Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Until the Last Dog Dies
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://cryptoscatology.blogspot.com/
CITY:
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | n 2012053822 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2012053822 |
| HEADING: | Guffey, Robert |
| 000 | 00629cz a2200157n 450 |
| 001 | 9070858 |
| 005 | 20170518074659.0 |
| 008 | 120817n| azannaabn |n aaa |
| 010 | __ |a n 2012053822 |
| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |d DLC |
| 053 | _0 |a PS3607.U472 |
| 100 | 1_ |a Guffey, Robert |
| 670 | __ |a Cryptoscatology, c2012: |b t.p. (Robert Guffey) p. 4 of cover (lecturer, English Dept., California State Univ.- Long Beach) |
| 670 | __ |a Until the last dog dies: |b CIP t.p. (Robert Guffey) |
| 670 | __ |a e-mail 2017-05-17 fr. C.Allyn, Night Shade Books: |b (Robert Guffey has also published Cryptoscatology; Spies and Saucers; Chameleo) |
| 953 | __ |a rg90 |
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:California State University–Long Beach, B.A., M.F.A.; Clarion Writers Workshop, graduate.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, educator. California State University–Long Beach, Department of English, lecturer.
WRITINGS
Contributor of stories and articles to periodicals, including Believer, Black Dandy, Catastrophia, Chiron Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Mailer Review, Pearl, Pedestal, Phantom Drift, Postscripts, and Third Alternative. Also author of collection of novellas, Spies & Saucers, PS Pubishing, 2014.
SIDELIGHTS
Robert Guffey is a lecturer in the Department of English at California State University–Long Beach, and the author of several books, including the nonfiction titles Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form and Chameleo: A Strange But True Story of Invisible Spies, Heroin Addiction, and Homeland Security,Chameleo, as well as the 2017 novel, Until the Last Dog Dies.
Cryptoscatology
Guffey’s first book, Cryptoscatology, examines a plethora of conspiracy theories, from the moon landing to the assassination of JFK to discover links between seemingly unrelated events and eras. This cultural studies perspective allows the author to find strange connections between George W. Bush and Dracula, for example, or between strawberry ice cream and UFOs, Freemasonry and Shakespeare, mind control and the American public school system, genetically-engineered cows and genocide in the Middle East, and microwave weaponry and the reanimation of the dead. The pieces collected here are mostly previously published essays in magazines and online.
Reviewing Cryptoscatology in Magonia Review of Books website, Peter Rogerson commented: “If Guffey is sensible regarding secret societies and the like, he is, or professes to be, more than slightly paranoid about the US government and intelligence services, who he holds responsible for just about everything less than pleasant that goes on in the country.” Rogerson added: “Though Guffey like many writers both on the left and the right, see the state as the sole source of evil, much of the repression in the United States comes from very local authorities and civil society rather than the ‘Federal Government’.”
Chameleo
In Chameleo Guffey presents the strange story of a friend of his, Dion Fuller, a heroin addict, who gave shelter to a member of the U.S. Marines who had stolen night vision goggles and potentially also some top secret documents. Dion was subsequently arrested for conspiring with international terrorists, though he claims no such affiliation. Held for six days, he thereafter felt that he had become the subject of a secret “cloaking” experiment by investigators made “invisible.” In this work, Guffey interviews one of the scientists supposedly involved with this research, a man codenamed Chameleo.
In an online Disinfo interview with John Hawkins, Guffey remarked on the inspiration for the structure of Chameleo: “When I was eighteen, I discovered Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And around that same time, I discovered a book called AIDS, Inc by Jon Rappoport, which is a very hard-hitting investigative journalism look into alternative theories regarding the origin of AIDS. Was AIDS from a government laboratory, etc. It examines all the theories. I remember thinking it would be fascinating if you could combine the serious investigative journalistic tone of AIDS, Inc with this kind of crazy Gonzo narrative thing, like in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and I think Chameleo is a culmination of that interest on my part.”
