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(1) “Luckily, he had plenty to choose from. As a Sunday Times location report explained, ‘Bowie hates aircraft so he mostly travels across the States by train, carrying his mobile bibliotheque in special trunks which open out with all his books neatly displayed on shelves. In New Mexico the volumes dealt mainly with the occult, his current enthusiasm.’ This portable library stored fifteen hundred titles – enough to make Clark’s later observation to a journalist that Bowie ‘really read a lot’ while making The Man Who Fell To Earth seem a bit like an understatement.”
(2) “Bowie underperformed at school and left in 1963 with just one qualification to his name – a basic O level in art. Given the wide range of interests he subsequently cultivated, this suggests not laziness or an inability to retain information so much as impatience with formal education. Like many autodidacts, Bowie realized early on that he enjoyed teaching himself much more than he enjoyed being taught. And he took huge pleasure in passing on what he had learned to others: when he loved a book, friends say, he would proselytize passionately on its behalf.”
(3) “’I never became who I should have been until maybe twelve or fifteen years ago,’ he told talk-show host Michael Parkinson in 2002. ‘I spent an awful lot of my life…actually looking for myself, understanding what I existed for and what made me happy in life and who exactly I was and what were the parts of myself that I was trying to hide from.’ The role that reading played in this quest can’t be underestimated. Because reading is, among much else, an escape – into other people, other perspectives, other consciousnesses. It takes you out of yourself, only to out you back there infinitely enriched.”
(4) “This kind of thinking was fashionable – indeed, everywhere – in the late-‘60s pop-intellectual circles. It’s there in Colin Wilson; in hippie favorites Hermann Hesse and H. P. Lovecraft; and in the then bestselling novelist John Fowles’s 1964 collection of philosophical maxims The Aristos, which draws on Heraclitus to posit an ‘elect’ body of supermen who advance society in the face of a lumpen, ignoble mass content merely to exist. It’s also there in Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier’s treasury of conspiracist nonsense The Morning of the Magicians, translated into English in 1963 and a palpable influence on “Quicksand” from 1971’s Hunky Dory. For Bowie, there may have been a personal dimension to this. The half brother he adored as a child developed schizophrenia in his twenties and spent much of his life in the hospital. In the Daily Telegraph the psychologist Oliver James wrote that Bowie ‘often wondered why he was ‘chosen’ for greatness and Terry for madness. I don’t think Bowie necessarily thought of himself at this stage as great or gifted. But he would have been aware that he was quick and bright; more charming, ambitious, and sexually charismatic than most of his peers.”
(5) “A book that isn’t on Bowie’s list but probably should be is the Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer’s memoir of his stint as tutor to the fourteenth Dalai Lama, Seven Years in Tibet, which Bowie named a song for on his 1997 album Earthling, telling a journalist around this time that it had been a very influential book for him when he was nineteen and had left a lasting impression. In the years to come David Jones would enfold writers like Harrer and David Kipp into the ‘Orientalist pioneer’ side of his David Bowie persona.”// Did Bowie read this? How many times did he say Bowie claim to have read a book he hadn’t read?
(6) “As the fog of drugs descended during 1974’s Diamond Dogs/Philly Dogs tour, this business of persona construction became increasingly fraught. The Thin White Duke character from the 1976 album Station to Station compounds all manner of unsavory types, from the nineteenth-century magus Eliphas Levi (who makes the list) to the openly fascist Norwegian modernist writer Knut Hamsun (who doesn’t, though I’m convinced Bowie read him around this time) and occultist’s occultist Aleister Crowley (who doesn’t feature either – surprisingly, given how obsessed Bowie was with him). Funnily enough, none of the occult-or Nazi-themed books it’s often claimed that Bowie read while he was cracking up in Los Angeles in the mid-‘70s is there. There’s no sign of The Morning of the Magicians, Israel Regardie’s The Golden Dawn, Trevor Ravenscroft’s The Spear of Destiny, or Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defense. How to explain their absence? One possible explanation is that Bowie simply didn’t want to revisit what he later came to regard as an awful, depressing period in his life by including a load of mostly dumb books that reminded him of it, however much they’d meant to him when he was out of his gourd.” // One of the rare remix artists that I was partial to pre-SZ was The Thin White Duke./ These books embarrass him?
(7) "He also liked true-crime books such as Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry's bestselling Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, which Tina Brown saw in his hotel room with a half-eaten piece of cheese balanced on the cover when she went to Los Angeles to interview him for the Sunday Times in July 1975. (Brown calls the book Manson Murder Trials and doesn't name the author, but she probably means Helter Skelter, as it won the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime book that year.) In 1978 Bowie told Crawdaddy magazine about the extraordinary effect Kafka's Metamorphosis had had on him: 'I had vivid nightmares about that - literal translations of what he was writing about: of enormous bugs flying and lying on their backs and other creepy-crawly dreams. I saw myself become something unrecognizable, a monster.'" // What was Bowie doing, then?
(8) "Bowie had lots of writer friends and enjoyed literary gossip. His friendship with Hanif Kureishi began when the novelist requested permission to use his songs in the BBC's adaptation of his novel The Buddha of Suburbia. 'I thought you'd never ask,' Bowie replied - then provided an entire bespoke soundtrack." // Was Kureishi under a compulsion, here?
(9) William Boyd said of Bowie: "He always said he'd read all my books (and I used to send him the new ones) and yet I am absent from his list. Go figure." //Did Bowie lie about having read all of Boyd's books?
(10) "He looked really good for fifty-five. His hair was dyed ash blond and there were dabs of concealer on the bags under his eyes. But his body was as trim and wiry as ever. He'd finally given up snoking after nunerous failed attempts. I was almost suprised when, two years later, he had his heart attack. This momentous, terrifying event precipitated the great hiatus in Bowie's career - a decade-long stretch during which, give or take the odd guest appearance, he concentrated his energy on being a husband and a father. He also used the time to do what his long-standing producer Tony Visconti described to The Times as 'a phenomenal amount of reading: old English history, *Russian history*, the monarchs of Great Britain - what made them bad and good." // Why the hiatus, and why these books?
(11) "All biography junkies know how unusual it is for successful artists to be successful human beings. After Bowie's death, grieving fans drew comfort from the fact that hardly anyone seemed to have a bad word to say about him. On the contrary, we heard again and again how loyal and living he was, how kind and compassionate, wise and funny." // What about his mistreatment and dehumanization of Terry Burns, his brother?
