Category: Literature

Posted on

Cabaret (Pantages Theatre Toronto, 2001; Theatre Kent 1992)

Pantages Theatre, Toronto, April 23, 2001

“Cabaret”, after all, is still a musical.

You know– those dippy concoctions in which impossibly handsome lumberjacks sing schmaltzy love songs to dainty girls with kerchiefs in their hair while throwing them over hay stacks and pitch-forking in unison. Absurdities, in other words. Something which, in the right context, could be mistaken for a parody of something that is stupid it couldn’t possible exist in an original form.

cabaret129.jpg (31150 bytes)

The author with two members of the “Cabaret” cast, Theatre Kent, Chatham, Ontario (1992).
(Photos from 1992 Theatre Kent production of Cabaret, Chatham, On.)

Yes, you heard it here first: the musical is no more of an “art form” than ceramics or collectible dolls or the can-can.

So Cabaret is still a musical, and so, at some point, Sally Bowles sings a dippy love song about this man (Cliff) just maybe being the one who will turn out to be “different” from all the other one-night stands, and might be that one special person with whom she can build an enduring relationship and it’s obviously a showpiece number, and the audience is expected to applaud at the end of the song even though it occurs in the middle of what is supposed to be a play, a story, a narrative, and even though the guy is gay.

By the way– I have to rant about this for a moment– the theatrical tradition of applauding at the end of a musical number within a theatrical performance is absolutely disgusting, contemptible, idiotic, annoying, and stupid. I hate it. If the drama is worth watching, the last thing in the world you want is for the audience to suddenly break out into applause. The drama is supposed to flow from scene to scene. Contrasts and ironies are developed and intensified. Emotions are pitched. Characters are illuminated. But, suddenly: hey, great singing there Alphonso! Bravo! What a show-stopper! Now, what was the girl doing with the rope around her neck?

Most musicals– however– deserve the interruptions.  They are mostly pabulum, bland confections of trite melodic ditties.

“Cabaret” is not trite.  It’s a very acute, perceptive dissection of the critical period in German history.

But the audience was trained:  they applauded after every song.

Now, in all fairness, most of the singing in Cabaret takes place in the Kit-Kat club, so the applause is not as disruptive as it is for, say, “The Sound of Music”, wherein we all applaud the children going to their bedrooms, or a nun dancing on what is supposed to be a hillside.

As I said, for most musicals– a phony art form if ever there was one– the applause at the end of each song is not really a problem because I never hear it because I rarely go to musicals. Do I really want to see “Oklahoma”? No. Do I think “The Sound of Music” really illuminates the nature of the Nazi terror? Not a chance. Does “Oliver” move me to some kind of state of contemplative bliss? Oh, please…

For the record, I have seen some musicals, live, on-stage, as well as a few on film. Here’s a list that I can remember off-hand:

  • Oklahoma (so very weird)
  • The Producers (delicious and funny, because it mocks the musical)
  • The Sound of Music (compared to “Cabaret”)
  • Fiddler on the Roof (least bad of this lot)
  • Cabaret (a twisted work of dark genius)
  • Hair (a musical with pseudo-rock songs in it.  The Milos Forman movie version is interesting.)
  • Oliver (can’t remember)
  • Showboat (boring, sorry.)
  • Camelot (awful)
  • West Side Story (Natalie Wood’s vocals were recorded by Marni Nixon– need I say anything more about phoniness?)
  • South Pacific (dumb, dumb, dumb)
  • My Fair Lady (who cares)

I have also seen and enjoyed “Jesus Christ Superstar” live and on film, and “Evita” on film, but neither of these are really musicals. They are operas. The word “opera” is death at the box office, so they are advertised as “musicals”. Get it straight: “Jesus Christ Superstar” is an opera, in form and style and design. It has arias and recitatives and the entire narrative is contained in the songs. It is an OPERA. And so is “Evita”.

(Backstage)

Anyway, back to “Cabaret”. “Cabaret” is loosely based on a book by Christopher Isherwood that is a fictionalization of his life in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis. It’s really not a very good book. It’s interesting, and it’s not awful, but it’s not great literature. But he did create some memorable characters and we don’t really have very much good English writing on Berlin in the 1920’s or 30’s so it stands out. In 1951, a guy named John Van Druten thought so too and wrote a drama (not a musical) based on the stories and it was produced on Broadway with Julie Harris and it was deemed a success. In the 1960’s, Hal Prince decided to develop it into a musical and recruited a couple of guys named John Kander and Fred Ebb to create the songs. Joel Grey created an absolutely unforgettable “Emcee”, and in 1966 the Broadway production won 8 Tony awards including “Best Musical”. In 1972, Bob Fosse made it into an exceptionally good film– except for the awful casting of Peter York as “Cliff” and Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles– which won numerous Oscars including “Best Director”. Joel Grey indispensably reprised his role as the Emcee.

The production I saw live at the Pantages was “directed” by Sam Mendes, who directed the film “American Beauty”. Did Sam Mendes actually direct this version? I doubt it. More likely, this staging of Cabaret was based on his original staging, but directed by Rob Marshall.

Now, odd things happen to brilliant talents in our culture. We live in a democratic, free society. The powers that be do not censor our literature or movies or theatre. That means, in theory, that you can say anything you want in a play or movie or book, and no one will arrest you and prevent people from seeing or reading what you have to say.

No. But we go one better: when someone presents a disagreeable message to us, a message that might imply that there are faults or sins or crimes in the way we– the collective “we”, the audience– act, we simply appropriate the message, repackage it, and make it into a cultural artifact.

Consider, if you will, the title song of “Cabaret”.

What good is sitting alone in your room?
Come hear the music play,
Life is a cabaret, old chum,
Come to the cabaret

A line from this song– “What good is sitting alone in your room”– has been appropriated by SFX productions for the advertising of the touring version of “Cabaret”. Obviously it means, in this context, don’t stay home watching television or playing cards or staring discontentedly at your spouse! Get up off your fat duff, whip out your credit card, and fork over $80 for a crummy seat at a large theatre and watch our packaged presentation of a musical that collected amazing critical reviews and therefore must be artistic and telling your friends you saw it will confirm your good taste. Get out! Have a great time! Make it dinner and a show, and stay overnight at the Ramada with the pool and sauna and calypso bar! Enjoy yourself! Live!