Reviewing Chameleo in the Mailer Review, Victor Peppard noted: “It needs to be stressed that Robert Guffey is not indulging in an exercise in science fiction, about which is he very well informed, and he has done extensive research on the military’s surveillance techniques. … Guffey contends that the military deliberately uses people like Dion Fuller who are in one way or another vulnerable and thus unlikely to fight against being used as unwilling or unknowing subjects for testing invisible midgets and miniature drones. He also shows … that the military has many ways of shielding its projects from investigative reporters and other interested citizens. … I believe we should pay serious attention to Guffey’s exposing of the surveillance techniques and tactics employed by what he calls ‘The Machine.’ And we should also heed his exhortations to fight against them–if only we had the initiative and the gumption to do so.” Writing in Flavorwire website, Jonathon Sturgeon commented: “By turns exuberant, resourceful, hilarious, dubious, and emotionally affecting, Chameleo thrives on the contact high of the possible, much like the twin arts of paranoia and conspiracy, from which it takes its manic energy.”
Until the Last Dog Dies
Guffey’s novel, Until the Last Dog Dies, focuses on a young stand-up comedian who must deal with a comedian’s nightmare: a virus that attacks people’s sense of humor. This virus is attacking people around the world, and while not deadly, it it does attack a part of the brain and destroys the sense of humor. It seems no one is immune from this virus. Meanwhile in Los Angeles, Elliot Greeley at first does not believe in the virus, but as it takes its toll, it also loses him and his comedian friends their audiences. How to react, how to survive?
A Kirkus Reviews critic called Until the Last Dog Dies a “clever concept that gets lost in a sea of farcical subplots and self-indulgent prose.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer had a more varied assessment, commenting that this “sardonic, cleverly written comedic debut relies heavily on absurd synchronicity, bold characterization, and heavy irony to make its points about the apocalyptic nature of American humorlessness.” Another critic for Kirkus Reviews contributor had a higher evaluation, terming it a “nihilistic satire that takes the idea that death is easy and comedy is hard to a whole new level.” Similarly, Locus Online writer Paul Di Filippo concluded: “By turns mystical and ashcan-real, insanely funny and grimly ghastly, Guffey’s novel cuts a zigzag trail through conventionality as it follows Elliot Greeley in his half-serious, half jesting quest for some deeper meaning to existence. If you build your life on laughs, what happens when the laughs disappear? … Guffey’s standup debut is standout speculative fiction.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2017, review of Until the Last Dog Dies; September 15, 2017, review of Until the Last Dog Dies.
Mailer Review, fall, 2015, Victor Peppard, review of Chameleo: A Strange But True Story of Invisible Spies, Heroin Addiction, and Homeland Security, p. 345.
Publishers Weekly, September 18, 2017, review of Until the Last Dog Dies, p. 59.
ONLINE
Cision PRWeb, http://www.prweb.com/ (May 14, 2012), Kris Millegan, review of Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form.
Coast to Coast, https://www.coasttocoastam.com/ (June 7, 2018), “Robert Guffey.”
Crytptoscatology website, http://cryptoscatology.blogspot.com (June 7, 2018), “Robert Guffey.”
Disinfo, http://disinfo.com/ (March 28, 2015), John Hawkins, review of Chameleo.
Flavorwire, http://flavorwire.com/ (April 23, 2015), Jonathon Sturgeon, review of Chameleo.
Locus Online, https://locusmag.com/ (December 20, 2017), Paul Di Filippo, review of Until the Last Dog Dies.
Magonia Review of Books, http://pelicanist.blogspot.com/ (July 11, 2012), Peter Rogerson, review of Cryptoscatology.
OR Books website, http://www.orbooks.com/ (June 7, 2018), “Robert Guffey.”
Biography
Robert Guffey is a lecturer in the Department of English at California State University – Long Beach. His latest book is UNTIL THE LAST DOG DIES (Night Shade/Skyhorse, 2017), a darkly satirical novel about a young stand-up comedian who must adapt as best he can to an apocalyptic virus that destroys only the humor centers of the brain. His previous books include the journalistic memoir CHAMELEO: A STRANGE BUT TRUE STORY OF INVISIBLE SPIES, HEROIN ADDICTION, AND HOMELAND SECURITY (OR Books, 2015), which Flavorwire has called, “By many miles, the weirdest and funniest book of 2015.” A graduate of the famed Clarion Writers Workshop in Seattle, he has also written a collection of novellas entitled SPIES & SAUCERS (PS Publishing, 2014). His first book of nonfiction, CRYPTOSCATOLOGY: CONSPIRACY THEORY AS ART FORM was published in 2012. He’s written stories and articles for numerous magazines and anthologies, among them The Believer, Black Dandy, Catastrophia, The Chiron Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Mailer Review, Pearl, The Pedestal, Phantom Drift, Postscripts, and The Third Alternative.
