Buzz Bunny by James LaFond; Q&A with Author

© 2017 James LaFond

What do you get when you cross The Wire, Watership Down and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? You get James LaFond's novella Buzz Bunny. This is the story of Tamar, a reserved boy with an active imagination and the target of harrowing bullying by the Simpson boys. Tamar is befriended by another victim of the Simpson's, recently reincarnated as a telepathic rabbit, and the two set out to exact their revenge.

LL: James, Tamar is tormented at school, on the bus, in the park, and his own home is no refuge. Is there anywhere in Baltimore a kid can relax? Is this why they all get high all the time? Now that I think about it, Tamar did have some peace and quiet in the library, but somehow I doubt there are huge crowds there.

JL: There is no safe place for a boy in Baltimore—none. I invented the library sanctuary in a whimsy.

LL: Are you surprised that these types of revenge killings don't happen more often than they do?

JL: I am saddened that these types of revenge killings do not happen regularly.

LL: Have you ever had a pet?

JL: There was Friskie, our hero dog, a beagle-fox terrier mix who survived a shooting, bit a hornet in half that was menacing us little tykes, survived a mauling by a mixed Cywolf-hound and was a true family pet from 2 to 17 years. There was Ace, my flaky stray mutt who went insane after her puppies died and had to be put down. There was Buddy, who was my four-legged pal, a Border Collie-Terrier mix who I saw get hit by a truck. Took the bumper right in the head and became mean thereafter and served as a good watchdog for my stepmother after I moved to Baltimore and he went the rest of the way nuts.

Then there was Bear, who was six inches long when I got him, a Manchester terrier who weighed 15 pounds and broke a 20-30 pound choke chain. I kept him on a 30 yard chain run in the large yard of the Baltimore house I rented with an 80-pound test choke chain, resulting in him repeatedly snapping the swing-set chain I used for his run as he ran after larger dogs who came around while his love—the Germen shepherd bitch next door, was in heat. Once, as she walked around him—her owners let her wander the yard, which she did not leave—but as he was too short to mount her, he looked at me for help and whine-snarled. I chained him by the porch and he barked aggressively. The giant gal came over and stood next to the porch and he repeatedly climbed on her back but kept sliding off onto the pavement. My wife thought I was a nut for doing this—but I was trying to help him out. Once I was eating my way through a pizza at 1 a.m. after work when I heard his run snap again as he went after a large Irish setter. I—in bare feet, shorts, and nothing else—then began chasing him around Cedonia as he chased this poor 100 pound dog, eventually treeing the poor thing on his master’s porch. Bear then led me on a merry chase. As I tried to cut him off over a curb I skidded onto my chest in the middle of White Avenue and noticed that he stopped and looked to see if I was okay. So I groaned and rolled over in a fetal position. When the little bastard started sniffing my face I grabbed his ass and carried him home while he tried to bite me.

Bear bit a neighbor girl in the face and Dante in the face—a mean little bastard. I gave him to a prison guard who had a pitbull and a German shepherd. I would walk by once a week to say high and when I came to the fence he would attack the two larger dogs until they backed off—only he would be petted by me, he being my owner after all. He had the most savage growl.

Big Rich, the prison guard loved, Bear, but when I came over to visit the last time, he said, “Jesus, I feel like the only white guy in the locker room—this little bastard loves you.”

That is my dog history. My wife had a number of Greyhounds she adopted but they were hers—Faye is like Duchess Dolittle, every animal that meets her becoming like men before a goddess.

Oh yes, once I returned into the bedroom to kiss her good night on my way to work after Bear had taken my spot in bed and heard him snarl like a gargoyle and dared not place my face close to the bed. You could not see this twerp in the dark—coal black.

Another time, I woke up on my morning off with one of those morning erections that plague younger men—yes, fellas, they eventually go away! As I walked to the bathroom and Faye groaned, “I hope my mother isn’t coming down the hallway”—she must have been channeling, because Bear jumped off the ground, jaws snapping, trying to rip my manhood off. I grabbed and spun and he took a piece of my tail instead.

Yep, that’s all my man-dog stuff.

I no longer have time for a pet.

LL:  Thanks, James.  Buzz Bunny is available in paperback, and as a PDF download.

Beyond the Ember Star by James LaFond

A team of four “time-jumpers” is being deployed 35,000 years into the past, tasked with a dual mission: to retrieve a Neanderthal child from Ice Age Europe, and to splinter Time itself. The four man team is being deployed with a device that will generate an alternate timeline if they manage to alter the course of pre-history, by somehow saving the Neanderthals from total extinction. The leader of this team was specifically engineered for this task. His handlers regard him and his three men as utterly expendable.