The trouble is, that’s not what the song means at all. In the context of the play, Sally is announcing her refusal to accept reality, or any kind of responsibility for the monumental evil that is closing in around her. When Cliff announces his disgust with the Nazis, Sally says, “but what has politics to do with us?” Cliff tells her that she is blind. And the play tells us that this diseased society– Berlin of the 1930’s– has opened itself to the infusion of Nazi ideals. And Sally blithely sings on, “life is a cabaret, old chum…” Is this the sentiment the audience wishes to identify with?

I grant you– the advertising itself might be playing with irony. But I doubt it.

In the original production by Hal Prince, another line did cause consternation. The Emcee does a little dance with a gorilla, while singing to the audience that, if they could only see her through his eyes, they would realize how beautiful and desirable she was. At the end of the song, he sings,

if you could see her through my eyes/
she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.

It’s a terrific line. It’s a fabulous line. It’s the entire heart and soul of the play’s anti-nazi sentiment. And it was rejected by the original producers and deleted from the production! Why? Because they thought it would imply that the play’s producers thought that Jews resembled gorillas? Yes. They thought Jewish Theatre-goers would be offended by it!

I am sometimes filled with wonder at this crazy world of ours.

Cabaret is a “concept musical”. That is, instead of lumberjacks singing to virginal maidens while dancing through the fields, the trees themselves sing. Just kidding. I mean that there is never any pretense that the music pops out of real-life situations into a tiny set-piece before the drama resumes. In “Cabaret”, the music is organically and symbolically linked to the drama, and becomes a metaphorical part of the narrative. The Emcee, for example, often intrudes on the action, singing a line, or, through facial expression, passing ironic judgment on the characters.

Ah… but in this new production, the Emcee has also changed.

In the original, Joel Grey was a magnetic, ambiguous personality. He invites you in to the Kit-Kat Klub, to leave your troubles outside and live for the moment. He urges you to enjoy life to it’s fullest without inhibition or hesitation. The ambiguity in this part is critical: he is simultaneously attractive and repulsive. He glowers and caresses, cajoles and demands. He is sexually ambiguous too– androgynous, asexual, an object of fantasy or domination. One minute he is rhapsodizing about the pleasures of a ménage a trois, the next he is a menacing storm trooper, winking to the audience– this is a game we all can play. The swastikas, the leather, the boots mean nothing. It is just another fetish. Grey’s performance is the richest, most entrancing element of the movie version, precisely because he doesn’t offer the viewer any shortcuts or simplified perspectives. While the owners of the club are beaten to a pulp by Nazi thugs, the camera cuts back to Grey, leering, laughing, chasing the cabaret girls in their lacey underwear. We’re all part of it…

In the current touring stage version of Cabaret, the Emcee looks more like Edward Scissorshands. He is pale, intoxicated, and diminished. He is, in the words of Joe Masteroff (author of the book of the original version), a “figure of doom”. During the first performance of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”, the sinister anthem to the rising power of the disciplined Nazis, the Emcee bares his ass: it has a swastika painted on it.

The audience can relax: evil has been conspicuously labeled and we are inoculated against the seductiveness of it all.

Which brings to me a certain ambiguity at the heart of “Cabaret”. You have a number of likeable characters at the center of the story who indulge in various degrees of licentious behavior and then you have the big bad Nazis trampling through the scenery hauling everyone off, presumably, to concentration camps. I’m not sure we want to draw a moral from the story, but if we did, what would it be? Isherwood was gay, so surely he wouldn’t want to have suggested that sexual immorality– defined in the broad strokes of the KitKat Klub– leads, as a consequence, to repressive, authoritarian governments? Cliff (or Brian, in the movie) leaves Berlin because he sees the Nazis as a genuine threat while Sally is blind to them. So he has “come to his senses”. So he goes back to America where he could be arrested for having sex with another man, and where plays like “Cabaret” have to conceal the homosexuality of one of it’s lead characters in order to find an audience on Broadway.

It’s a neat ambiguity. But then, Isherwood always insisted that his perspective was that of a camera– recording, but not judging.

Conversely, the orchestra is now comprised of beautiful women. In the original, the orchestra consisted of lumpy middle-aged men garishly dressed as women. Why the change? I don’t know. The first view of the orchestra in the film version is quite shocking, disturbing. How far will people go in this place? What is this Emcee leading us into? Is there any sanity in this place?

The Toronto production is smooth and efficient and even somewhat elegant. The orchestra is extremely tight and well-mannered, though the New York Times reported that the original revival production tried to sound more “authentic” and raw, as a real orchestra in the real original clubs would have sounded.

Christopher Isherwood lived in Berlin between 1930 and 1933. He wrote, of course, but paid the bills with English lessons. It was here that he met Jean Ross and the other persons who inspired the character sketches of “I am a Camera”. Isherwood later moved to the United States and taught English and wrote screenplays in California. “I am a Camera” was not a great success until the dramatization by John Van Druten made it’s mark in the 1950’s. In this version, as in the later movie, Cliff Bradshaw’s homosexuality was downplayed.

A book inscribed to “Jean Ross”, from Christopher Isherwood himself, was recently offered for auction at $12,500 by James S. Jaffe Rare Books.

Hal Prince on the movie version of Evita:

I must say I think that’s where the movie failed for me. They didn’t take that into account. They didn’t bother to figure out what was behind its underpinnings in the first place – and JUST told the story.

Did you like “The Money Song”? I did too. One of the highlights of the show. But it wasn’t written for the original “Cabaret”. It was created for the film version. But wait– you saw it in a live production?! Dang right. The movies rule! After the success of the Bob Fosse film, the stage version incorporated “The Money Song” too. Cross fertilization? Or homogenization?

Movies rule? Bill, check yourself. According to Hal Prince, the returns on “Phantom” are far greater than the total returns on the movie “Titanic”. Why? Because “Phantom” has played to sold-out houses for 11 years at, like, $45 a pop, whereas “Titanic” played to sold-out houses for three months at about $8 a pop. Hal Prince reports meeting people who have seen “Phantom” 75 times. He thinks that’s great. I’m not sure I don’t think it’s sick. What kind of person, do you think, sees “Phantom” 75 times? Think about it.

In it’s first incarnation, the German officers in “The Sound of Music” did not wear swastikas.

We now believe, in fact, that it is one of the great terrible illusions that we create an automatic redemption in such events as the Nazi era. Dr. James Young, Professor of English and Judaic Studies, University of Mass.