Robert Guffey
I'm the author of CRYPTOSCATOLOGY: CONSPIRACY THEORY AS ART FORM (TrineDay, 2012) as well as SPIES & SAUCERS, a collection of three novellas (available from PS Publishing at: http://www.pspublishing.co.uk/spies-and-saucers-jhc-robert-guffey-2158-p.asp), and CHAMELEO: A STRANGE BUT TRUE STORY OF INVISIBLE SPIES, HEROIN ADDICTION, AND HOMELAND SECURITY (available from OR Books at: http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/chameleo/). My most recent book is UNTIL THE LAST DOG DIES (available from Night Shade Books at: http://www.nightshadebooks.com/book/until-the-last-dog-dies/#.Wf-RnIhrzcs). If you would like to buy a signed copy of CRYPTOSCATOLOGY, simply click on the button below.
Robert Guffey
Special Guest
Biography:
Robert Guffey is a lecturer in the Department of English at California State University – Long Beach. His latest book is Chameleo: A Strange but True Story of Invisible Spies, Heroin Addiction, and Homeland Security (OR Books, 2015), which Flavorwire has called, “By many miles, the weirdest and funniest book of 2015.” A graduate of the famed Clarion Writers Workshop in Seattle, he has also written a collection of novellas entitled Spies & Saucers (PS Publishing, 2014). His first book of nonfiction, Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form, was published in 2012. He’s written stories and articles for numerous magazines and anthologies, among them Fortean Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Mailer Review, Mysteries, New Dawn, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Paranoia, Postscripts, and Video Watchdog Magazine.
Robert Guffey
AUTHOR
Robert Guffey is a lecturer in the Department of English at California State University – Long Beach. A graduate of the famed Clarion Writers Workshop in Seattle, he is the author of a collection of novellas entitled Spies & Saucers (PS Publishing, 2014). His first book of nonfiction, Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form, was published in 2012. He’s written stories and articles for numerous magazines and anthologies, among them Fortean Times, Mysteries, Nameless Magazine, New Dawn, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Paranoia, The Third Alternative, and Video Watchdog Magazine.
CHAMELEO
A Strange but True Story of Invisible Spies, Heroin Addiction, and Homeland Security
Robert Guffey
Chameleo is a true account of a heroin addict who sheltered a U.S. Navy sailor who’d stolen night vision goggles and a few top secret files from a nearby Marine base. He found himself arrested and subsequently believed himself under intense government scrutiny — and, he suspected, the subject of bizarre electro-optical experimentation called “cloaking.” More
In the News
CHAMELEO author ROBERT GUFFEY is interviewed on “Where Did the Road Go?” (3/15/2018)
Robert Guffey blogs on Cryptoscatology (9/23/2016)
“Meet the Ph.D of Secret Shit” ROBERT GUFFEY reviewed by The Edge (6/24/2016)
ROBERT GUFFEY interviewed on The Higherside Chats (4/4/2016)
On DisInfo, ROBERT GUFFEY details new findings on government surveillance tactics (1/20/2016)
QUOTE:
A nihilistic satire that takes the idea that death is easy and comedy is hard to a whole new level
Guffey, Robert: UNTIL THE LAST DOG DIES
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Guffey, Robert UNTIL THE LAST DOG DIES Night Shade (Adult Fiction) $15.99 11, 7 ISBN: 978-1-59780-918-4
A young stand-up comic finds his world turned upside down when a mysterious brain disease kills off the world's sense of humor.This debut novel by Guffey (Chameleo: A Strange but True Story of Invisible Spies, Heroin Addiction and Homeland Security, 2015, etc.) is a strange mishmash of influences. It taps into the cultural zeitgeist of I'm Dying Up Here, Showtime's gritty portrait of stand- up comedy, but then squanders its traction on a navel-gazing contemplation of how humor makes us human. Elliot Greeley is a stand-up comedian creeping up on 30, making his way around the indie comedy circuit with his best friend, Danny Oswald. Trading on routines like "My Girlfriend's a Coke Whore," Elliot is emblematic of comedians like David Cross, a bitterly funny, vulgar comic who's reaching burnout in a hurry. It doesn't help that he self-prophesizes his own dilemma in the first few pages. "I often wondered if most of the human race wasn't suffering from some kind of strange disease, an anti-evolutionary trait that prevented them from detecting the mad humor that surrounded them each and every day," Elliot muses. Sure enough, a mysterious new illness starts attacking people's funny bones, and Elliot and his friends fall into a deep metaphysical funk. Guffey tries to inject some humor with a gig opening for a punk band ("Doktor Delgado's All-American Genocidal Warfare Against The Sick And The Stupid"), a pair of bumbling Jehovah's Witnesses in the vein of Vladimir and Estragon, and a host of other satiric figures, but the book turns very dark as Elliot's friend Heather returns from a gig in San Francisco. Asked if anyone was getting any laughs, she responds: "Some, the ones who aren't funny. The rest of us were devastated, we couldn't understand it. The whole city felt dead, filled with dead people, dead cars, dead buildings, dead girders, dead molecules, everything dead. Dead to the core." A nihilistic satire that takes the idea that death is easy and comedy is hard to a whole new level.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Guffey, Robert: UNTIL THE LAST DOG DIES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2017. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504217706/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&