(12) "The early '70s was a grim, embattled era in England. John Lennon sang in 1970 that the (hippie) dream was over. But 1971 was the year things turned brutish as the alternative society splintered into a mass of competing factions such as the radical-left urban terrorists the Angry Brigade - Britain's answer to Germany's Baader-Meinhof gang - who launched a string of bomb attacks against Establishment targets. Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange came out in the UK in January 1972, five months before The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The following year the director withdrew it from cinemas after receiving death threats; the gesture amplified the film's air of leering menace while saying a good deal about the febrile social climate."
(13) "A Clockwork Orange took [Burgess] three weeks and was inspired by a horrific incident in April 1944 where his first wife, Lynne, pregnant at the time - she subsequently miscarried - was assaulted in a blackout by a group of American soldiers. She'd been on her way home from the London offices of the Ministry of War Transport where she was involved in planning the D-Day landings. A Clockwork Orange is interested in not just what might drive someone to carry out this kind of attack, but also in the ethics of rehabilitation. Can you force someone to be good by torturing them, as per the Ludovico Technique aversion therapy Alex undergoes?"
(14)"If you like this, try: Graham Greene, Brighton Rock."
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(15) "But The Outsider raises too many questions for this to be the end of the matter. Is Meursault a psychopath? What was the nature of his relationship with his mother? Why, having killed the Arab man with his first shot, did he fire four more bullets into his body? Why is the Arab man simply called 'the Arab' throughout? It is a deliberate distancing effect or racism? If the latter, whose racism, Meursault's, or Camus's? There's endless food for thought here about motive, conscience, and the arbitrariness of rules. 'I've always felt comfortable with writers like Camus,' Bowie told Soma in 2003. 'But people would read that as being so negative. And it wasn't! It just made absolute sense, what he had to say.'"
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(16) "As a schoolboy growing up in New Jersey during the 1980s he is tormented for this, which only drives him deeper into himself, deeper into movies about doomsday devices and mutants and magic. There's more to it than that, though. Sci-fi and fantasy are the only genres capable of reflecting the vicious, parallel-universe quality of life in the country Oscar's family comes from, the Dominican Republic, under dictator Rafael Trujillo, compared in the novel to Sauron from The Lord of the Rings. Like Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers, The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao suggests that human affairs are ultimately governed by supernatural, indeed diabolical forces, in this case a curse called fukú, which was placed on the New World by colonizing Europeans. Bowie's nerdery was every bit as epic as Oscar's, although considering how much of his life the singer spent pretending to be an alien there's suprisingly little sci-fi on the V&A list."
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(17) "Despite having a wife and two children, Mishima was openly gay rather than bisexual; he rationalized this paradox in a later autobiographical work, Sun and Steel, as a means of embracing contradiction and collision. (Another key scene in Confessions of a Mask is his first, explosively successful attempt at masturbation, electrified by a painting of St. Sebastian pierced all over by arrows.) To please his ailing mother, his marriage was an arranged one, in traditional Japanese fashion. Among Mishima's requirements were that his bride should be no taller than he; pretty, with a round face; and careful not to disturb him while he worked. Eventually he settled on Yoko Sugiyama, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a popular Japanese painter. Having himself come out as bisexual in 1972, albeit in what was felt to be a publicity stunt, Bowie was still talking up his fluidity four years later. His gay side was mostly dormant, Bowie explained to a nineteen-year-old Cameron Crowe in a deliberately outrageous interview in the September 1976 issue of Playboy, but visiting Japan always roused it reliably: 'There were such beautiful,looking boys over there. Little boys? Not that little. About 18 or 19. They have a wonderful sort of mentality. They're all queens until they reach the age of 25, then suddenly they become samurai, get married and have thousands of children. I love it.'"
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(18) "How, Hitchens argues, can it sustain this pretense when a war criminal of the caliber of Adolf Eichmann (as far as Hitchens sees Kissinger) is permitted to walk free?" // Why this comparison?
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(19) "In 1981, at a party at Bowie's loft in Manhattan, former Blondie bassist Gary Lachman got into an argument with the singer about Colin Wilson. 'He goes around at night and traces pentagrams on people's doorsteps,' Bowie told Lachman. 'He draws down the ectoplasm of dead Nazis and fashions homunculi.' Lachman replied that he didn't think Wilson was into that sort of thing. 'Oh yes he is,' said Bowie. 'I know for a fact that he heads a coven in Cornwall.' When Lachman disagreed again, he was asked to leave by two assistants."
(20) "But for generations of students The Outsider has functioned more or less effectively as a primer on existentialism in its most romantic-heroic mode. And the outsider as defined by Wilson does sound distractingly like Bowie, or at least how Bowie chose to project himself at various points in his career: 'The Outsider is not sure who he is. He has found an "I" but it is not his true "I." His main business is to find his way back to himself.' Over time, Wilson's repertoire expanded to include serial killers, UFOs, Nazis, and the occult - all big Bowie obsessions."
(21) "If you like this, try: Colin Wilson, The Occult: A History."
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(22) "When Achilles refuses to fight one day after an argument with King Agamemnon, Patroclus borrows Achilles's armor and is therefore mistaken for Achilles by both sides. What's more, Patroclus actually derives power from the armor to the point where he starts to assume Achilles's fighting skills and mannerisms."
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(23) "'Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different,' Eliot wrote. (Bowie was frequently candid about how much he took from other artists. 'You can't steal from a thief,' he reassured LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy when Murphy admitted to stealing from Bowie's songs.) Thomas Stearns Eliot grew up in Saint Louis on the banks of the Mississippi and arrived in London in 1914. As a young man he had, like Bowie in the mid-1970s, dabbled in the occult and grown suspicious of democratic politics. In London he married a British woman, Vivienne Haigh-Wood - as Bowie would later marry an American, Angie Barnett - and financed his writing and editing with a job as a bank clerk. In 1921, however, overwork combined with money worries and the stress of coping with Vivienne, who suffered from depression, to trigger a nervous breakdown. To recuperate, Eliot first went to Margate, then to a sanitorium in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he finished writing The Waste Land. (Bowie, too, lived in Lausanne, spending much of the 1980s and '90s at Château du Signal, a fourteen-room mansion built in 1900 for a Russian prince. Lodger and several subsequent Bowie albums were recorded at Mountain Studios, forty minutes' drive away in Montreux.) // Which Russian prince was this?
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(24) "In the world of British postwar children's comics, two titles stood apart from the crowd - The Beano and The Dandy. Though they were both published by the same company, Dundee, Scotland-based D. C. Thomson, The Beano had the edge. It was goofier and zanier. More anarchic. And it had had a good war, mocking the Nazis so viciously that its editor was on Hitler's 'murder list' of figures the führer wanted arrested after his planned invasion of Britain in 1940.