Ugly Sister is the only daughter of The Family’s dominant she. As the cold-time lingers longer than usual and fear of the Others dampens their hopes she comes to maturity. On the very night that she confronts Mother about her suitability to mate a great ember of a star bursts in the sky. Taking her adult name from this singular event Dawn Star sets off with The Family on a journey that will take them to the mouth of the Water Dread. Will her vision save them or will they perish at the hands of the ever-encroaching Others?

Available in paperback.

On Becoming Antifragile

James,

We have discussed offline Nassim Taleb's concept of antifragility, detailed in his book "Antifragile." Briefly the concept is that things may be fragile, that is, easily damaged; or they may be robust, that is, not easily damaged; but it is also possible to take the spectrum further, and look for things that are antifragile, that benefit from stress, attacks, or the passage of time. Taleb gives the example from Greek myth of the Hydra, which grows two new heads each time one is cut off. What are your thoughts on this characteristic?

Lynn

Lynn, thanks for stretching my brain space again.

What would my boxing coaches say about Taleb’s antifragile concept? In other words, if I had summarized the anti-fragile concept to them in a training session, what might they have said:

Reds Foley: “If you don’t learn to move that head they’ll soon be no room in there for those big ideas.”

Big Rich: “No shit, Sherlock—give me another round!”

Raphael: “Steel sharpens steel. We don’t sharpen our knives with silk pillows.”

Mister Jimmy: “Some genius got paid for saying that? I wonder if he’ll by my car. The transmission is shot.”

Mister Frank: “That’s the foundation of what we do here. I’d like to speak to this man. I’m sure I could learn something from someone smart enough to figure that out without stepping in the ring.”

In other words Lynn, this is clearly known to anyone who has fought and who trains to fight or trains others to fight. There is all the equipment and technique to learn, the hundreds of rounds spent shadow boxing and meditating on method. However, one is not made fight ready until he is set to sparring with a partner.

That partner, if inept, and posing no danger to the fighter, will make this fighter weaker, will leach from him the essence he is trying to increase.

There are also numerous pitfalls to sparring, as many unproductive things that can crop up as productive. If sparring is mistaken for fighting, for instance, retardation and fixing of an incomplete skill set may occur. If conducted sensibly, sparring, with the right sparring partner, which means a partner who poses some level of threat, is the only way one progresses in the training environment in such a way as to translate to the fight venue. But even this, since there are various takes on the behavior that fall short of the actual fight, only achieves a portion of a fighter’s evolution.

Where the fighter gains mastery—the only place this occurs—is in that most dangerous setting where he can be stopped, injured, maimed or killed. Being stopped may cause a type of spiritual damage that is essential an injuring, maiming or killing of the fighting spirit.

The fighter is brought along in evolutionary steps to prepare him first for an “antifragile” immersion in sparring and then finally in competition where the nature of the more lethal environment will greatly increase his adaptive quality.

This antifragile notion is, perhaps tied to Nietzsche’s dictum, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

Admittedly, in the case of boxing, the coach is pre-selecting an antifragile—let’s call him hyper-adaptive, though “robust” is really perfect, to be cultivated as an evolving combatant in progressively more stressful training session and then fights, in such a way that the fighter literally ascends a transformative field of experience, a field of experience ritually and perilously far beyond the domesticated norms of the civilized experience.

LL:  James, you quote Nietzche, whom Taleb discusses at length in the book, and in your last paragraph you note the importance of pre-selection on the part of the coach, another topic he covers extensively.  It fascinates me to see intersections between seemingly disparate intellects, your insights particularly so, since you seamlessly combine both modes of inquiry, that of the intellect and that of the physical.

(c) 2017 James LaFond

Road Killing by James LaFond

Road Killing includes both Planet Buzzkill and Fat Girl Dancing by James LaFond, a pair of automotively themed short novels.

Available in both paperback and Kindle.

Fat Girl Dancing by James LaFond

Fat Girl Dancing is a story about a zaftig spinster, a lad approaching manhood, and a pristine muscle car that shelters our heroes from the false world around them.  Only James LaFond can touch your heart by weaving a beautiful love story between two searching souls out of threads of loss, hunger, ministry, murder and more.

Available in paperback and Kindle.

Easy Chair and Other Stories by James LaFond

Humorous Reader Generated Fiction by James LaFond

A Politically Incorrect Anthology of Humorous, Urban, Reader versus Writer, Horror Tales:

Trent Jackson’s Profession 

Dat Gat ATV 

MissMiss In The Hood 

Easy Chair 

IED Davon and Liza Spaz 

And the classic, 

Whiteboy Wayne, Help A Brutha Out!

Available in both paperback and Kindle editions.