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http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
xid=6cb35a4e. Accessed 19 May 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A504217706
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QUOTE:
clever concept that gets lost in a sea of farcical subplots and self-indulgent prose.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Guffey, Robert: UNTIL THE LAST DOG DIES
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 1, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Guffey, Robert UNTIL THE LAST DOG DIES Night Shade (Adult Fiction) $15.99 11, 7 ISBN: 978-1-59780-918-4
In this debut novel, a virus eradicates Americans' senses of humor as they prepare to elect the next leader of the free world.Comedian Elliot Greeley is known for his provocative stand-up routines, so when the crowd at an alternative comedy club in West Hollywood reacts to his set with indifference, it rattles him. He assumes that he's losing his edge until government scientists report the discovery of a virus that "affects only the humor centers of the brain" and whose symptoms include complacency, denial, and the inability to understand sarcasm. Although most people believe that this strange new illness was invented by the CDC to occupy their time, its effects are no laughing matter for Elliot and his friends--who, one after another, start losing the ability to write and tell jokes. Set during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, this satirical tale explores the role of comedy in maintaining a healthy democracy. Regrettably, in the process of promoting humor as a means to cope with the absurdity of current events, Guffey (Chameleo: A Strange but True Story of Invisible Spies, Heroin Addiction, and Homeland Security, 2015, etc.) spills more ink on accidentally stoned Mormons, pedophilic Mexican hit men, and a terminally ill rock band than he does on the plague and its fallout. Elliot's manic, rambling narration further muddies Guffey's message. A clever concept that gets lost in a sea of farcical subplots and self-indulgent prose.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Guffey, Robert: UNTIL THE LAST DOG DIES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2017. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502192310/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=f5105e9f. Accessed 19 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502192310
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QUOTE:
sardonic, cleverly written comedic debut relies heavily on absurd synchronicity, bold characterization, and heavy irony to make its points about the apocalyptic nature of American humorlessness.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Until the Last Dog Dies
Publishers Weekly.
264.38 (Sept. 18, 2017): p59. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Until the Last Dog Dies
Robert Guffey. Nightshade, $15.99 trade paper (322p) ISBN 978-1-59780-918-4
Guffey's sardonic, cleverly written comedic debut relies heavily on absurd synchronicity, bold characterization, and heavy irony to make its points about the apocalyptic nature of American humorlessness. However, his own humor and metahumor sometimes struggle to find their footing in a tale that evokes the work of Robert Anton Wilson with a hint of Flowers for Algernon. Elliot Greeley and his fellow second-tier L.A. comedians find their professional and personal lives devastated by a brain virus that causes people, including their audiences and some of their colleagues, to lose their senses of humor without realizing it. Guffey effectively displays humor's use as a defense mechanism in the strong central portion of the novel, in which Elliot's sarcasm is met sometimes with banter, inviting the reader into the fellowship of those who get the joke, and at other times with unnerving sincerity that is inherently funny in its incongruity. But Guffey settles in unevenly at first, leaving it unclear whether the reader is supposed to find the protagonist the butt of the joke. Terse final chapters that extend from the personal into the political, as Greeley's own humor is affected, are disturbing but less sharp. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Until the Last Dog Dies." Publishers Weekly, 18 Sept. 2017, p. 59. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A523623354/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=a28f6288. Accessed 19 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A523623354
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QUOTE:
t needs to be stressed that Robert Guffey is not indulging in an exercise in science fiction, about which is he very well informed, and he has done extensive research on the military's surveillance techniques.