[...] Bowie's lifelong love of comics and graphic novels started with The Beano. So it was fitting and somehow beautiful that on the day of the singer's death the comic honored him by sharing an image of Dennis with an Aladdin Sane stripe on his face."
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(25) "Blown away by the show, Bowie went backstage afterward to congratulate Lou Reed and tell him how great he thought his songs were. The pair chatted amiably for some time. Only later did Bowie realize that Lou Reed had left the band the previous summer and the recipient of his glowing praise had been their swiftly promoted former bass player Doug Yule."
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(26) "According to the laws of kabbalah, man is able to manipulate events in the earthly sphere by connecting to the higher, divine sphere through the mediun of his astral body. When Bowie warns us in 'Breaking Glass' not to look at the carpet because he drew something awful on it, he's referring to the practice - cautioned against by [Eliphas] Levi, who called black magic 'an epidemic of unreason' - of drawing particular combinations of lines and symbols on the floor in order to summon visions and/or assert diabolical control over a person. 'What are you drawing?' the US TV host Dick Cavett asked Bowie in a notorious 1975 edition of his talk show when he noticed his emaciated, nasally congested guest scrawling something on the floor with a cane. 'Your attention,' Bowie replied, quick as a flash."
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(27) "Emaciated and cocaine-addicted, Bowie developed a romantic fixation with Weimar Berlin - a place where, as Isherwood put it, hate had a habit of erupting suddenly out of nowhere. Divining the source of this hate, Bowie created the occult-obsessed Nietzschean overlord the Thin White Duke for his album Station to Station."
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(28) "Zanoni is about Rosicrucianism, a spiritual movement that holds that the world is run by a clandestine network of alchemists and sages possessing special knowledge passed down from ancient civilizations. (In fact, Rosicrucianism and its alleged originator, a knight called Christian Rosenkreuz, were the jokey invention of a seventeenth-century German theologian.) This notion fed into Bowie's cocaine-fueled mid-1970s obsession with UFOs, hermetic magic, and the occult roots of Nazism. As well as being friends with Eliphas Levi, Bulwer-Lytton was a devotee of theosophy, the Eastern-tinged philosophical tradition partly based on Rosicrucianism and founded by another of Bulwer-Lytton's chums, Helena Blavatsky. A Russian mystic, Blavatsky claimed to have traveled alone in Tibet, where she acquired esoteric powers from an 'adept' called Master Morya, the reincarnated form of King Arthur, Sir Thomas More, and Akbar the Great, founder of the Mogul empire."
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(29) "Julian Jaynes was an eccentric Princeton psychologist with a tantalizing, if wholly speculative, theory about brain function. Using examples from early literature such as Homer's Iliad, James argued that until three thousand years ago humans didn't experience consciousness as we do. Instead, they performed ordinary human activities (eating, speaking, fighting, building) like automata, without any higher-order subjective awareness or facility for introspection. Why? Because their brains were arranged in a bicameral, or 'two-part,' fashion: the decision-making right hemisphere transmitted auditory hallucinations - voices telling it what to do - to the left, which interpreted these voices as 'gods' and obeyed them accordingly. For millennia this arrangement persisted, bolstered by rigidly hierarchial societies where everyone had a clear sense of purpose." // Odd theory. Who was partial to it?
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(30) "Bowie claimed not to be interested in his own mythology. But this wasn't true. In reality he was his own Geoffrey Braithwaite - an obsessive reader of books about himself, even his ex-wife Angie's. He had always been a hoarder. After his heart attack he started to expand his already vast collection of objects relating to his career, even buying back items like synthesizers he had given away years earlier. Why so randy for relics?"
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(31) "While that too deals with medical misadventure in exotic places, A Grave for a Dolphin is more oblique and ruminative, more interested in local fables and legends and what they might mean. Enormously significant to Bowie personally, it was his inspiration for the famous line in 'Heroes' about wishing he could swim like dolphins can swim. It is the reason the singer had a tattoo of a dolphin on the back of his calf alongside the name 'Iman.'"
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(32) "Bowie's love of comics was reciprocated by comic creators, who recognized him as a kindred spirit and, in some cases, incorporated him into their work. For example, the character of Lucifer in Neil Gaiman's late 1980s/early 1990s comic series Sandman was deliberately drawn to resemble Bowie. 'Neil was adamant that the Devil was David Bowie,' remembered artist Kelley Jones in Joe McCabe's book Hanging Out with the Dream King: Conversations with Neil Gaiman. 'He just said, "He is. You must draw David Bowie."'
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(33) "Did Bowie have something against cats? Black Boy is the second book on his list to include a kitten-killing scene, though this time the instrument of execution is a noose, not a knife. Four-year-old Richard Wright and his brother kill the cat not because they are evil and they want to, but because their stern, soon-to-be-absent father has told them to. Their mother, appalled by what they have done, makes Richard dig its grave. A little earlier she beat him unconscious for accidentally setting fire to his grandmother's house - he just wanted to see how the curtains would look when they burned." // Why did Wright's father instruct him and his brother to kill the kitten? Did he have delusions about the cat, or had he made use of the cat himself? Did an occultist in the kitten get Richard to burn the curtains, hoping that his grandmother's home would be destroyed?
The book in question is Black Boy by Richard Wright (1945).
(34) "As a husband to a black wife and father to a black daughter, Bowie would have read this and winced, then read it again and taken heed. Throughout his career, Bowie championed black artists and criticized their sidelining by mainstream white media. In a 1983 interview on MTV, he complained about the way the channel only showed videos by black acts 'at about two thirty in the morning.'"
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(35) "Ann Petry, The Street (1946)"
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(36) "Ironically, given that Lampedusa died before it was published, The Leopard is one of the great novels about death - and has one of the best death scenes. The seventy-three-year-old prince, once so strong that in rages he bent cutlery without noticing, has been incapacitated by a series of strokes. Immobile in a hotel armchair, his frail legs blanketed, he makes up a balance sheet of his life, setting the pleasurable times against the sad or anxious ones."
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(37) "'So much of what first appealed to me about Buddhism has stayed with me,' he told the Daily Telegraph in 1996. 'The idea of transience, and that there is nothing to hold onto pragmatically, that we do at some point or another have to ket go of that which we consider most dear to us, because it's a very short life.' After Bowie's death, his body was cremated in a Buddhist ceremony in Bali."