Big Water Blood Song by James LaFond

Charlie Robinson is a quantum physicist who gave up his quest to build a time machine, filed his notes away, and then dropped out to start a science-based church. He is soon contacted by time-travelers from the future who claim to be his disciples, and to have fabricated his device. Jay Bracken is a genetically engineered 24th Century time-hunter pre-based in the late 20th Century; a deep retrieval asset overdesigned to thrive in low tech environments, and believes he is a dumb jock from West Virginia. Daniel London, hardnosed ER surgeon facing his greatest test; providing health care for a stone-age society on the brink of military and biological holocaust. Three-Rivers is a visionary of the Longhouse-people. When an insane white savage comes into Mother Earth seeking He-who-makes-rivers Three-Rivers meets him by chance above the Shellfish-water. This Whiteman is possessed by a potent flesh-demon, brings dread warnings of evil invaders, and has been sent into the world by a thunder-conjurer from a mysterious place beyond the very Sunset. Three-Rivers simply must see this wonderful Sunset World!

Own Big Water Blood Song in paperback.

Considering a Primal Human Perspective

A Prequel to the Author’s Interview with Lynn Lockhart

Lynn, you’ve asked me some pretty big questions and also to match wits with a man that has put forth some daunting ideas. Before answering I should make plain my divergence from modern society so that an understanding can occur.

Modernity places man in his masses under ideologies, according to numbers.

I disagree.

Most blatantly I disagree with this approach to violence studies. For instance, the FBI did a comparative analysis of Cocaine-Boom Miami circa 1980 and Dodge City, a hundred years earlier, and declared parity between the two, as they use numbers of people under threat, not area of habitat under threat to determine risk of violence, with their stupid how many deaths in 100,000 equation.

What this showed was that Dodge City and Scarface Miami were both equally violent to an unacceptable degree. Ever since people have used the euphemism that if guns are not taken away from Americans, than our cities will become like “The Wild West”

Well if Baltimore was like the Wild West, we would have had only one homicide last year. That’s right, in the year Dodge City was compared to Miami during the drug cartel high tide, one man was killed and that in a voluntary duel over a woman?

Not one murder, just a man slaughter. And, according to the FBI, that is equivalent to Cuban thugs and Columbian Narcos hosing down strip malls with machine guns while women and children are shopping?

Why would these geniuses—and they are geniuses, unlike I who could not pass the FBI entrance exam—come up with such a false model?

It is simple, the FBI is a branch of the U.S. government, and that government like all other modern state systems is engaged in people farming. Just as shepherds and ranchers count their livestock so do our handlers.

This, I see as a departure from most of human history and prehistory and has its roots in the two great submissive faiths, Christianity and Islam. Islam means submission, with Muslim men taking names that proudly declare themselves the slaves and servants of God. In Leviticus—in the very book of the Old Testament that justifies enslavement, God’s Chosen People are declared to be his slaves, and should therefore strive to keep one another free of lesser bonds of servitude to outsiders. Being raised Catholic, the idea that I was supposed to submit as a first response to an invocation of authority over my person and my soul was explicit in the ritual kneeling, the constant reference to God, His Son and Prophets “shepherding” their “flock,” coupled with the “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s admonition that our parish priests quoted often, indicating that I should be a submissive subject of a government, that I should be livestock.

This doctrine of submission to God and his representatives insured that Christianity and Islam would be the dominant faiths over most of the planet. And breadth means something here. For these faiths are the blueprints for interacting with the human habitat. There may have been more Hindus at one point, but the adherents to that religion were geographically limited, meaning that fewer aspects of creation fell under their religion’s influence. And to people before the materialistic ethos and atheism supplanted so much of the metaphysical construct humanity lives within, Creation meant something, something more than a pile of rock to be rendered into ore and smelted into precious commodities.

Many current critics of the “Abrahamic” faiths take issue with their ethnic or environmental origin. But the fact is that most tribal conquest resulting in civilizations feature violent, herding people displacing the ruling class of a submissive toiling people, who are naturally viewed as cattle, and hence chattel. This was obvious to all pre-modern societies. But modern society operates under a fiction, far less plausible than the idea of God, that is the idea of “civil service” or “democracy,” the insane notion that the cattle rule the ranch through their bellowing.

Before we continue with the dialogue on Taleb’s work, I’d like to make it plain that I see the human being in terms of his relationship to God, which includes the environment, and excludes the herd, the human shepherds. It is obvious that the sacred creeds of submission informed those who structured modern state systems and political ideologies, and that these notions of Dar al-Islam and Christendom contained a more ancient notion of habitable space, not simply the numbers of their flocks.

Before the Industrial Age, Europeans thought in terms of faith far more than race and would speak of “Christian lands,” placing people in their living context and beyond it, rather than in our atomized way. Muslims had a similar view and retain far more of it than we secularized Christians.