Guffey contends that the military deliberately uses people like Dion Fuller who are in one way or another vulnerable and thus unlikely to fight against being used as unwilling or unknowing subjects for testing invisible midgets and miniature drones. He also shows, with the assistance of Richard Schowengerdt, that the military has many ways of shielding its projects from investigative reporters and other interested citizens.
I believe we should pay serious attention to Guffey's exposing of the surveillance techniques and tactics employed by what he calls "The Machine." And we should also heed his exhortations to fight against them--if only we had the initiative and the gumption to do so.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
HOW THE NEW ORDER OF
SURVEILLANCE REALLY WORKS
Victor Peppard
The Mailer Review.
9.1 (Fall 2015): p345+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2015 Norman Mailer Society http://normanmailersociety.org
Full Text:
Chameleo. A Strange But True Story of Invisible Spies, Heroin Addiction, and Homeland Security By Robert Guffey
OR Books
New York, 2015
264 pp. Paper $18.00
E-book $10.00. Print + E-book $24.00
CHAMELEO IS INDEED A STRANGE STORY, one we might wish were not true, but after reading Robert Guffey's book I am convinced that it is. The book's cover features the title superimposed on a facsimile of a page from the Department of the Navy's Field Manual. This is because the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) plays a crucial role in the events Guffey describes. In addition, the upper left-hand corner has the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States with the words Annuit coeptis above and Novus or do seclorum below. ludging from the subject matter of CHAMELEO, it seems likely that Guffey means to suggest a new meaning for the "Eye of Providence" above the pyramid. As though to whet our appetite, on the pages before the start of the story, we see photographs of the principal characters, including the author, his friend Dion Fuller, and Richard Schowengerdt, the head of Project Chameleo, as well as a picture of a "UFO-like drone." These photographs include one of Dion Fuller giving the finger as a "farewell message to the NCIS and their invisible devil spawn." CHAMELEO consists of two basic parts: the first is the story of how Dion Fuller, a friend of the author, winds up being tracked, interrogated, and subjected to all manner of high-tech surveillance by the NCIS, and the second is a narrative that features Robert Guffey's meetings with Richard Schowengerdt, head of Project Chameleo.
Dion lives in an apartment in Pacific Beach, CA, where he sells drugs and allows his dwelling to be used for twenty-four parties and by anyone who wants to crash there. One such young man named Lee stops there briefly in the process of going AWOL from Camp Pendleton. To the amazement of the author, Lee has managed to steal twenty-five pairs of night vision goggles, a nine-millimeter pistol, a laptop, and a truck in the course of his getaway. Lee's brief stay in Fuller's apartment is the ostensible reason for the multi-faceted NCIS persecution of Dion, because they believe he knows the whereabouts of the night vision goggles, which we presume have some special high-tech properties
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the Navy does not want to become known to the public.
Early in the recounting of Dion's tribulations, we are not sure how much to believe of what he tells Robert Guffey, because Dion is a meth and heroin addict who may be paranoid. He is also proficient at taking advantage of others and may even be a con-man. Nevertheless, Guffey remains loyal to him and goes to great lengths to help him out. At a certain point, his involvement results in Dion's troubles becoming his own (78).
When Dion tells Guffey about being visited by invisible spies or agents, we are naturally skeptical. Dion also notices that when he looks outside of his apartment he sometimes does not recognize what he is seeing. His efforts to persuade the NCIS that he does not know the whereabouts of the stolen night vision goggles are all in vain. He even meets with Lita Thompson, the head of the investigating team, but is unable to convince her to stop all of the high-tech shenanigans she and her crew are subjecting him to. Eventually, Dion realizes he needs to leave Pacific Beach, which is near Navy headquarters in San Diego, and so he moves to Minnesota. But there too he is hounded by what he believes are hundreds of people who he is convinced are deliberately getting in his way and running into him in all kinds of places, including restrooms. They all tend to say the same kinds of things to him, often telling him to give up the goggles. It also appears that a predator drone is following him everywhere he goes. At a certain point, he begins to see crows that hover around and follow him.