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(38) "Charles White, The Life and Times of Little Richard (1984)"
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(39) "If you like this, try: Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" // Just noticed the "K," here.
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(40) "Bowie seems to have viewed gnosticism as an active religion, not a dusty museum artifact. In a 1997 interview with Q he mentioned an 'abiding need in me to vacillate between atheism or a kind of Gnosticism...What I need is to find a balance, spiritually, with the way I live and my demise.' More than any other book on the list, The Gnostic Gospels would have helped him achieve that goal."
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(41) "If you like this, try: Truman Capote, Music for Chameleons"
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(42) "A second trip in April 1976, with a bigger party including Iggy Pop, was more problematic. The group was escorted iff the Warsaw-Moscow train at the border by KGB guards. Bowie and Pop were strip-searched, the KGB's suspicions having been roused by books on Goebbels and Albert Speer that Bowie had brough with them in his portable library."
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(43) "Thomson was living in Rome in 1997 when he got a call from Interview magazine asking if he wanted to take part in a new series where famous people interviewed much less famous people. Knowing at once which role he would be occupying, Thomson asked who would be interviewing him. 'David Bowie,' came the reply. The singer had enjoyed The Insult so much, he wanted to meet its author. 'I waited for the magazine to call again, as they had promised to,' Thomson remembered in a funny piece for The Guardian, 'but the days went by, and then the weeks, and the phone didn't ring. The interview never took place. I never did meet, or even talk to, Bowie.'"
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(44) "The devil has all the best tunes. And in Bulgakov's much-loved satire of Stalinist Russia, he also has his Bowie-like wonky eyes - one black and one green." // The devil has heterochromia, like Bowie and Dog.
(45) "Manuscripts don't burn, Woland famously tells the Master, Bukgakov's way of suggesting that truth will always triumph over attempts to suppress it. But he deliberately burned an early manuscript of The Master and Margarita, terrified that it would be discovered by Stalin's secret police. He rewrote it from memory and was still dictating revisions to his wife on his deathbed. It wasn't published until 1966, at which point it caused a sensation and became a must-read in hip circles. It inspired Mick Jagger to write 'Synpathy for the Devil' and its combination of occultism, antipsychiatry, political allegory, and slapstick comedy was plainly *catnip* to Bowie."
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(46) "Nella Larsen, Passing (1929)"
(47) "If you like this, try: Carla Kaplan, Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance"
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(48) "When David Bowie commissioned Belgian artist Guy Peellaert to design the cover for Diamond Dogs he instructed him to create a 'freak show' in which Peellaert's 'dog-man' depiction of Bowie could be displayed."
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(49) "Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (1939)" // Evelyn Waugh "Vile Bodies."
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(50) "Although she was released from the notorious Kolyma gulag in 1949, Ginzburg remained in exile in the town of Magadan, where she remarried, her first husband having died during her imprisonment, and adopted a daughter. She was 'rehabilitated' in 1955, eventually moving to Moscow, where she wrote Journey into the Whirlwind and a second volume, Within the Whirlwind, published in 1982."
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(51) "Dos Passos put his all into researching the books to make them as authentic as possible. Malcolm Cowley remembers the way he traveled across America by train, visiting cotton mills in Carolina, coal fields in Kentucky - anywhere he felt there was likely to be social ferment. It's hard to believe that by the 1960s this crusader for social justice had swapped his Marxism for and extreme brand of right-wing libertarianism, writing for the National Review and campaigning for Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon."
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(52) "Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (1986)"
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(53) "Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death (1963)"
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(54) "'We go every fortnight and we take a hamper of sandwiches and apples, new shirts, and fresh stuff. Take his laundry. And he's always very happy to see us but he never has anything to say. Just lies there on the lawn all day, looking at the sky.' - David Bowie on visiting his half brother, Terry, in the hospital." // Is this actually true? Terry was happy, but said nothing? // This chapter suggests R. D. Laing's The Divided Self.
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(55) "When Bowie writes about how he'd rather hang out with 'madmen' than perish with the sad men roaming free, he's echoing Laing's belief that 'our' normal state is a rejection of our ecstatic potential. Laing identifies schizophrenia as a state of transcendence that ordinary squares don't understand, a tributary of nostalgia, childhood-obsessed endless-summer dream state celebrated in acid reveries such as the Beatles' 'Strawberry Fields Forever,' Pink Floyd's 'See Emily Play' (covered by Bowie on Pin Ups) and pre-RCA Bowie efforts like 'When I'm Five' and 'There Is A Happy Land.' In middle age, Bowie would confirm what many had long suspected: that his restless creativity was a way of harnessing a mania that might otherwise present as madness: 'One puts oneself through such psychological damage in trying to avoid the threat of insanity,' he admitted to the BBC in 1993. 'I felt I was the lucky one [in my family] because I was an artist and it would never happen to me because I could put all my psychological excesses into my music and *then I could always be throwing it off.'*"// He hardly spent time with Terry, though, and he offered to pay for him, but didn't keep his word.
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(56) "If you like this, try: Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds"
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(57) "Did David Bowie have fascist sympathies? It's one of those hardy perennial questions. We know his mother, Peggy, had a brief flirtation with Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists in her early twenties and that a regular columnist in the movement's official newspaper The Blackshirt went by the name of Alexander Bowie. The Ziggy Stardust 'lightning bolt' symbol is remarkably similar to the BUF's logo - but then, it also resembles the logo designed by Elvis Presley to illustrate his mantra, 'taking care of business;' and in Mick Rock's Moonage Daydream Bowie says it was based on a 'High Voltage' sign he saw on a fuse box. In 1976, Bowie gave what looked like a Nazi salute to waiting fans at London's Victoria Station. Even worse, in an interview with Playboy that year he declared: 'I think Britain could benefit from a fascist leader,' and, 'Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.'" // This is in a chapter suggesting Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.
(58) "If you like this, try: Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times"
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(59) "For Bowie, creation went hand in hand with destruction, or at least disruption. 'To cause an art movement, you have to set something up and then destroy it,' he told NME's Lisa Robinson in 1976."// This quote is a disgusting, and untrue statement.
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(60) "I would be surprised if Bowie's favorite story in this collection wasn't 'Dead as They Come.' A loquacious businessman's account of his deranged obsession with 'Helen,' a clothes-shop mannequin he brings home, cooks for, confides in, and has increasingly violent sex with, it unspools with the deadpan savagery of a monologue by Bowie's hero Peter Cook."