“…he regarded himself as a citizen, not of a country called Morocco, but of the Dar al-Islam, to whose universalist spiritual, moral and social values he was loyal above any other allegiance.”

-Ross E. Dunn on Ibn Battuta

Early Christianity retained much of the ancient, holistic, human worldview, before it was gradually reduced to an ethos to support Modernity. Many Christians [I’m not one] have a sense for this and are continually reinventing the Church on a smaller scale, whether localized or inward-reaching, even bordering on the shamanic, like John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, in which he discusses “the silence of fathers” in our denatured society. In a larger sense the ethical systems derived from these religions are, too, silent, which is why I wanted to discuss Taleb’s antifragile concept and his related opinion concerning the absence of sacrifice, after this attempt to place it in a truer context.

I’ll address Antifragile, and then sacrifice, over the next two weeks.

Thanks for the demanding line of inquiry.

(c) 2017 James LaFond

By the Wine Dark Sea by James LaFond

By the Wine Dark Sea is a sourcebook of martial life and heroic themes set in Archaic Hellas in 650 B.C., intended to serve the needs of the novelist, roleplaying game moderator, screenwriter, or video game designer, in crafting an authentic adventure setting with realistic, socially functional characters. The author is at his best in describing the uses of the various weapons and the poetic traditions of archaic Hellas. Includes: A gallery of period heroes, Calendars, 100 page name-building glossary, 12 illustrations by Joseph Bellofatto.

paperback

Kindle

At The End of Masculine Time: A Case for Cultural Resistance by James LaFond

At The End of Masculine Time makes the case that modern liberal society is a Faustian matrix whereby the collective and individual souls of men are incinerated on The Altar of what the author names ‘the God of Things.’ This manifesto makes the case against the ever pervasive violence of civilization in favor of the serenity of barbarity. This counter culture meditation on being a man in an emasculated society names the cause, enumerates the symptoms, and offers a cure for what ails men.

Includes the essays:

Echoes of Men,
What Smokes on God’s Altar,
Superman and the Plight of Orks,
Let the Weak Fall,
In The Onion Field of the Soul, and
Where Life is Scarce.

Paperback

The Third Eye by James LaFond

James LaFond, a science-fiction writer who has authored such counter-culture self help books as When You’re Food and Taboo You, uses the tools of the writer of speculative fiction to explore the subtext of the postmodern American life. This series of 12 insightfully humorous essays includes:

The Extinction of Men 

To Step On God’s Toe 

Welcome to Manginastan 

The Fall of the Garden of Ishtar 

The GQ Mugging Inquest 

The Third Eye is an examination of alienated engagement and emasculation in postmodern America, and is the immediate prequel to Incubus of Your Sacred Emasculation.
The Third Eye - paperback & Kindle

Winter by James LaFond

A.D. 2013: Two bruthas shoveling snow to make ends meet discover a savage secret in a suburban house.

A.D. 43: A squad of Roman legionnaires hunts a wicked sorceress across Wales and Ireland in the late summer, their progress vexed by torrential snowfall the entire way. 

A.D. 2014: A homeless man is driven insane by the sight—indeed the very thought—of the woman who fired him, and goes on a murderous rampage. 

A.D. 1783: A Shawnee scouting party comes across a secluded cabin in the snow banked Appalachian Mountains. 

A.D. 2014-16: Emergency Medical Technician Vitto Quintivale takes a call that changes his life forever, as if an icy hand gripped his heart and an icy breath drew the life from his lungs. As his life spins violently out of control he reaches within, into the world of dread dreams that has risen from his very blood to torment him, for the answer that might save him from the one thing he most fears—insanity. Winter is a tale of blood memory; of violent racial identity and the dark dreams and stark reality that has haunted humanity since its dawn, and one man’s attempt to resist its primeval pull.

Winter - paperback

Hurt Stoker by James LaFond

Since Stonewall Jackson’s defeat of Meade, and the capture and lynching of Lincoln, The South had, ever so gradually, adapted to modern mores. Since The Negro Bond Act of 1898, The Act of Segregation of 1934, and The Negro Incivility Act of 1971, lynching had become among the rarest of events. Now, on this fine evening, as Dixie Day draws to a close in the sleepy town of Hawthorne Maryland, Whiff Gleason has the misfortune of being waylaid by three Pennsylvania boys in a pickup, intent on asserting their superiority south of the Mason Dixon Line, where they suppose it will be appreciated.

Most men would plead, beg mercy, say prayers to the Lord Above, or whisper a word to The Dear Departed. But not Whiff Gleason. Whiff knows that there is one incontrovertible truth in life: that there is a potential profit to be made from any situation, no matter how bad it might seem. Now all he has to do is figure out how these three rednecks are going to pay for his next French-tailored silk suit.

