“The smartest people in the world had gathered in Los Angeles” — Paul Simon
Come for the embarrassing bits on Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Mossad, and Larry Summers, stay for the found poetry. Here’s the wikipedia definition:
Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them (a literary equivalent of a collage[1]) by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning.
And here’s a wonderful example:
“INTELLECTUAL JAZZ,” indeed. I just love the idea of Julie Taymor and Benny Safdie shooting the shit with Joey Gallo and Stephen Wolfram in the in the Galleria at the Holiday Inn in Riverside, California, with David Brooks nearby sipping $78 worth of bourbon on the rocks. Maybe they were able to get in some golf in between the mutual autograph signings.
One fun thing about this email archive is that it contains some entire books! In particular, I came across this one by Paul Krassner, a guy I’ve never heard of . . . ummm, ok, he was a leftist political writer and comedian. I have no idea how he got looped into the Jeffrey Epstein orbit. The disgraced financier corresponded with Steve Bannon and Paul Krassner, but never at the same time, I guess. He played both sides of the street.
Or maybe Bannon and Krassner bonded at some event in a motel in Riverside, California? I’m picturing a 70s-style cocktail lounge with Bill Murray in the corner, crooning the theme from Star Wars.
But I digress. This Krassner book is really entertaining! I can’t say I read the whole thing, but check out the bit about Robin Williams at the Harlan Ellison roast. Good stuff.
Or if you want to read something more cringeworthy, check out this book proposal by oil-company heir Gordon Getty. You’ll be interested to hear that it’s mostly about his ideas in economics. It turns out that he’s “a big free market fan.” Who’d a thunk it? On the plus side, he believes in innovation, qualified by “We’ll have to find some way to face the risks and manage them. This book doesn’t say how. It will open that can of worms, and others too, and try to track some but not all to their destinations. One look leads to another.” This book proposal is 132 pages long! Ummm . . . it seems that he finally published it! And you can buy it on Amazon for a mere $24.99. Dude’s so rich, you think he’d just give the book away, but I guess you don’t get rich by giving things away. Larry Summers is rich too, but this didn’t stop him and his wife from debasing themselves to a sex offender to try to squeeze out money for his wife’s project.
OK, back to the found poetry! Check this out:
Come and Mgggggggeet it!
Yup, these are our overlords. “Woody Allen talks about the human condition with Linguist Noam Chomsky.” I guess they never filmed that one?
But here’s my question for you. I came across this one-page mini-essay entitled, “President Obama and Self-deception.” It’s some amateur political analysis with a little bit of racism throw in. Did Epstein write this one himself? If not, I wonder who sent it to him.
P.S. Completely unrelated, except for yet another example of the world going to hell in a handbasket, is this horrible story.
I’d just like to point out that “Mission Inn Hotel and Spa” can and *should* be sung to the tune of ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’
If you want to, you can pick me up at the lost and found
But I can’t tell you whether to keep walking or turn around
You see I just know I’m lost, but I don’t know where I am or will be
But perhaps that’s something for you to find out and try to see
And if you do just that, maybe that’s how and where we’ll meet
I won’t be at some office in a building located at some street
It will be in a moment that something resonates and rings true
It’s there that you can find me, and perhaps I can find you
OK, I actually lived in Riverside for two unpleasant years in the 80s, and even then I wondered what was the thing about the Mission Inn. I had to check it out, of course, and it was a bit quaint, but otherwise nothing much. And Riverside? Is this an example out of Tom Schelling, where a nothing place becomes important because it becomes a node of shared expectations or something? Or maybe it’s simply that, if you’re in Riverside for some reason, the Mission Inn is probably as much a draw as anywhere else.
Peter:
There’s more to the story (although not about Riverside, California). Stay tuned.
Paul Krassner was, in his time, a rather big deal to a certain subculture. Something like the Jon Stewart of his day. There was an “anti-establishment” flavor to his work that might be discussed with Bannon, in a kind of game-recognizes-game comparison. Not exactly, but I could it see it happening. I recall some of those left-wing writers would sometimes talk about right-wing media, and what they saw which worked in that media, and if they could adapt some of the ideas for left-wing media.
+1 (You beat me to it) The Realist was great but not well known.
Seth:
The interesting thing to me was not so much Krassner (except for the fact that he had some really entertaining stories in that memoir) but rather how savvy Epstein was in corresponding with all these people who just seemed to assume that he was agreeing with them politically. Noam Chomsky thinks Epstein is a lefty, Larry “doesn’t know the global sex ratio” Summers thinks Epstein is a sensible moderate, Paul Krassner thinks Epstein is anti-establishment, Peter Thiel and Steve Bannon think Epstein is fascist-friendly, etc. Meanwhile Epstein’s just trying to keep his the balls in the air and stay out of jail, while having the attention span of a flea.
I would add that we used to hawk “The Realist” by having copies peeking out from trench coats, and instead of “extra extra” we would shout “sex, dopes and lies”. It was a different time!
I find it interesting that the linked piece on Obama trashes Larry Summers and the Clintons, so did whoever sent it think Epstein shared that view of them?
Wonks:
As I wrote in a comment above, I was impressed at how savvy Epstein was in corresponding with all these people who just seemed to assume that he was agreeing with them politically. Noam Chomsky thinks Epstein is a lefty, Larry “doesn’t know the global sex ratio” Summers thinks Epstein is a sensible moderate, Paul Krassner thinks Epstein is anti-establishment, Peter Thiel and Steve Bannon think Epstein is fascist-friendly, etc. My guess is that Epstein didn’t respect any of these guys!
In the essay on Barack Obama: where is the racism?
“He had all the benefits of outbreeding–tall, good looking and very bright.”
P.S. I clicked on your name and I see you wrote a post on redistricting. Along those lines, you might want to read this post where I discuss some reasons why redistricting has become so much more of a problem in the past thirty years.
My guess is that’s Bob Trivers—the revolutionary evolutionary himself. Trivers appears in Epstein’s email trove discussing science and politics. Trivers is brilliant, iconoclastic, and a great storyteller. His groundbreaking theories on parental investment, sexual selection, parent-offspring conflict, and self-deception make him one of the most influential evolutionary biologists of the past century. He’s also done great work exposing fraud in science (https://www.science.org/content/article/controversial-dance-paper-finally-retracted). Deception and self-deception, this essay’s theme, is one of his more recent research topics (talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMaZZEDTtnY).
Iconoclast, yes. Trivers published a paper with Huey Newton on self-deception:
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/678175