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(61) "If you like this, try: Henry Pu Yi, The Last Manchu: The Autobiography of Henry Pu Yi, Last Emperor of China"
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(62) "(In fact, Wolf failed to supply the Stasi with interesting enough information and her file was closed in 1962. She wrote about the experience many years later in a self-lacerating memoir, City of Angels: or, the Overcoat of Dr. Freud.)"
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End of book entry.
(2) “Bowie underperformed at school and left in 1963 with just one qualification to his name – a basic O level in art. Given the wide range of interests he subsequently cultivated, this suggests not laziness or an inability to retain information so much as impatience with formal education. Like many autodidacts, Bowie realized early on that he enjoyed teaching himself much more than he enjoyed being taught. And he took huge pleasure in passing on what he had learned to others: when he loved a book, friends say, he would proselytize passionately on its behalf.”
(3) “’I never became who I should have been until maybe twelve or fifteen years ago,’ he told talk-show host Michael Parkinson in 2002. ‘I spent an awful lot of my life…actually looking for myself, understanding what I existed for and what made me happy in life and who exactly I was and what were the parts of myself that I was trying to hide from.’ The role that reading played in this quest can’t be underestimated. Because reading is, among much else, an escape – into other people, other perspectives, other consciousnesses. It takes you out of yourself, only to out you back there infinitely enriched.”
(4) “This kind of thinking was fashionable – indeed, everywhere – in the late-‘60s pop-intellectual circles. It’s there in Colin Wilson; in hippie favorites Hermann Hesse and H. P. Lovecraft; and in the then bestselling novelist John Fowles’s 1964 collection of philosophical maxims The Aristos, which draws on Heraclitus to posit an ‘elect’ body of supermen who advance society in the face of a lumpen, ignoble mass content merely to exist. It’s also there in Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier’s treasury of conspiracist nonsense The Morning of the Magicians, translated into English in 1963 and a palpable influence on “Quicksand” from 1971’s Hunky Dory. For Bowie, there may have been a personal dimension to this. The half brother he adored as a child developed schizophrenia in his twenties and spent much of his life in the hospital. In the Daily Telegraph the psychologist Oliver James wrote that Bowie ‘often wondered why he was ‘chosen’ for greatness and Terry for madness. I don’t think Bowie necessarily thought of himself at this stage as great or gifted. But he would have been aware that he was quick and bright; more charming, ambitious, and sexually charismatic than most of his peers.”
(5) “A book that isn’t on Bowie’s list but probably should be is the Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer’s memoir of his stint as tutor to the fourteenth Dalai Lama, Seven Years in Tibet, which Bowie named a song for on his 1997 album Earthling, telling a journalist around this time that it had been a very influential book for him when he was nineteen and had left a lasting impression. In the years to come David Jones would enfold writers like Harrer and David Kipp into the ‘Orientalist pioneer’ side of his David Bowie persona.”// Did Bowie read this? How many times did he say Bowie claim to have read a book he hadn’t read?
(6) “As the fog of drugs descended during 1974’s Diamond Dogs/Philly Dogs tour, this business of persona construction became increasingly fraught. The Thin White Duke character from the 1976 album Station to Station compounds all manner of unsavory types, from the nineteenth-century magus Eliphas Levi (who makes the list) to the openly fascist Norwegian modernist writer Knut Hamsun (who doesn’t, though I’m convinced Bowie read him around this time) and occultist’s occultist Aleister Crowley (who doesn’t feature either – surprisingly, given how obsessed Bowie was with him). Funnily enough, none of the occult-or Nazi-themed books it’s often claimed that Bowie read while he was cracking up in Los Angeles in the mid-‘70s is there. There’s no sign of The Morning of the Magicians, Israel Regardie’s The Golden Dawn, Trevor Ravenscroft’s The Spear of Destiny, or Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defense. How to explain their absence? One possible explanation is that Bowie simply didn’t want to revisit what he later came to regard as an awful, depressing period in his life by including a load of mostly dumb books that reminded him of it, however much they’d meant to him when he was out of his gourd.” // One of the rare remix artists that I was partial to pre-SZ was The Thin White Duke./ These books embarrass him?
(7) "He also liked true-crime books such as Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry's bestselling Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, which Tina Brown saw in his hotel room with a half-eaten piece of cheese balanced on the cover when she went to Los Angeles to interview him for the Sunday Times in July 1975. (Brown calls the book Manson Murder Trials and doesn't name the author, but she probably means Helter Skelter, as it won the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime book that year.) In 1978 Bowie told Crawdaddy magazine about the extraordinary effect Kafka's Metamorphosis had had on him: 'I had vivid nightmares about that - literal translations of what he was writing about: of enormous bugs flying and lying on their backs and other creepy-crawly dreams. I saw myself become something unrecognizable, a monster.'" // What was Bowie doing, then?
(8) "Bowie had lots of writer friends and enjoyed literary gossip. His friendship with Hanif Kureishi began when the novelist requested permission to use his songs in the BBC's adaptation of his novel The Buddha of Suburbia. 'I thought you'd never ask,' Bowie replied - then provided an entire bespoke soundtrack." // Was Kureishi under a compulsion, here?
(9) William Boyd said of Bowie: "He always said he'd read all my books (and I used to send him the new ones) and yet I am absent from his list. Go figure." //Did Bowie lie about having read all of Boyd's books?
(10) "He looked really good for fifty-five. His hair was dyed ash blond and there were dabs of concealer on the bags under his eyes. But his body was as trim and wiry as ever. He'd finally given up snoking after nunerous failed attempts. I was almost suprised when, two years later, he had his heart attack. This momentous, terrifying event precipitated the great hiatus in Bowie's career - a decade-long stretch during which, give or take the odd guest appearance, he concentrated his energy on being a husband and a father. He also used the time to do what his long-standing producer Tony Visconti described to The Times as 'a phenomenal amount of reading: old English history, *Russian history*, the monarchs of Great Britain - what made them bad and good." // Why the hiatus, and why these books?
(11) "All biography junkies know how unusual it is for successful artists to be successful human beings. After Bowie's death, grieving fans drew comfort from the fact that hardly anyone seemed to have a bad word to say about him. On the contrary, we heard again and again how loyal and living he was, how kind and compassionate, wise and funny." // What about his mistreatment and dehumanization of Terry Burns, his brother?
(12) "The early '70s was a grim, embattled era in England. John Lennon sang in 1970 that the (hippie) dream was over. But 1971 was the year things turned brutish as the alternative society splintered into a mass of competing factions such as the radical-left urban terrorists the Angry Brigade - Britain's answer to Germany's Baader-Meinhof gang - who launched a string of bomb attacks against Establishment targets. Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange came out in the UK in January 1972, five months before The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The following year the director withdrew it from cinemas after receiving death threats; the gesture amplified the film's air of leering menace while saying a good deal about the febrile social climate."