Hurt Stoker in Kindle & paperback

Organa; Q&A with Author, James LaFond

Organa is a fast paced science fiction novella set in the distant, dystopic and eerily plausible future. In this, only one of LaFond's many future worlds, humans are corporate property from birth, outfitted with permanent mechanical augmentation and equipped with artificial companions that provide comic relief and color commentary. Our protagonist, Tray Sorenson, starts life as a simple but lovable specimen who gains dimension and complexity as he rises in his career as a Security Tech.

LL: James, you have constructed this novella with several distinct phases. You show us how humanity might become fully consumed by globalist-corporate culture, with individuals designed and owned by corporations from birth to fill various roles, and with consumer culture having supplanted or invaded all aspects of life. Some people in your fictional world have considerably more material comfort than others, but they all seem equally disposed to oppression of the spirit, or to seek the means of escaping that oppression. Is this something you have observed in your own life?

JL: Absolutely. The most dismayed and despairing souls I have met have been in the underclass and the over-class—not in the middle. the only thing I have noticed as universal among poor, middle and upper class and among both criminals and patriots is a deep desire to be misled as to the actual context of their plight. This led me to develop the avatars as a way of implanting social narrative.

LL: Forgive my nerdy schoolgirl tendencies, but I learned in a high school English class that the main character of a story is the one that undergoes a change. Tray experiences an episode of uncontrolled violence followed by sexual initiation. How do these experiences contribute to his decisions later in the story, when he is moved to take extreme actions in the service of love and beauty?

JL: Men don’t really feel powerful until they have sex. This is more important than latent physical ability. Tray is a physical titan, designed to toss around mobs of traditionalists like those pesky Amish whining about breeding rights. But he lacks agency. Sex gives a healthy man a taste of that. That is why Tray was not permitted to have consensual sex until age 25—yes, it means the person on preexisting sexual probation may be raped—I am predicting that the ancient premanuptials are going to return at the hands of a corporate class of Clintonian perverts.

Oh, by the way, this future world is the same future world in the Sunset Saga, the place where the two time hunters, Bracken and Sensky were built.

LL: A major theme in this work is sexual exploitation, primarily of the title character, but I think that the erotic scene between Tyra and Tray is also somewhat exploitative. It is easy to laugh off sexual aggression when it is directed by women towards men. Does the fact that a man must usually be willing in some measure cause us to discount the harm that may come when women take advantage of this congenital weakness in men? [I want to read and discuss the Samson story together, if you think that is a good idea, but I want to read Taboo You first.]

JL: Great idea. I’ve wanted to look again at Samson after doing the Gilgamesh book. Okay, the murderous bitch that seduces Tray, is one of four sisters, a pod of purpose built, killer lesbian quadruplets designed to protect, control and kill CEOs and secondarily—and as part of this function—to wrangle security and paramilitary meatheads. This is why the military techs are monogamous homosexual males, to make them immune to their wiles. They basically kill during sex. Most of their sexual conduct is supposed to be with the female CEOs, to facilitate control. Any guy they do twice just has to die—no third time around with these whores. Yes, before you ask these women are a composite of women I have been involved with.

LL: Another major theme is that characters willingly take their lives in their hands, whether it be to protect another, or to seek their own freedom. Do you think that it is possible to separate the sacrifice from the freedom, or are they the same thing?

JL: According to Robert E. Howard, the ultimate freedom of the hero was to commit self-sacrifice, which shows through in about ten of his stories as a yearning for a suicidal escape from the dull reality of servitude. I know from experience that the only time I’ve ever really enjoyed myself was when I thought I was throwing my life away.

But in Organa, since Tray is still a man—with most males having been prevented, neutered or emasculated by psychological means—he comes into contact with something he doesn’t understand, the biological imperative to save a woman. This is something he was designed and indoctrinated against—one of his jobs is killing pregnant women, which I omitted as I actually had plans on selling this story—but, when he becomes the Usher he meets the first organic woman in his life—which is a problem. I might as well give this away because I buried it too deeply in the subtext for most readers to pick up. Security operatives who excel are assigned as the Usher guarding these various celebrity organic persons, primarily because being too good at their work makes them a potential danger. The usher detail is their last assignment before they’re terminated.

LL: Thank you, James, for sharing this haunting story with me. Organa can be purchased as a stand-alone novella in paperback or Kindle, an earlier version of the story is available as a pdf at the JL store, and versions are also included Darkly and Motherworld.

(c) 2017 James LaFond & Lynn Lockhart

Darkly by James LaFond

Darkly is the comprehensive anthology of the short fiction of James LaFond; encompassing the lesser anthologies: Rise, Motherworld, Sacrifix and Daughters of Moros. This collection includes 22 novelettes and short stories ranging from historical horror, science-fiction, and his own weird brand of postmodern urban horror, including: By This Axe! Buzz Bunny, Little Feet Going Nowhere, Organa, Fat Girl Dancing, Menthol Rampage, and The Song of Jeannot.