When a pair of "Jesus freaks," Jeb and Bo, get hold of Dion and try to convert him to their version of the light by threatening him with branding irons, Guffey is forced to intercede yet again, this time over the phone. As farfetched as Dion's trials might have seemed to some, Jeb and Bo are receptive and hold off on the branding irons. This allows Dion to move to Winona, Kansas to a house well away from town, a place where he finds a brief respite from the incessant harassment he is receiving, but boredom sets in and he goes first to New Orleans and then to Seattle. Author-Narrator Robert Guffey goes on vacation to Seattle but winds up getting into a "mundane variety of intrigue... driving me up the wall more than the fucking invisible midgets ever had" (138) due largely to Dion's arrival there in his well-travelled van that serves as his mobile abode cum office. The causes of the "psychological dissonance" (154) Dion has been experiencing, as well as the meaning of the title begin to become clearer when Guffey meets with Richard Schowengerdt, the head of the project that gives the book its title.
Robert Guffey quotes Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes in order to enhance the credibility of his own story when he writes: "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth" (182). When Guffey meets Schowengerdt, who works for the Defense Contract Management Agency, we learn how Project Chameleo got its name. Here is what Schowengerdt tells the author:
Project Chameleo was conceived with the idea that we could take the
background and present it on a surface surrounding an object or in
front of an object, and portray the background on this image,
effectively giving you the same effect as if you were looking through
the object, see the background behind it. And the chameleon does this.
That's why I chose Chameleo, which is the Latin word for the genus
chameleon, or chameleon. (183)
In this way, all kinds of structures and people could be camouflaged at a distance of 700 feet or more, and it also would be possible to change the colors of aircraft. As Schowengerdt says, special sensors
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could be set up so that they conceal a person even as s/he turns (188). He also says that such a system is already of great interest to the Army in its program for developing the Soldier of the Future, and the Navy has also shown "intense interest" (189). What is more, the intelligence services could take advantage of this concealment technique as well, (193), and humans could be made to look like animals for purposes of psychological warfare (195).
Robert Guffey is so intrigued by all of these possibilities and developments he asks Schowengerdt whether it is possible to find out about them using the Freedom of Information Act. However, as Schowengerdt has already found out in his attempts to get an extension on the techniques he has patented, the Department of Defense (DOD) fends you off with all sorts of technicalities and requests for more and more details about exactly what information you want (197).
Guffey, who combines the techniques of a good investigative reporter with that of a (well pubished) fine storyteller, is interested in whether the government can keep a secret. Schowengerdt has a theory about that based on how the government dealt with the Roswell "UFO" incident of 1947:
He says that "I firmly believe that the UFO phenomenon has been leaked
out in a very controlled manner since about the 1950s and '60s...
there's just too many coincidences and too many connections, and a lot
of executives from the CIA, for example, have moved back and forth into
the movie industry. It's like a revolving door between the CIA and the
movie industry, and the media, the national media. And the whole idea
behind it is that it's a form of conditioning and control, that if you
condition the people that this is the way it's gonna be, then when it
finally comes, they're not going to be shocked out of their mind, you
know. (207)
Schowengerdt believes in the final analysis that "the military can keep a deep, dark secret, and I think they have done that to a degree with Roswell. But they've also leaked it out, which is kind of a paradox" (207). Schowengerdt is, undoubtedly, extremely talented and accomplished in the field of camouflage and concealment, and he is a tremendously valuable source for understanding what the military is doing in this field, as well as for exposing the military's tactics in keeping its programs hidden from those who would like to know what they are up to. Nevertheless, as a non-believer in UFOs I am not ready to get on board with his theory that for 68 years a succession of US administrations has been able to manage a series of coordinated efforts to alternately hide and leak information about UFOs and the Roswell incident, all with the purpose of not shocking the public out of our wits. That the government can keep certain information away from the public view for long periods of time seems self evident. Dion, who has a proprietary interest in that issue, cites the case of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment (217). This took place from 1932 to 1972, during which time black men with syphilis were experimented on rather than treated, even though penicillin was already the treatment of choice by 1940. We have to wonder how long the experiment would have lasted had not a whistle blower exposed it in 1972. However, is that government capable of mixing suppression of information with releasing bits of it at the same time?