(13) "A Clockwork Orange took [Burgess] three weeks and was inspired by a horrific incident in April 1944 where his first wife, Lynne, pregnant at the time - she subsequently miscarried - was assaulted in a blackout by a group of American soldiers. She'd been on her way home from the London offices of the Ministry of War Transport where she was involved in planning the D-Day landings. A Clockwork Orange is interested in not just what might drive someone to carry out this kind of attack, but also in the ethics of rehabilitation. Can you force someone to be good by torturing them, as per the Ludovico Technique aversion therapy Alex undergoes?"
(14)"If you like this, try: Graham Greene, Brighton Rock."
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(15) "But The Outsider raises too many questions for this to be the end of the matter. Is Meursault a psychopath? What was the nature of his relationship with his mother? Why, having killed the Arab man with his first shot, did he fire four more bullets into his body? Why is the Arab man simply called 'the Arab' throughout? It is a deliberate distancing effect or racism? If the latter, whose racism, Meursault's, or Camus's? There's endless food for thought here about motive, conscience, and the arbitrariness of rules. 'I've always felt comfortable with writers like Camus,' Bowie told Soma in 2003. 'But people would read that as being so negative. And it wasn't! It just made absolute sense, what he had to say.'"
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(16) "As a schoolboy growing up in New Jersey during the 1980s he is tormented for this, which only drives him deeper into himself, deeper into movies about doomsday devices and mutants and magic. There's more to it than that, though. Sci-fi and fantasy are the only genres capable of reflecting the vicious, parallel-universe quality of life in the country Oscar's family comes from, the Dominican Republic, under dictator Rafael Trujillo, compared in the novel to Sauron from The Lord of the Rings. Like Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers, The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao suggests that human affairs are ultimately governed by supernatural, indeed diabolical forces, in this case a curse called fukú, which was placed on the New World by colonizing Europeans. Bowie's nerdery was every bit as epic as Oscar's, although considering how much of his life the singer spent pretending to be an alien there's suprisingly little sci-fi on the V&A list."
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(17) "Despite having a wife and two children, Mishima was openly gay rather than bisexual; he rationalized this paradox in a later autobiographical work, Sun and Steel, as a means of embracing contradiction and collision. (Another key scene in Confessions of a Mask is his first, explosively successful attempt at masturbation, electrified by a painting of St. Sebastian pierced all over by arrows.) To please his ailing mother, his marriage was an arranged one, in traditional Japanese fashion. Among Mishima's requirements were that his bride should be no taller than he; pretty, with a round face; and careful not to disturb him while he worked. Eventually he settled on Yoko Sugiyama, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a popular Japanese painter. Having himself come out as bisexual in 1972, albeit in what was felt to be a publicity stunt, Bowie was still talking up his fluidity four years later. His gay side was mostly dormant, Bowie explained to a nineteen-year-old Cameron Crowe in a deliberately outrageous interview in the September 1976 issue of Playboy, but visiting Japan always roused it reliably: 'There were such beautiful,looking boys over there. Little boys? Not that little. About 18 or 19. They have a wonderful sort of mentality. They're all queens until they reach the age of 25, then suddenly they become samurai, get married and have thousands of children. I love it.'"
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(18) "How, Hitchens argues, can it sustain this pretense when a war criminal of the caliber of Adolf Eichmann (as far as Hitchens sees Kissinger) is permitted to walk free?" // Why this comparison?
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(19) "In 1981, at a party at Bowie's loft in Manhattan, former Blondie bassist Gary Lachman got into an argument with the singer about Colin Wilson. 'He goes around at night and traces pentagrams on people's doorsteps,' Bowie told Lachman. 'He draws down the ectoplasm of dead Nazis and fashions homunculi.' Lachman replied that he didn't think Wilson was into that sort of thing. 'Oh yes he is,' said Bowie. 'I know for a fact that he heads a coven in Cornwall.' When Lachman disagreed again, he was asked to leave by two assistants."
(20) "But for generations of students The Outsider has functioned more or less effectively as a primer on existentialism in its most romantic-heroic mode. And the outsider as defined by Wilson does sound distractingly like Bowie, or at least how Bowie chose to project himself at various points in his career: 'The Outsider is not sure who he is. He has found an "I" but it is not his true "I." His main business is to find his way back to himself.' Over time, Wilson's repertoire expanded to include serial killers, UFOs, Nazis, and the occult - all big Bowie obsessions."
(21) "If you like this, try: Colin Wilson, The Occult: A History."
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(22) "When Achilles refuses to fight one day after an argument with King Agamemnon, Patroclus borrows Achilles's armor and is therefore mistaken for Achilles by both sides. What's more, Patroclus actually derives power from the armor to the point where he starts to assume Achilles's fighting skills and mannerisms."
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(23) "'Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different,' Eliot wrote. (Bowie was frequently candid about how much he took from other artists. 'You can't steal from a thief,' he reassured LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy when Murphy admitted to stealing from Bowie's songs.) Thomas Stearns Eliot grew up in Saint Louis on the banks of the Mississippi and arrived in London in 1914. As a young man he had, like Bowie in the mid-1970s, dabbled in the occult and grown suspicious of democratic politics. In London he married a British woman, Vivienne Haigh-Wood - as Bowie would later marry an American, Angie Barnett - and financed his writing and editing with a job as a bank clerk. In 1921, however, overwork combined with money worries and the stress of coping with Vivienne, who suffered from depression, to trigger a nervous breakdown. To recuperate, Eliot first went to Margate, then to a sanitorium in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he finished writing The Waste Land. (Bowie, too, lived in Lausanne, spending much of the 1980s and '90s at Château du Signal, a fourteen-room mansion built in 1900 for a Russian prince. Lodger and several subsequent Bowie albums were recorded at Mountain Studios, forty minutes' drive away in Montreux.) // Which Russian prince was this?
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(24) "In the world of British postwar children's comics, two titles stood apart from the crowd - The Beano and The Dandy. Though they were both published by the same company, Dundee, Scotland-based D. C. Thomson, The Beano had the edge. It was goofier and zanier. More anarchic. And it had had a good war, mocking the Nazis so viciously that its editor was on Hitler's 'murder list' of figures the führer wanted arrested after his planned invasion of Britain in 1940.