Kindle

Paperback

Incubus of Your Sacred Emasculation by James LaFond

Incubus of Your Sacred Emasculation makes the case that Modern Man was psychologically neutered and denatured beyond his dimmest dreams, and that his grandson, the Postmodern First World Man has been reduced to the social status of the eunuch of old, and possibly prefigures a drone-like future. This politically incorrect screed describes the process by which men have been invalidated through conquest, civics, and literature. The author makes the case that as long as civilizations have risen men have been systematically emasculated, and goes onto interpretations of Gilgamesh, The Iliad, The Odyssey and Beowulf that reflect on the authors of these ancient works as having been cognizant of this process.

paperback

Into the Mountains of Madness, Part Three, by James LaFond

What happens when an ‘off the rails’ science fiction writer and urban violence researcher sifts through the rubble of the American dream in search of the loose brick that brought it all down? An anthology of 151 book, journal and video reviews from 2014, including: Morning-Crowned and Shining, The Curse of Heaven, The Primal Math of Violence, Got Kung Fu Bitchez, In the Chinks of Your World Machine, To Sail beyond the World, and the articles Living in the Subtext, and Rise of the Nike Nation. If you want to be the person who can change the terms of discussion in such a way as to send doubt and, fear and distaste coursing through the veins of your brainwashed friends, family and associates then consider Into the Mountains of Madness: Part 3 as a dinner party primer that could put you too the beyond the pale.


Paperback

Into the Mountains of Madness, Part Two, by James LaFond

What happens when an ‘off the rails’ science fiction writer and urban violence researcher sifts through the rubble of the American dream in search of the loose brick that brought it all down? An anthology of 154 select book, journal and video reviews from 2013, including: The Great Horn, Boomed Doom Hounds, Your Heels, The Dead White Dude Who Saved My Mind, The Man Who Ate Captain Cook’s Big Toe, My Darling Donkey Boy, With Somber Fire, and the essay Childish Things. If you want to be the person who can change the terms of discussion in such a way as to send doubt and, fear and distaste coursing through the veins of your brainwashed friends, family and associates then consider Into the Mountains of Madness: Part 2 as a dinner party primer that could put you too the beyond the pale.

paperback

Into the Mountains of Madness, Part One, by James LaFond

What happens when an ‘off the rails’ science fiction writer and urban violence researcher sifts through the rubble of the American dream in search of the loose brick that brought it all down? 50 essays, including: To Step on God’s Toe, The Secret History of Bitchez, Welcome to Manginastan, The Extinction of Men and The Microeconomics of Wife Beating. If you want to be the person who can change the terms of discussion in such a way as to send doubt, fear and distaste coursing through the veins of your brainwashed friends, family and associates then consider Into the Mountains of Madness as a dinner party primer that could put you, too, beyond the pale.

Paperback

Breeder's Digest by James LaFond

What percentage of Money Transfers at a ghetto supermarket go to Federal prison inmates?

Why didn’t Taino Indians want to go to heaven and opted to be burned at the inquisitor’s stake instead?

How many calories of petroleum does it take to produce 1 calorie of food?

What is the cannibal record for human livers eaten by one man in a lifetime?

Why was Genghis Khan a humanitarian?

Where will you find the 15 million psychopaths in the United States?

Have you ever felt like a guinea pig in some unseen mastermind’s laboratory, and would like evidence that your creeping sense of hierarchical insemination is justified?

If you are hungry for off-the wall factoids that point to where we came from and where we are headed, then the Breeder’s Digest will give you all the ammunition you need to wage an unconventional dinner party discussion. Also includes the first five secrets of the universe according to Tarl Cabot, the ‘Box Prophet’, who sketched the secrets of human salvation on the inside of his cardboard home, with a ‘spork’ in his own blood, only to have some ‘ecofreaks’ shove his home, and the chance for mankind’s salvation, into a compactor!

Paperback

The GQ Mugging Inquest by James LaFond

From early 2013 through late 2014, the author, an urban violence researcher and novelist, visited one Northeast Baltimore bar where a handful of middle-aged men gathered to speak of sports, their work day, the current news, and of their youth. The GQ Mugging Inquest is his impression of their interesting, entertaining, and ultimately manly, art of conversation.

The GQ Mugging Inquest is a study in masculine culture, specifically the art of bonding conversation between African-American men of the generation that came of age in the 1960’s and 70s.