Posted on

Canadian Writers

Is the long, harsh winters, that keep us indoors and introspective? Is it the expanse of the land, the magnificence of our geography, our rippling rivers, the magical light of the prairies, the stern might of the mountains? Is it the multi-cultureless, the duality of French-English?

Who knows. For whatever reason, Canada produces a lot of very good writers. In fact, compared to our giant neighbors to the south, we produce a veritable plethora of first rate scribes, whose impressive achievements tower over the best America has to offer right now. Dom Delillo? Vastly over-rated. Thomas Pynchon? Which of his books would you read twice? Toni Morrison? If it wasn’t for Oprah, who would care? Anne Tyler? Don’t make me laugh.

The truth is that America does not have a single first-rate writer right now that is of the literary stature of any of the top Canadian writers.

For the record, the Great Canadian writers (best book):

Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)
Margaret Atwood (Wilderness Tales)
Alice Munro (Who do you Think you are?)
Jane Urquhart (The Stone Carver)
Leonard Cohen (Beautiful Losers)
Rohan Mistry (A Fine Balance)
Mordecai Richler (Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz)
Margaret Laurence (A Jest of God)
Robertson Davies (Fifth Business)
Guy Vanderhaeghe (The Englishman’s Boy)
Carol Shields (Stone Diaries)
Mavis Gallant (Collected Stories)

Best new Canadian writer: Yann Martel, author of “Life of Pi”.

Posted on

Mad Magazine

All right– so it wasn’t always funny or incisive, and it could be tired and dowdy at times. And occasionally it picked the wrong targets in some misguided belief that all sides of every issue deserve equal measures of humiliation. And it hasn’t been really relevant for twenty years. Still, you have to shed a tear for the death of Mad Magazine.

Not that it’s actually died.

The new owners of Mad Magazine — the quintessential greedy, ruthless, heartless corporation– AOL/Time Warner– will now accept advertising, thank you.

How can Mad Magazine, which used to mock the fundamental principles of hucksterism and commercialism, continue to attack the great hypocrisies in American culture while simultaneously urging you to buy Schlock Beer or Fuds Candy Bars?

My guess is that they will do the insidious thing: they will install a pseudo-hip self-mocking irreverence in the advertising itself, thereby confusing the reader into thinking that it can be cool to be an idiot– precisely the sort of clever marketing strategy that Mad used to mock.

I don’t think any sell-out on my list makes me sadder. Poor William H. Gaines (the original publisher of Mad, who refused all advertising).

Mad was no great shakes as a magazine. It had it’s faults. But the one thing I loved dearly about it was that it alone, among all American media outlets, had the courage and audacity to defy the one real sacred cow of our culture: that greed is good.

Sob.

Posted on

The London Defibrillation Choir

The New York Times, which never lies, has an article today about a movement to train everyone on how to use defibrillators. Apparently about 90% of the people who have cardiac arrest– which is not the same as a heart attack or a heart with no companion– die in the first 10 minutes. But if you have a defibrillator handy (in your purse or your camera bag or something, I assume), about 53% of the victims survive. That is amazing. Now the heart can have a companion.

They were even able to demonstrate that the average grade six student, who doesn’t know the state capital of Alaska where the oil is, can nevertheless be trained to operate a defibrillator in just a few hours. They tell them it’s just like a Sony Playstation.

Still, I find it somewhat alarming. New York State has passed a law that released from liability anyone who uses a defibrillator to try to save someone. You see, if you use a defibrillator on someone who is not having a heart attack, you can actually kill them. So I think the first thing we need to do, after making defibrillators available to everyone in order to save lots of lives, is to restrict their availability in order to save lots of lives.

Another thing I find alarming about defibrillators is that you have supposed to shave the person’s chest before applying the two little paddles and shouting “all clear”, so everyone knows you watch ER. I mean, some guy is dying (most likely in a Casino where there is a disproportionate number of cardiac arrests as well as tacky double-knit pantsuits), and you rush over to help and everyone’s standing around watching and you have to say, “anyone got a razor– while he’s down, I might as well shave his chest.” What if it was Burt Reynolds or someone? “Oh my god, this is going to take hours. Anyone got a Philishave?” What if it was Dolly Parton? “Bigger paddles, quick! We need— yes, those satellite dishes will do quite nicely….”

Another thing is — which is why Cohen’s explicit poetry is actually good for our society– what if it is a woman undergoing cardiac arrest and you’re kind of a shy young man and all these people are watching…. Can New York State also make an exception for sexual harassment lawsuits? But then, if they did, you’d have all these guys walking around the beach with defibrillators on their shoulders instead of boom boxes, and they’d be targeting good looking girls who fall asleep while tanning. “All clear. Leon! I said ALL CLEAR! Now. I mean it. All right, see if I care. ZZZZZZAAAAAPPPPP. Oh my God! Leon’s down! Someone get a razor, quick!”

I’m only bringing this up because if Leonard attends Hydra 2002… well, he is getting on in years, and I hope they have a defibrillator handy just in case. You know how women react around him. If Fiona or Judith or Ania actually met Leonard, you’d have to be ready to use those paddles, I think, though I would be very nervous about it myself. And, instead of shouting out “all clear”, I think, apropos of the occasion, I would shout “did you ever go clear?” ZZAAAAPPPP. “Bill, Bill, stop! She’s only taking a nap!” “Not any more. We better do it again. It’s like the reset button on a computer, isn’t it?”

And before I go to bed, I want to note that they have an actual video of a 77 year old man having cardiac arrest in a Las Vegas Casino. He falls over. The security guards rush to his aid. They look like they are in grade 6. They rip off his shirt and shave his chest. They apply the goo, the little sensor pads, and then — “Go Clear!”– the paddles. ZAAAAPPPP. He’s up. An old man who had fainted was revived. And everyone agreed twould be a miracle indeed…. except that the video also shows all the other people in the Casino basically ignoring him. I’m not kidding. They took one look at the guy and went back to their slots and blackjacks.

I think hell is… you’re in a Casino. Wayne Newton is singing “Dunkeshein”. Fat ladies in pastel-plaid double-knit pantsuits are working the slot machines. The décor resembles Andy Warhol repackaged by Walmart. You have a heart attack. Your soul starts to rise from your body and you look down and notice that not a single person gives a damn. What depresses you even more is that these are not the kind of people you wish would give a damn about you, but Ania and Fiona and Judith and Corisa and Tim and both Mikes and Mark and Jarkko and Nancy and Barbara …. are all in Hydra jamming to an aud and eating roast sheep. They don’t give a damn, and the guards stand helpless by: no one remembered a shaver. They try the paddles on your butt instead. With every zap you return to your body and the whole experience starts over again.