[...] Bowie's lifelong love of comics and graphic novels started with The Beano. So it was fitting and somehow beautiful that on the day of the singer's death the comic honored him by sharing an image of Dennis with an Aladdin Sane stripe on his face."
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(25) "Blown away by the show, Bowie went backstage afterward to congratulate Lou Reed and tell him how great he thought his songs were. The pair chatted amiably for some time. Only later did Bowie realize that Lou Reed had left the band the previous summer and the recipient of his glowing praise had been their swiftly promoted former bass player Doug Yule."
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(26) "According to the laws of kabbalah, man is able to manipulate events in the earthly sphere by connecting to the higher, divine sphere through the mediun of his astral body. When Bowie warns us in 'Breaking Glass' not to look at the carpet because he drew something awful on it, he's referring to the practice - cautioned against by [Eliphas] Levi, who called black magic 'an epidemic of unreason' - of drawing particular combinations of lines and symbols on the floor in order to summon visions and/or assert diabolical control over a person. 'What are you drawing?' the US TV host Dick Cavett asked Bowie in a notorious 1975 edition of his talk show when he noticed his emaciated, nasally congested guest scrawling something on the floor with a cane. 'Your attention,' Bowie replied, quick as a flash."
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(27) "Emaciated and cocaine-addicted, Bowie developed a romantic fixation with Weimar Berlin - a place where, as Isherwood put it, hate had a habit of erupting suddenly out of nowhere. Divining the source of this hate, Bowie created the occult-obsessed Nietzschean overlord the Thin White Duke for his album Station to Station."
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(28) "Zanoni is about Rosicrucianism, a spiritual movement that holds that the world is run by a clandestine network of alchemists and sages possessing special knowledge passed down from ancient civilizations. (In fact, Rosicrucianism and its alleged originator, a knight called Christian Rosenkreuz, were the jokey invention of a seventeenth-century German theologian.) This notion fed into Bowie's cocaine-fueled mid-1970s obsession with UFOs, hermetic magic, and the occult roots of Nazism. As well as being friends with Eliphas Levi, Bulwer-Lytton was a devotee of theosophy, the Eastern-tinged philosophical tradition partly based on Rosicrucianism and founded by another of Bulwer-Lytton's chums, Helena Blavatsky. A Russian mystic, Blavatsky claimed to have traveled alone in Tibet, where she acquired esoteric powers from an 'adept' called Master Morya, the reincarnated form of King Arthur, Sir Thomas More, and Akbar the Great, founder of the Mogul empire."
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(29) "Julian Jaynes was an eccentric Princeton psychologist with a tantalizing, if wholly speculative, theory about brain function. Using examples from early literature such as Homer's Iliad, James argued that until three thousand years ago humans didn't experience consciousness as we do. Instead, they performed ordinary human activities (eating, speaking, fighting, building) like automata, without any higher-order subjective awareness or facility for introspection. Why? Because their brains were arranged in a bicameral, or 'two-part,' fashion: the decision-making right hemisphere transmitted auditory hallucinations - voices telling it what to do - to the left, which interpreted these voices as 'gods' and obeyed them accordingly. For millennia this arrangement persisted, bolstered by rigidly hierarchial societies where everyone had a clear sense of purpose." // Odd theory. Who was partial to it?
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(30) "Bowie claimed not to be interested in his own mythology. But this wasn't true. In reality he was his own Geoffrey Braithwaite - an obsessive reader of books about himself, even his ex-wife Angie's. He had always been a hoarder. After his heart attack he started to expand his already vast collection of objects relating to his career, even buying back items like synthesizers he had given away years earlier. Why so randy for relics?"
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(31) "While that too deals with medical misadventure in exotic places, A Grave for a Dolphin is more oblique and ruminative, more interested in local fables and legends and what they might mean. Enormously significant to Bowie personally, it was his inspiration for the famous line in 'Heroes' about wishing he could swim like dolphins can swim. It is the reason the singer had a tattoo of a dolphin on the back of his calf alongside the name 'Iman.'"
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(32) "Bowie's love of comics was reciprocated by comic creators, who recognized him as a kindred spirit and, in some cases, incorporated him into their work. For example, the character of Lucifer in Neil Gaiman's late 1980s/early 1990s comic series Sandman was deliberately drawn to resemble Bowie. 'Neil was adamant that the Devil was David Bowie,' remembered artist Kelley Jones in Joe McCabe's book Hanging Out with the Dream King: Conversations with Neil Gaiman. 'He just said, "He is. You must draw David Bowie."'
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(33) "Did Bowie have something against cats? Black Boy is the second book on his list to include a kitten-killing scene, though this time the instrument of execution is a noose, not a knife. Four-year-old Richard Wright and his brother kill the cat not because they are evil and they want to, but because their stern, soon-to-be-absent father has told them to. Their mother, appalled by what they have done, makes Richard dig its grave. A little earlier she beat him unconscious for accidentally setting fire to his grandmother's house - he just wanted to see how the curtains would look when they burned." // Why did Wright's father instruct him and his brother to kill the kitten? Did he have delusions about the cat, or had he made use of the cat himself? Did an occultist in the kitten get Richard to burn the curtains, hoping that his grandmother's home would be destroyed?
The book in question is Black Boy by Richard Wright (1945).
(34) "As a husband to a black wife and father to a black daughter, Bowie would have read this and winced, then read it again and taken heed. Throughout his career, Bowie championed black artists and criticized their sidelining by mainstream white media. In a 1983 interview on MTV, he complained about the way the channel only showed videos by black acts 'at about two thirty in the morning.'"
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(35) "Ann Petry, The Street (1946)"
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(36) "Ironically, given that Lampedusa died before it was published, The Leopard is one of the great novels about death - and has one of the best death scenes. The seventy-three-year-old prince, once so strong that in rages he bent cutlery without noticing, has been incapacitated by a series of strokes. Immobile in a hotel armchair, his frail legs blanketed, he makes up a balance sheet of his life, setting the pleasurable times against the sad or anxious ones."
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(37) "'So much of what first appealed to me about Buddhism has stayed with me,' he told the Daily Telegraph in 1996. 'The idea of transience, and that there is nothing to hold onto pragmatically, that we do at some point or another have to ket go of that which we consider most dear to us, because it's a very short life.' After Bowie's death, his body was cremated in a Buddhist ceremony in Bali."
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(38) "Charles White, The Life and Times of Little Richard (1984)"
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(39) "If you like this, try: Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" // Just noticed the "K," here.