Kindle & paperback

Narco Night Train by James LaFond

In Narco Night Train counterculture urban violence writer James LaFond offers a selection of stranger than fiction truths to illustrate the massive threat to personal autonomy that is the 21st Century American Narco State. You do not have to agree with the author that the people of America are being drugged into insensibility and led up the chronologic meat chute to agree that drug use and The Drug War in the United States are cultural driving mechanisms.

Kindle edition
Paperback

Don't Get Boned by James LaFond

This urban survival guide answers dozens of self-defense and avoidance questions, including: What can I legally defend myself with while in public spaces? Don’t Get Boned is a handbook for surviving the nuanced threats of postmodern urban life, written for the person residing in the hunting matrix outside of law enforcement.

Kindle

Paperback

Alienation Nation by James LaFond

In Alienation Nation James LaFond, the authority on urban survival, offers a guide to defining and surviving our dystopian now. As a committed Darwinist LaFond offers no societal solutions and advocates no political action, but rather offers a guide to living below the political and criminal horizon [which he insists are one and the same] and adopting a practical view of violence and society toward the end of developing sustainable countermeasures that will permit you to avoid and survive crime without falling into the clutches of the judicial system.

Alienation Nation is available in Kindle and paperback:

Kindle edition

Paperback

The Scale of Warfare; Q&A with James LaFond

Masculine Revival in the Face of the Machine State: From the Peace of Westphalia to the Marseilles Soccer Hooligan Clash and the Baltimore Riots

Note to reader: If you haven't read James LaFond's post "No Small Beer," or seen the related video, you should go there first.

The video is an hour long and well worth watching, but the gist of it is that there is a growing movement of Soccer Hooliganism in Russia. Young men are training and fighting one another in groups, and in 2016, around 200 of these Hooligans went to Marseilles during the World Cup and attacked their English counterparts. English Hooliganism has seen better days and they were unaware and unprepared for the battle. The video was put out by the BBC and has the predictable biases.

LL: James, you have observed that the Peace of Westphalia marked the beginning of "national machine warfare." Relatedly, Nassim Taleb has proposed, also citing the Peace of Westphalia, in "Antifragile," that the existence of nation-states, as opposed to city-states, feudal and tribal groups, led to the pattern of war of the twentieth century, with large scale conflict, and has left the world with far greater danger of catastrophic war than ever in history. This contrary to the popular view (from Steven Pinker) that violence, including warfare, is on the decline world wide. Taleb's point is that having numerous local skirmishes is much safer than having large powers in constant tension, and we won't know how bad it could get until it does.

JL:  Lynn, first, violence within society continues to increase, counter to law enforcement data. Society is now more violent per foot space than it ever was. However, since our intellectuals deal in violence per 100,000 , an intrinsically dehumanized scale, we, like the wildebeest, are seen as rarely preyed upon. Medieval studies of violence show a high per-capita rate of violence. However, per-capita notions are artificial. What is important is violence per foot. How dangerous is the place where you live if you removed everybody but yourself and the predators? That is the psychologically impactive view, what produces alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, ennui, decadence…

Furthermore, if we go along with the misleading and fundamentally flawed FBI notion of macro-data qualified violence we see the following when compared with my first hand survey:

In 1996, only 25% of violence came to the attention of law enforcement.

In 2016, only 5% of violence came to the attention of law enforcement.

During this 20 year period law enforcement has made a multi-layered commitment to reclassifying violence down, with home invasions becoming destruction of property, muggings becoming theft, etc.

Beyond this is the fact that most aggression does not result in legally definable aggression. Me following you to your car and then walking on by because your husband happens to be sitting in the car, when if he hadn’t I would have attacked you, is not definable by law enforcement.

Also, where murders may remain stagnant, with handgun killings staying steady nationwide and stabbing perhaps doubling, blunt force attacks, as the admittance of clubbing and beating victims do not trigger law enforcement responses as do gunshot, stabbing and rape admittances, have greatly increased, with cagey criminals averse to prison time switching to blunt force away from firearms and edged weapons.

Taking the above factors, from Baltimore City, into account, how can anyone look at a marginal decrease in overall killing stats across the nation, or a reduction of robbery stats [which are heavily massaged by reporting methods] and see a less violent world, where it is at least three times as violent.

A better way to rate aggression would be to track the sale and installation of plexi-glass counter shields at retail outlets and aggregate them, meaning the bulletproof counter installed on North and Maryland 40 years ago is still in use, and all of those built since, at an accelerating rate, actually amount to a manifold doubling of hostile points of aggression and predation across the real physical landscape rather than in the contrived theoretic landscape of the FBI macro stats.

As for the Peace of Westphalia, which traditionally dates the rise of the nation state, projecting force with conscription-based armies over kingdoms and republics employing feudal obligations and mercenary employment for force projection, here are my immediate thoughts.