Did you ever go clear? No. ZZZZZAAAAAPPPPP Ow! Now I am.

Posted on

Tail-Gunner Bill Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley, the famous American conservative with a fake, snotty British accent, has recently published a novel. With an audaciousness rarely seen in the literary community, he has decided to undertake the rehabilitation of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Sure, the rest of the world has come to see McCarthyism as a synonym for bigotry, intolerance, and fanaticism, but Mr. Buckley has decided that he alone can correct that erroneous impression. McCarthy was a hero. He was right. He may well have saved America!

I always feel reassured when conservatives show their true colors. You see, many conservatives seem to have turned their backs on McCarthyism and appear to agree with most people that McCarthyism was a bad thing. In a roundabout way, I think this causes many people to get the warm fuzzies when they see George Bush Jr. on television, talking about compassion, even if they know that the U.S. Treasury can’t print dollars fast enough to keep up with the orgasmic flush being directed to Bush, and the Republican Party, by big corporations.

In case anyone needs a refresher, Senator McCarthy chaired a committee which investigated the penetration of U.S. government agencies, including the army, by communist agents. You really need to see one of the good dramatizations of McCarthy’s tactics (“Fear on Trial” is a good start) to appreciate the man. Not a man to waste his time with obtuse diversions like evidence or due process, he merely smeared people with innuendo or suspicion and bullied corporations, the government, the army, and Hollywood, into destroying the lives of anyone who would not appear before his committee, bow before him, and rat on his or her buddies. He was finally disgraced when even Eisenhower couldn’t stomach him anymore. He died a lonely, broken man, an alcoholic, and left, as his greatest legacy, his name as an adjective.

But Mr. Buckley wants to rehabilitate his image. Did we all miss something? Was Senator McCarthy misunderstood? Did he really save America? Can you believe Billy Buckley Jr.’s version of events?

Buckley describes, in his novel, an old black man who asks if it is true that the International Communist Conspiracy is seeking to undermine the U.S. government. Yes, of course. Then why, he asks, don’t we just run them out of town, like we used to? Buckley thinks this is the right attitude. Why don’t we just run them out of town? And that is Buckley’s real vision of “democracy”. If we don’t like someone, we just run him out of town. And why apply that solution only to communists?

If you like that philosophy, then save a soft spot in your heart for “Tail-gunner” Joe McCarthy. And keep your bags packed. There is always a witch hunt somewhere

 

Posted on

The Cost of Books

Why does a book cost about $25 nowadays? Why do even paperbacks cost $15? How much do you think the author gets?

Well, the author gets about a buck. That’s right: $1.00. The rest of that “reasonable” price is the cost of printing, formatting, shipping, and handling. It includes the cost of display shelves, store clerks, cash registers, and agents. It includes the cost of advertising, promotion, travel, office furniture, telephones, and postage.

What if you didn’t have any of those costs? What if you could buy the book directly from the publisher? What if the book could be shipped to you over a phone line, in about 10 seconds? What if the publisher didn’t have to pay for paper? How much should the book cost? About $2.00, right? All right– let’s be generous: $3.50.

Wrong. It would cost $15-20.00. It would cost more than the same book on sale, in paper, on a shelf, in a store, in front of a counter with a cash register and a clerk.

This makes no sense. But it’s true. Meet the “electronic book”. Meet greed.

This reminds me of when the CD first came out. It was priced about $10 more than a vinyl LP. Why? The record companies said it cost more to produce. Well, today the CD cost way less to produce than a vinyl record. When do the discounts start? When do they start to pay their artists?

Yes, the first “virtual” books are on the market: The Software Book and The Rocket. They cost about $500 – 600. They are about the size and weight of real books and consist mostly of computer components and monochrome screen. Yes, you can read in the toilet again.

And how about that: you can buy Shakespeare for your virtual book. I couldn’t find out the price, but I’m sure you won’t mind paying a royalty on it.

Should you buy one? If you’re the kind of person who buys lottery tickets for birthday presents, then yes, by all means.

For the rest of us— forget it.

Posted on

“Into Thin Air”: on Climbing Your Ego

For a while, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were the only two persons to have set foot on the top of the world’s tallest peak. They did it on June 2, 1953, just before coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The news electrified the world in a way we can hardly imagine today. The North Pole had been found, and the South Pole, and almost every other remote location in the world had been explored and conquered and claimed. British climbers had been trying to ascend Everest for at least 25 years before Hillary and Norgay, using bottled oxygen, finally succeeded.

Since then, there have been more than 615 successful ascents of Mount Everest– and 142 deaths. In 1996 alone, there were 30 expeditions, all up there during the same two-week period in May, the only safe– if you could call it that– time to climb Everest, between the winter snows and the spring typhoons.

So it’s not a very exclusive club any more. Nor is this club confined to extraordinary athletes: in 1985, climber David Breashears escorted a wealthy but fit 55-year-old Texan to the top, proving, so it seemed, that almost any reasonably healthy person could do it. Everest lost some of its lustre and soon serious mountain climbers were going after more exotic records, like “first person to climb the highest mountain on all seven continents” and “first person to climb a mountain on a bicycle” and “first person to actually camp on the summit”, and so on.

Every year now, dozens of climbers make the attempt, and a good number of them make it. It’s become big business, for the guides, for the Sherpas (12 or more required for each expedition), for the climbers (witness the glut of books and films), and for the governments of Nepal and Tibet, the two nations bordering on Everest. These governments charge up to $70,000 for permits for each expedition. Legitimate expenses? Right.  Because the government has to cover some costs involved in these expeditions.  Do they?  So how come volunteers from around the world have to clean up the cast-off oxygen bottles and torn tents? Cash grab? Probably.

Still, it would be a mistake to underestimate the resolve, discipline, courage, and determination required to plant your foot on the highest spot on the planet. One out of five never come back.