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(40) "Bowie seems to have viewed gnosticism as an active religion, not a dusty museum artifact. In a 1997 interview with Q he mentioned an 'abiding need in me to vacillate between atheism or a kind of Gnosticism...What I need is to find a balance, spiritually, with the way I live and my demise.' More than any other book on the list, The Gnostic Gospels would have helped him achieve that goal."
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(41) "If you like this, try: Truman Capote, Music for Chameleons"
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(42) "A second trip in April 1976, with a bigger party including Iggy Pop, was more problematic. The group was escorted iff the Warsaw-Moscow train at the border by KGB guards. Bowie and Pop were strip-searched, the KGB's suspicions having been roused by books on Goebbels and Albert Speer that Bowie had brough with them in his portable library."
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(43) "Thomson was living in Rome in 1997 when he got a call from Interview magazine asking if he wanted to take part in a new series where famous people interviewed much less famous people. Knowing at once which role he would be occupying, Thomson asked who would be interviewing him. 'David Bowie,' came the reply. The singer had enjoyed The Insult so much, he wanted to meet its author. 'I waited for the magazine to call again, as they had promised to,' Thomson remembered in a funny piece for The Guardian, 'but the days went by, and then the weeks, and the phone didn't ring. The interview never took place. I never did meet, or even talk to, Bowie.'"
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(44) "The devil has all the best tunes. And in Bulgakov's much-loved satire of Stalinist Russia, he also has his Bowie-like wonky eyes - one black and one green." // The devil has heterochromia, like Bowie and Dog.
(45) "Manuscripts don't burn, Woland famously tells the Master, Bukgakov's way of suggesting that truth will always triumph over attempts to suppress it. But he deliberately burned an early manuscript of The Master and Margarita, terrified that it would be discovered by Stalin's secret police. He rewrote it from memory and was still dictating revisions to his wife on his deathbed. It wasn't published until 1966, at which point it caused a sensation and became a must-read in hip circles. It inspired Mick Jagger to write 'Synpathy for the Devil' and its combination of occultism, antipsychiatry, political allegory, and slapstick comedy was plainly *catnip* to Bowie."
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(46) "Nella Larsen, Passing (1929)"
(47) "If you like this, try: Carla Kaplan, Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance"
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(48) "When David Bowie commissioned Belgian artist Guy Peellaert to design the cover for Diamond Dogs he instructed him to create a 'freak show' in which Peellaert's 'dog-man' depiction of Bowie could be displayed."
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(49) "Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (1939)" // Evelyn Waugh "Vile Bodies."
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(50) "Although she was released from the notorious Kolyma gulag in 1949, Ginzburg remained in exile in the town of Magadan, where she remarried, her first husband having died during her imprisonment, and adopted a daughter. She was 'rehabilitated' in 1955, eventually moving to Moscow, where she wrote Journey into the Whirlwind and a second volume, Within the Whirlwind, published in 1982."
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(51) "Dos Passos put his all into researching the books to make them as authentic as possible. Malcolm Cowley remembers the way he traveled across America by train, visiting cotton mills in Carolina, coal fields in Kentucky - anywhere he felt there was likely to be social ferment. It's hard to believe that by the 1960s this crusader for social justice had swapped his Marxism for and extreme brand of right-wing libertarianism, writing for the National Review and campaigning for Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon."
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(52) "Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (1986)"
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(53) "Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death (1963)"
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(54) "'We go every fortnight and we take a hamper of sandwiches and apples, new shirts, and fresh stuff. Take his laundry. And he's always very happy to see us but he never has anything to say. Just lies there on the lawn all day, looking at the sky.' - David Bowie on visiting his half brother, Terry, in the hospital." // Is this actually true? Terry was happy, but said nothing? // This chapter suggests R. D. Laing's The Divided Self.
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(55) "When Bowie writes about how he'd rather hang out with 'madmen' than perish with the sad men roaming free, he's echoing Laing's belief that 'our' normal state is a rejection of our ecstatic potential. Laing identifies schizophrenia as a state of transcendence that ordinary squares don't understand, a tributary of nostalgia, childhood-obsessed endless-summer dream state celebrated in acid reveries such as the Beatles' 'Strawberry Fields Forever,' Pink Floyd's 'See Emily Play' (covered by Bowie on Pin Ups) and pre-RCA Bowie efforts like 'When I'm Five' and 'There Is A Happy Land.' In middle age, Bowie would confirm what many had long suspected: that his restless creativity was a way of harnessing a mania that might otherwise present as madness: 'One puts oneself through such psychological damage in trying to avoid the threat of insanity,' he admitted to the BBC in 1993. 'I felt I was the lucky one [in my family] because I was an artist and it would never happen to me because I could put all my psychological excesses into my music and *then I could always be throwing it off.'*"// He hardly spent time with Terry, though, and he offered to pay for him, but didn't keep his word.
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(56) "If you like this, try: Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds"
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(57) "Did David Bowie have fascist sympathies? It's one of those hardy perennial questions. We know his mother, Peggy, had a brief flirtation with Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists in her early twenties and that a regular columnist in the movement's official newspaper The Blackshirt went by the name of Alexander Bowie. The Ziggy Stardust 'lightning bolt' symbol is remarkably similar to the BUF's logo - but then, it also resembles the logo designed by Elvis Presley to illustrate his mantra, 'taking care of business;' and in Mick Rock's Moonage Daydream Bowie says it was based on a 'High Voltage' sign he saw on a fuse box. In 1976, Bowie gave what looked like a Nazi salute to waiting fans at London's Victoria Station. Even worse, in an interview with Playboy that year he declared: 'I think Britain could benefit from a fascist leader,' and, 'Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.'" // This is in a chapter suggesting Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.
(58) "If you like this, try: Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times"
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(59) "For Bowie, creation went hand in hand with destruction, or at least disruption. 'To cause an art movement, you have to set something up and then destroy it,' he told NME's Lisa Robinson in 1976."// This quote is a disgusting, and untrue statement.
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(60) "I would be surprised if Bowie's favorite story in this collection wasn't 'Dead as They Come.' A loquacious businessman's account of his deranged obsession with 'Helen,' a clothes-shop mannequin he brings home, cooks for, confides in, and has increasingly violent sex with, it unspools with the deadpan savagery of a monologue by Bowie's hero Peter Cook."
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(61) "If you like this, try: Henry Pu Yi, The Last Manchu: The Autobiography of Henry Pu Yi, Last Emperor of China"
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(62) "(In fact, Wolf failed to supply the Stasi with interesting enough information and her file was closed in 1962. She wrote about the experience many years later in a self-lacerating memoir, City of Angels: or, the Overcoat of Dr. Freud.)"
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End of book entry.