The defeat of the Spanish tericos [combined arms regiments loyal to the king of Spain] that led to the Peace of Westphalia, killed whatever connection to warfare that heroism had, that is whatever the brutal 30 years war had not already erased. In a very real sense, that war, from 1618 to 1648 was when God was killed on the battlefield along with the divine right of kingship. Kings would now increasingly become a class of managerial despot compromised by their advisors. That war also saw the first WMD, the Hell-Burner of Antwerp. The Spanish were as evil as the rest of the players. But their soldiery still held to notions of heroism that would soon only find expression in dueling and prize fighting, which emerged at this very time as a plague on the officer class. We see honorable violence being pushed downward into society as the first modern slave armies [they emptied the prisons and whore houses to fill the ranks] sterilized war of meaning as it became a collective expedient.

LL:  James, do you think the Russian Soccer Hooligans represent a return to tribal warfare? You point out in the comments to that article that these firms fight one another for practice. By fighting firm vs. firm, they signal the safety of their towns, and by joining up to fight the English, they can also signal national strength.

JL:  The fact is that these hooligans are engaging in warrior pursuits with meaning as only a few hundred men of any nation can engage in meaningful warrior activity in the machine-minded armed services. Once you get below the special operations types you just have a welfare state-prison-school-system in uniform.

LL:  I have mixed feelings about what they did in Marseilles, but I wonder if there aren't a few English and French who would think twice now about going to war with Russia?

JL:  Such notions as national will for war are really obsolete. War is now a machined wraith of its former self, a form of macro-policing by globalists and doomed resistance by nationalists, and has been such since 1948. This Marseilles clash was about the Russians using the occasion to assert their masculine humanity over the decadent Brits, in essence saying, “We will remain Russians and men, as you are thrown on the scrap heap of humanity by the soulless system that your grandfathers fought to erect, which has now begun eating its own, reducing you to neither men or Englishmen, but a shadow without a ghost—you revolted against Modernity and sank into sloth and we carry on.”

The Russians are letting the British and the dying West know that they have all become like Tolkien’s ring wraiths—terminally, amorally domesticated ciphers.

LL:  Looking back over this I have left out what I really wanted to talk about which is your idea about outsourcing violence.

We have seen that an individual man has the right to risk his own body in the violent endeavors of his choosing. You have made your life's work out of sharing your violent experiences, and we learned about some of the physical consequences last week.

By joining firms, these young Russian men compromise themselves to a group, albeit a small and highly accountable one. The leaders of the group are fighting alongside the recruits and we saw that the fighting and the leading are inextricably linked when Vasily indicated that he had retired from fighting and firm leadership, without distinguishing between the two. Moving up the scale any further removes the warrior role from the leaders who are responsible for disposing of their lives.

JL:  Lynn, you have just described a real—if circumscribed within the confines of modernity—a real, actualized return to the hero bands of primal antiquity. Vasily and his men are Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Odysseus and his Crew, Jason and his Argonauts, Achilles and his Myrmidons and Beowulf and his dozen heroes. As strange as it seems Russian soccer Holliganism is a protest against outsourced aggression-based society and an expressed yearning for a return to a primal lifestyle.

LL:  Thank you James.

‘No Small Beer’ - jameslafond.com

‘The European Age’ - jameslafond.com

jameslafond.com

(c) 2017 James LaFond & Lynn Lockhart

Lesser Angels of our Nature by James LaFond

This troubling memoir chronicles the aggression of ideas that fuels the violence and inequity that engulfs us. The author, James LaFond, recounts tales of prejudice and hatred as he retraces his life from innocent boyhood, through a troubled youth and savage adulthood, and into fatalistic middle-age; a life lived within a violent, fractured, self-hating society at war with its own reason for being.


Buy a copy in Kindle or paperback, or a pdf from the James LaFond store.

Saving the World Sucks by James LaFond

"Saving the World Sucks" is a no-words-barred look at our changing literary landscape from the perspective of a practitioner of the art of speculative fiction. LaFond excavates the politically correct, trope-laden, and clichéd graveyards of science-fiction, fantasy and horror, with a defiant eye on what emerging authors of this and previous eras have and can do to set themselves apart from the vapidly palling literary pack.

"Saving the World Sucks" is available in paperback at Amazon.

American Fist: A Fighter's View of Boxing by James LaFond

American Fist is James LaFond's anthology of boxing commentary and instructional material.  James describes the art of boxing in detail, providing the novice with vivid images of the positions and motions used by boxers.

Whether your interest in boxing is oriented toward the ring, the cage, the street, or the flat screen TV on your man cave wall, American Fist will broaden and deepen your understanding of this ancient art that has, in its final form, become something quintessentially American.

American Fist is available in paperback at Amazon.