It’s not as if you can just take a bus to the base of the mountain and then give it your best shot. The journey to “Base Camp” itself (at 17,500 feet, the starting point for all expeditions to the top) requires a flight to Katmandu, a ride in a battered, aging Soviet helicopter to the town of Lukla, 9,200 feet up, and then a long trek, usually about 3 or 4 days, through mountainous passes and wobbly foot-bridges over winding rivers. There are no Holiday Inns on this journey: you stay overnight in rambling, leaky stone lodges. You may pick up a dangerous parasite if you are not careful about what you eat and drink. And if you do get the runs, you’ll have to relieve yourself in an outhouse– if they’re not overflowing.

All of the supplies necessary for a summit attempt– food, water, oxygen bottles, medical equipment, and radios, and so on, must be laboriously hauled up narrow, winding mountain paths by yaks.

There is only about 1/2 as much oxygen in the air at base camp as there is at sea level. Above 25,000 feet, there is only 1/3 as much. Climbers must slowly acclimatize themselves to the thin air, a process than can take up to eight weeks, of grueling excursions up and down the lower ranges of the mountain.

The ascent begins with a harrowing trip through the Khumbu Icefall, a unstable white maze of fractured glacier and towering seracs that has taken more lives than any other part of the mountain, including the summit. In some places, climbers must walk across three or more rickety aluminum ladders strapped together over a crevasse hundreds of feet deep. The glacier itself moves 3 to 4 feet every day, and is covered with a thin layer of snow and ice that can conceal treacherous gaps.

After a few trial runs, you camp above the glacier in temperatures that can descend to -20 C. Then climbers ascend the Lhotse Face, a sheer icy wall of 3000 feet, and camp about halfway to the top of it, at 24,000 feet.

When someone says “mountain climber” to us, we tend to picture a blonde yodeling alpinist ascending a steep rock face with ropes and pick axe. Most of Everest, however, including the Lhotse Face, is more like a very steep walk. Most climbers attach themselves to ropes strung along the face for safety, but they basically walk up a very steep, hard, icy incline of about 30 degrees. It is the incredible cold, the wind, the snow and ice, and that thin oxygen that makes it so fearsome.

The tents are nestled into little ledges carved out of the ice by the Sherpas. The Sherpas don’t carve out ledges for themselves, though: they prefer to go on up to the South Col at the top of the Lhotse Face and camp where it’s safer.

The film version of “Into Thin Air” (a dramatization– not a documentary) shows Chen Yu-Nan, a Taiwanese climber, coming out of his tent on the Lhotse face clad only in his boot liners. He slips and falls down a hundred feet or so and then drops into a crevasse. In the film, he died then and there, but in real life, he died a few days later, while trying to make his way back to base camp. The Taiwanese team proceeded without him.

Above 20,000 feet, the adventurers travel very slowly, resting every few steps. Many climbers develop a hacking cough, dizziness, and insomnia. If you ascend too fast, you can develop altitude sickness– your body fails to produce enough red blood cells to keep your brain fed. This can also lead to High Altitude Cerebral Edema (HACE) or High Altitude Pulmonary Edema (HAPE). Blood vessels in the brain, starved for oxygen, swell up, causing disorientation, loss of motor functions, and even coma. Climbers lose weight quickly, making them more vulnerable to the cold.

As if that isn’t enough to deal with, the sun and snow combine to create unbearable heat and light during the day, giving climbers splitting headaches and dehydration. Once the sun has gone down, the temperature can drop to 20 or 30 below zero or worse. If you were to spend the night near the summit itself, you might encounter a wind-chill of well below -50. Few of the climbers who have been stranded near the top overnight in a blizzard live to tell the tale or make the talk show circuit.

Keep in mind that, even in this day and age of phenomenal technological breakthroughs, Everest remains one of the most remote places on earth. Helicopters cannot ascend higher than 20,000 feet (the air is too thin to provide thrust to the rotors), so there is no rescue possible for climbers trapped near the summit in a raging blizzard, other than the assistance of your depleted and exhausted fellow climbers.

Much of the current fascination with Everest can be traced to the media coverage of the disaster in 1996, when 12 climbers died over a three-day period. Writer Jon Krakauer was on one of those expeditions and wrote a searing, compelling book on it called “Into Thin Air”. This unusually honest and self-examining account of the many lapses in judgment that led to the disaster unleashed a storm of controversy that continues to simmer today.

Krakauer claims that some of the guides behaved irresponsibly, rushing ahead of their clients to the summit and then descending before their clients were safe. One of the key Sherpas wore himself out carrying 80 pounds of useless communications gear for writer Sandy Pittman so she could send “live” dispatches from the summit. Lines were not strung over the difficult Hillary Step until climbers had been waiting in the freezing cold for 90 minutes– a delay that may have cost several lives. It is clear that all of these problems were aggravated by the fact that there were 39 people trying to summit on the same morning. Bottlenecks formed. Climbers in difficulty were lost in the crowd. Guides lost track of who was where.

When a storm struck late in the day, two of the expedition leaders, Rob Hall from New Zeeland, and Scott Fisher from the U.S., were trapped on the mountain, along with several exhausted clients. Doug Hansen, a client with the Hall group and a postal worker from Washington State, disappeared and was never found. Andy Harris, a guide with Rob Hall’s group, probably slipped over one of the sheer cliff’s that surround the peak while trying to assist Hall. A group of climbers barely made it back to the South Col, the location of their advanced base camp, but couldn’t locate the tents in the howling wind and snow. They huddled in the cold growing weaker and weaker until ace climber Anatoli Boukreev (who had descended early, ahead of his charges) found them. Beck Weathers and Yasuko Namba (the oldest woman to ever summit Everest) were left for dead. The others were almost carried back to the camp.

The next day, to the utter astonishment of Krakauer and the others, Beck Weathers walked into camp under his own power. He was put into a tent and made as comfortable as possible, but it was expected that he would not last the night. The next day, he was found lying in the open– his tent had collapsed and torn away in the night and his sleeping bag was half off. He had been shouting for help for hours but nobody had been able to hear him. He ultimately lost his hand and nose to frostbite.

Ed Viesturs and David Breashears, who were waiting at the base camp to make their own summit bid, helped rescue Weathers, an action that became a bit of a sub-plot of the IMAX film. Viesturs and Breashears did a good thing, but the film plays coy with the facts. You are left with the impression that Beck Weathers got into trouble and Viesturs and Breashears heroically rescued him, and that was that. The IMAX film glosses over the rest of the disaster, partly because real disasters don’t sell very well, are complicated to explain, and raise questions about the whole idea of celebrating a summit of Everest.

