints of connection and is still formed into grammatical units that function like sentences and sometimes even seem to be carrying actual meaning but then seem to collapse into incoherence again and start to feel skippable, but Freedenberg has an uncanny sense for how much patience his readers are bringing to the exercise of reading his word fever symptoms and drops in a few lines that actually communicate something right there to keep one going. 

Or at least it seemed that way to me.

Oh, and there are constant other textual tricks that tempt the reader to page back, sometimes hundreds is pages, to reinterpret a scene, image or illustration, which will be great fun for some and really annoying to others. I thought it was fun, mostly. 

But none of this I've said so far adequately conveys the truly tonic effect of this work. It's not just a celebration of creativity but a cry out for it as one of the only things that can save is from "gestures at everything" and the despair to which the everything counts on us succumbing. The whole reason this book exists is to join up its readers in a Unified Field of free thinking, weirdness for its own sake, and the will to create something new, even if it sucks. Maybe especially if it sucks? These seem like very warm-hearted and forgiving guys, the kind of guys who would work extra hard to find something to praise, some way to encourage the creator of, even the most pedestrian work of fiction/drawing/bit of music/piece of fiber art/whatever as long as it was sincerely offered.

The world needs much more of these guys, and much more from them. But, as we got hung up on saying to each other during my very first personal experiment with psychedelics, "You can do it, too. It's not a show!"

Bring it, my darlings. And yes, that includes you, Phill, Jeff, Rick... Actually, Rick is good. I mean, he's even published a cookbook recently.

*I'm making exceptions for things I've previously requested from my public library that, all but at random from my perspective, suddenly come available, and also for a bunch of books I've been longing to read for years that are available via Kobo+ and are thus suddenly within my budget. But otherwise, it's a stack of trade paperbacks sitting in my reading room and the contents of the ebook reader that shall no longer be named. And believe me, there are years and years worth of TBR on there. The story bundles alone are staggering.

**Which is next on my list of books I'll be reading on dead tree despite the pain, so stay tuned. It will be my first Rick Harsch book. I hope it's as delightful as he is.