A few days after Weathers was helicoptered to Katmandu from base camp, Viesturs, Breashears, a Spanish woman named Aracelli Segarra, and Jamling Norgay, the son of Tenseng Norgay, the first Sherpa to summit Everest, made their own successful summit.

The Viesturs team made a film of the trip for IMAX. It’s a big disappointment. For one thing, Viesturs got ahead of the team and reached the summit without benefit of cameraman. So what was supposed to be the climax of the film ends up being a verbal footnote. And when Segarra and Norgay make the top with the camera-man, you are left with the absurd impression that they filmed themselves. They celebrate, embrace, look out over the world, while the narrator trills their accomplishment… and you wonder who the heck is filming this, and why haven’t they said anything about him? How did he get there? Wasn’t that remarkable? Why are you pretending he isn’t there?

* * *

Many people don’t think much of the idea of climbing Everest. Why risk your life for an achievement that is completely symbolic, and of no scientific or humanitarian value whatsoever? Why should we feel sorry for climbers who die on Everest, when it is plain that their goals are entirely ego-centric?

The Viesturs expedition tried to patch a gloss of scientific necessity to the risk they took, much the way Robert Ballard tried to make his efforts to find the Titanic look useful and valuable, and NASA tried to make manned space missions seem necessary. But it is clear that there are really only two reasons people climb Everest. Firstly, to gratify one’s ego: I climbed Everest. Wow. Secondly, (and less dubiously), for the sense of personal accomplishment.

I have some respect for those who climb for the sense of personal accomplishment. It is still a remarkable achievement, of endurance, determination, and mental stamina. As I read through Krakauer’s book, I found myself experiencing an odd sense of longing for that bleak, windswept, arctic landscape near the top of Everest.

But I found that sense diminished when I considered that there would probably be another two dozen climbers up there at the same time.

Krakauer’s book is a powerful antidote to any illusions you might have about mountain climbing. It is a very rare little gem: an honest, intelligent book about sports– for that is what mountain-climbing really is– competition. Who got there first? Who did it the fastest? Who did it the most? Krakauer’s book has soul.

Posted on

Amazon

Everybody thinks Amazon.com, the on-line bookstore, is such hot stuff. In the past year alone, the value of Amazon stock soared from about 2 cents a share to $550.00, or something like that. Amazing.

The trouble is that Amazon has never actually made a profit. They lost about $45 million last year. Yet everybody thinks they are worth more than K-mart. Amazon was given a business load of $275 million dollars last year. Why? Does anybody seriously think an on-line bookstore operating out of a garage that hasn’t made any money yet is worth more than a well-known discount chain with hundreds of stores and offices and other assets? No. But everybody thinks everybody else does. So, you buy some Amazon stock and hype it up until everybody else starts buying it up. Then you sell it and get the heck out of there before it all crashes.

As a store, Amazon sucks.

I ordered a book, “Into the Wild”, by Jon Krakauer, in paper-back. How much is a paperback at a conventional book store? About $12-15 nowadays, I guess.

The Amazon.com price for this book was $10.36, U.S.. That seems like a pretty good deal. Let’s order some more:

Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen, $18.20
Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, $21.00
Wow! Three books for $49.56!

Actually, that’s pretty pricey. I think the government should subsidize books. Reading make you smart. The smarter we are, the more money we make. The more money we make, the more taxes we pay. The more taxes we pay, the more money the government has to build obsolete bombers and missile defense systems. Go for it.

Anyway, you hand over your VISA number and wait two weeks, and, voila: your book arrives by parcel post. Then you get your bill.

Whoa, Nellie!

The bill is for $59.00! How’d that happen? Oh yes— the ubiquitous “shipping and handling” charge.

Now, could someone explain something to me? You walk into K-mart. You see a book. The price of the book is $10.00. You go to the check-out. You hand over $10.00. You walk out with the book. Well, okay, first you pay $1.50 in taxes. Then you walk out with the book.

Didn’t they handle it? Didn’t they ship the book to the store? Didn’t they pay for electricity and water and heat? Didn’t they hire someone to clean the store? Of course they did. Those are all operating expenses. But they are included in the price of the book. They make sure that they sell enough books with a big enough profit margin so they can pay all their expenses.

Now, Amazon.com ships me my three books and then, surprise, hits me with a $9.85 “shipping and handling” charge. I can understand the shipping charge. That seems fair. But when I ship a package this size, I pay about $2.47, thanks to our volume deal with a well-known courier company. Amazon ships gazillions of books, so they must have an even better deal. So where does the rest of the $9.85 come from? Don’t tell me it cost $7.38 for someone to put the books into a box and slap a sticker on it? Of course it doesn’t.

It’s simply a way they have of picking your pocket on the way out of the store. Amazon has no more reason for charging for handling than K-mart does. The honest thing to do would be to include the “handling” charge in the list price, so you don’t get tricked into buying a book that actually cost more than they’re telling you. Then you can compare prices fairly, and disconnect yourself from their web page and head down to your local Chapters and buy the book in person and take it home with you right away.

Amazon.sucks.

Update 1999-06-25

Call me stupid: I went and ordered some more books from Amazon, “Digging up Sundance” by Anne Meadows, and “Etta Place: Her Life and Times with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, by Gail Drago. Cost of the books: $15.96 + $10.36 = $26.32. Now get a load of the shipping and handling on THIS order: $18.90. That’s right– $9.45 per book. What the heck is going on here? This is double the amount I paid on my last order, even though both books were delivered in the same package. I shudder to think what the charges are going to be for a couple of CD’s I ordered but which haven’t been delivered yet. Boycott Amazon!!

Posted on

Crumbs

Crumbs

Robert Crumb is famous for a number of cartoons he created in the 1960’s and 70’s, the most celebrated of which was the Keep on Truckin’ schematic, which became a trademark of sorts to the Grateful Dead. He is also the originator of the Fritz the Cat character, which became the subject of a full-length x-rated movie by Ralph Bakshi. Crumb disapproved of the movie.

In 1994, Terry Zwigoff, a friend of Robert’s, made a disturbing, brilliant documentary called Crumb, about Robert, and his two brothers, Charles and Maxon. (Crumb’s sisters declined to take part in the film. You may wonder about that by the end of the film.)

rcrumb2.jpg (37467 bytes)

I say “disturbing”. Searing might be more like it. The Crumb brothers pull no punches. At times, you almost can’t believe they are saying the things they say on camera. Don’t they realize how shocking they are? Yet this is no television talk show. The brothers are never coy or evasive, and don’t really shift blame away from themselves, or try to cast themselves as unwitting victims. If there is one attractive quality about these brothers, it’s their honesty and their sense of personal responsibility.

Crumb’s father was brutally strict, and his mother over-compensated, and the three boys had some kind of weird chemistry going. From the time they were little, they became obsessively fascinated with comic books. They were extremely gifted at drawing and Robert even organized the three brothers into a production company and they created their own variations on Treasure Island.

All three were also severely socially dysfunctional. Charles, though in his forties, lives at home with his mother, almost never leaves the apartment, rarely bathes, and uses prescription drugs to keep from becoming “homicidally disturbed”. According to Robert and Maxon, he has never had a sexual relationship with anyone but himself. He had made several suicide attempts before the documentary was made, and, a year afterwards, finally succeeded, providing the film with a poignant postscript.

[Update 2022: read that paragraph now, it occurs to me that a big part of Charles’ troubles may have been the side-effect of the prescription drugs.  If he stopped taking them at any time, the effects of withdrawal would have produced “symptoms” that would like be attributed to his personality, instead of to the drugs themselves and the effects of withdrawal.]

Maxon lives alone in an apartment and has been arrested several times for sexual assault. He swallows a long length of cotton cloth every three weeks to cleanse his bowels, feeding it like string slowly into his mouth, and likes to sit on a bed of nails and meditate. Like Charles, he is, frankly, a slob. He describes, with helpless amusement, how he followed a girl wearing tight shorts into a drug store and could not resist the urge to pull them down while she was waiting in line at the checkout. Unlike Clinton, there is no evasion, no excuses, no hypocrisy. He confesses to a repugnant act, but you almost like him.

Robert, who at first appears to be seriously maladjusted, eventually emerges as the sanest of the three. He manages to make a living from his drawings, develops relationships with women, marries, divorces, marries again. He has two children, years apart, one by each wife. Yet you can see that he’s not too far removed from Maxon and Charles. The difference may be that Robert succeeded in transferring his anti-social impulses into his art.

Crumb is one of the most brutally honest documentaries you are likely to ever see. The three brothers talk openly about their father’s abusive discipline, their sexual preferences and fetishes, their own hopeless perspectives on themselves and each other. Robert’s comics have always been controversial, and the film includes interviews with editors and fellow cartoonists who express their own misgivings about some of his more controversial stories. In one, for example, two characters enjoy the sexual favours of a woman with no head. They consider her perfect, since they don’t have to make conversation with her afterwards. In another, an outwardly normal, All-American family, is actually rife with incest. An editor allows that she is not sure that Crumb actually disapproves of the incest. A third example is a parody of consumerism, describing a new canned meat product called “Niggerhearts”.

When challenged, Robert Crumb, like his brothers, is not very evasive, arrogant, or apologetic. Who knows, he seems to say. Maybe I should be locked up. I don’t know why I have to draw those things but I do. They’re in me. Implied, of course, is the idea that many of these ideas are in us as well. Considering the number of awards this documentary has garnered, you would have to admit that many critics and film-goers acknowledge this. How else could you stomach such a man, or a film about this man?

It is unclear, at times, whether Crumb is parodying himself or society in general or those who think they understand society. His stories are hardly simple parables.

Another example: a black woman is convinced by several businessmen that performing degrading acts will make her a superior human being. She doesn’t outsmart them, though she realizes she’s being put on. Some readers interpret this to mean that Crumb thinks she is as foolish as the white businessmen think she is. Or is this a parody of the businessmen, and the way they attempt to turn even social oppression into material advantage? Or is it an assertion that materialism is itself the most oppressive force in our society? (I favour the last one).

Is it a sin to be truthful? Only if your truth is different from everyone else’s. Is our society ready to admit that otherwise “decent” people can harbour obscene fantasies or racist beliefs? Is our society ready to admit that even victims can be stupid?

I don’t think we are. It’s too difficult. We are far more comfortable believing that blacks are inferior and that women suffocate men or that blacks are innocent victims of racism and that women are morally better than men. We don’t like being thrown a curve. But remember that the most powerful abolitionist tract of the 19th century was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Today, even black activists are mostly contemptuous of its simple-minded moralism’s. Why? Because someone like James Baldwin had the nerve to attack one of the most sacred icons of progressive and religious humanism in existence. And you know what? He was right.

So is Crumb merely ahead of his time?

Well, what really is outrageous nowadays? I think it is obvious that some of our values are completely screwed up. We find the Clinton-Lewinsky affair outrageous, but not the deaths of tens of thousands of Moslem Serbs. We are outraged by a school boy killing his class-mates with a high-powered rifle, but not by an organization that spends $80 million a year to promote unrestricted access to every kind of weapon imaginable. We are outraged by a school teacher who has sex with a Grade 6 student, but not by a talk show host (Larry King) who has been married five times. We are outraged by someone who clubs a gas station attendant over the head to steal $15, but not by a securities seller who rips his clients off for a billion dollars. We are outraged at a seventeen-year-old kid who breaks into houses to steal money to feed his drug habit, but not a pharmaceutical industry that is doing its level best to make us all dependent on drugs. We are outraged at Mexicans crossing the border to seek a better life in the U.S., but not at the economic imperialism that turns self-sufficient Central American economies into impoverished coffee growers for Starbucks. We are outraged when the United Nations wants to include the U.S. among the nations accountable for war crimes to a new World Court, but not when Congress continues to subsidize an Israeli government that denies the most fundamental human rights to its own Palestinian population. We are outraged when a protester burns a U.S. flag, but not when U.S. negotiators refuse to believe that fish stocks on the west coast are in danger of extinction if over-fishing continues. We are outraged when an artist puts a crucifix into a jar full of urine, but not when the record companies routinely cheat artists out of the royalties they are due by jiggering their accounting records. We are outraged by a doctor who helps terminally ill patients die without pain and in dignity, but not by doctors that routinely recommend expensive and useless surgeries to elderly patients who are likely to die within months anyway. We are outraged by cloned sheep, but not by attempts by corporations to patent human DNA sequences. We are outraged by homosexuals seeking benefit coverage for their partners, but not by the fact that we are denying AIDS treatments to impoverished African nations to protect our own patent rights.

What exactly determines our outrage? What is it that most excites us about someone else’s sin? Isn’t it probable that when we proclaim our outrage, especially when we do it in the strongest possible words, we thereby hope to impress others with our own purity, and deflect suspicion away from ourselves? Since no one suspects us of murdering children in Rwanda or robbing old women of their lives’ savings, we don’t get too excited about those crimes. But if someone were to suspect us of sexually harassing an attractive secretary…. well, we’ve probably had a thought or two about it, haven’t we?

What is most telling about this analysis is not that we seem to be so defensive about certain human failings. It’s that the human race, in general, doesn’t really care all that much about starving children or ethnic cleansing or torture or exploitation. We really don’t. But we badly need to pretend that we are virtuous, so, by common consent, we identify certain transgressions as worthy of our hysteria. We draw lines in the sand, and then go ballistic when someone crosses one of them.

I don’t really like Robert Crumb. At best, he is a maladjusted misogynistic misanthrope. But he is articulate and honest, and his cartoons are the work of a genius. There is a soft underbelly to American public morality, and Crumb pokes a sharper stick at this underbelly than anyone else.

Posted on

You’re Never Alone With a Schizophrenic*: The Myth of Sybil

More unconscious humour: at one point, the real Sybil (Shirley Mason) wrote a letter to Dr. Wilbur insisting that she did not have multiple personalities. Some critics have made much of the letter and Wilbur’s dismissal of it. But then again, which personality wrote the letter…. (To her credit, Dr. Wilbur published the letter in “Sybil”. )

Multiple Best Seller Disorder

About 25 years ago, I read a book by Flora Rheta Schreiber called “Sybil”. It was about a woman with multiple personality disorder. The good psychiatrist. Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, was able to identify 16 different personalities within the consciousness of one troubled young woman. Some of the personalities knew about the other personalities; some did not. The personalities came into being as Sybil’s way of coping with dreadful abuse at the hands of her own mother. It was an awesome book– I was fascinated.

The book created a sensation. It spawned a television movie starring Sally Field, and host of television talk show episodes. It was a big factor in the gradual popular acceptance of the idea of multiple personalities and repressed memories, both caused by child abuse, which, indirectly, led to a lot of the ideas about repressed memory syndrome and the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare in the 1980’s.

Some experts in the field have never accepted the idea of repressed memories, and, as more evidence emerges, many more people are beginning to have doubts. At the very least, most professionals have become cautious about it.

And now it looks like we should start to question the idea of multiple personalities as well: it seems that “Sybil” is a fraud.

First of all, a psychiatrist who worked with the real Sybil, wrote a book questioning the idea that she had multiple personalities. Now a psychologist, after listening to the tapes of the sessions Dr. Flora Schreiber had with Sybil, has concluded that the “multiple personalities” were actually constructions by the psychiatrist to help Sybil explain why her behaviours seemed so strange to herself. It seems that patient, doctor, and writer got carried away with the idea, and, hey, it made good television (and lots of bucks), so why not go with it?

It should be noted that Shirley Mason had read “The Three Faces of Eve”, one of the first books on multiple personality disorder (or Disassociative Identity Disorder, as the DSM called it for a while) before becoming multiple personalities herself.

Well, every time you get tempted to think we humans are pretty smart, it helps to think about something like this. A lot of people, educated and not so educated, were completely fooled by “Sybil”, and, to this day, there are a lot of psychologists out there eagerly diagnosing patients as having multiple personality syndrome or as having repressed memories, on the basis of bad science. And, remarkably, a lot of patients who insist they are MPD– remember– an acronym means it’s true– which of course makes ridiculous the claim that they are…. MPD.

*This title is borrowed from the album by Ian Hunter.

Update April 2008:

An impressive interview with Dr. Herbert Spiegel, a psychiatrist who treated Sybil for a short time, and refused to participate in the book. He observes that the idea of Multiple Personality Disorder only took hold in the U.S.

Links to More Information about the Sybil Myth

Other Hollywood Disorders
Recovered Memories

Update: May 2003

Someone reading this website recently asked me a few questions about this story. I confess that I didn’t provide enough details for anyone to check into the facts, or to do an intelligent search on the subject. Here they are:

Sybil’s real name was Shirley Ardell Mason. She was born January 25, 1923 and died of breast cancer February 26, 1998.

Her psychiatrist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, died in 1992, so she isn’t around to defend herself. But other analysts who have listened to tapes of her sessions with Mason say that Dr. Wilbur was suggestive in her therapy and that she used hypnosis.

Flora Rheta Schreiber, the author, also died in the early 1990’s.

The psychiatrist who also treated her and concluded that the multiple personality disorder label was a fraud was Dr. Herbert Spiegel. I read an interview with him in an interesting article in the April 1997 New York Review of Books, in which he stated that Sybil was merely a “suggestible hysteric”.

Another analyst, Dr. Robert Reiber, actually listened to tapes of the sessions between Sybil and Wilbur and concluded that
Wilbur planted the idea
of “multiple personality”
into Sybil’s head, possibly out
of some kind of misguided
therapeutic strategy, and possibly for dumber reasons.

Wilbur claimed that Sybil was “cured”– the book and movie both build up to that startling miracle moment when she “reintegrates” her personalities, but, as in so many similar stories that have been popularized on TV and books, that is not quite the truth. Shirley Mason followed Wilbur to Lexington, Kentucky, and continued to receive therapy for many years.

I would check the archives of the New York Review of Books.   [Wait a minute: has it been removed?  It would not surprise me.]

You could certainly argue that no popular book about mental illness has done more damage to more families than this one: Sybil. With the exception of the infamous medieval text Malleus Maleficarum.

Who profits? The royalties from “Sybil” were split three ways, between Sybil, Schreiber, and Wilbur.

According to the Associated Press, Sybil wrote a letter to Wilbur denying that she had multiple personalities.

“Wilbur had decided she was going to make the Sybil case into a book, because she couldn’t get it published in professional journals…” From an interview with Dr. Herbert Spiegel. My emphasis.

But then, Dr. Spiegel “believes” in hypnosis. But then, Dr. Spiegel describes hypnosis as something more like a some kind of self-induced “trance” state– not what you see in the movies.

Incidentally, in the same letter in which Sybil denies having multiple personalities, she also admits to making up the stories of horrendous abuse.

Where do you put that?