When Richard Schowengerdt hears about the different optical distortions that Dion Fuller experienced, he posits that "they" might have been testing their techniques out on him (229). Fuller becomes so distraught over the surveillance he was subject to that he tries to commit suicide, but as he says, "it didn't work, because I'm indestructible for some ungodly reason" (231). When he moves to a part of California near some marijuana plantations, drone surveillance begins only after he gets there,
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and that convinces Guffey that Dion is being tracked again (262).
Toward the end of CHAMELEO, Guffey raises the temperature of his invective against the system that is developing ever more sophisticated surveillance techniques. His dealings with Linda Ciarimboli of Paramount Pictures, who tells him about the invisible soldiers that Paramount want to depict, convinces him that this is part of the military's conditioning kids to want to be invisible soldiers and "get their opaque asses blown off in some godforsaken desert at the backend of the world." He adds, "but, hey, at least I got to be invisible for a couple seconds. Go, G. I. Team, go!" (251). Guffey makes a plea that we "stop this surveillance" dystopia from ruining our own lives and lives of people we know... the lives of others (a reference to the German film The Lives of Others [Das Leben den Anderen]). He also worries that we have lost the ability to stop working for "The Machine" (257) and, quoting Theodore Sturgeon, urges us to "ask the next question" (260).
At the very end, Guffey turns up his invective yet another notch when he writes, "we're dealing with a rule-crazy, Puritanical, hypocritical, Old Testament-style perception that desperately needs to wipe out anything or anyone that is Other. Different. Contrary" (263). Moreover, he writes: "Fear God, demands our novus ordo seclorum. Fear the devils He created in his own image. Fear yourself. Fear the invisible. That's the new National Anthem of the Disassociated States of Amurrica" (264).
While writing this review I have encountered two articles in the press that substantiate and complement Robert Guffey's depiction of how the military and the intelligence services abuse our freedoms with their technology, both exotic and ordinary. The first of these appeared on June 3, 2015, 4A in an Associated Press report in the Tampa Bay Times: "The FBI is operating a small air force with scores of low-flying planes across the country carrying video and, at times, cellphone surveillance technology--all hidden behind fictitious companies that are fronts for the government, the Associated Press has learned." These planes can carry "technology that can identify thousands of people below through cellphones they carry, even if they're not making a call or in public." Naturally, the FBI claims that its surveillance planes, of which there are more than one hundred, operate within the agency's rules. Here I cannot resist saying, should we be glad of that or concerned about it? The news about these flights comes at a time when, as the AP puts it, "the Justice Department seeks to navigate privacy concerns arising from aerial surveillance by... drones." Robert Guffey and Dion Fuller will no doubt be more than interested to see how Justice resolves the issue. And when will we read in the mainstream press about the ways in which the government has conducted experiments to try out its new "intelligence gathering" equipment on people like Dion Fuller?
The second reference is an article, "Loitering with Intent" by William M. Arkin in Harper's, June 2015:11-16, about the military's use of drones and its inability to control the massive amounts of data it collects. Arkin understands well the deleterious impact of these practices when he writes: "When I look at the digital legions splayed out in the battlefield that is truly global, I see drones and the Data Machine they serve as the greatest threats to our national security, our safety, and our very way of life" (16). As we see here, Arkin's analysis dovetails with Guffey's depiction of surveillance drones in that each of them shows how much they erode the liberty and privacy we claim to hold so dear. (Arkin's article is from Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare, scheduled to appear in August 2015 by Little Brown.) I would add that it appears from the PBS "News of the Week in Review," June 19, 2015, that those who launch drones do not always know who they are targeting and only find out after a strike has been made. This separation of the warrior at a desk from the enemy is one of the major faults Arkin finds with the new warfare the United States is waging.
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It needs to be stressed that Robert Guffey is not indulging in an exercise in science fiction, about which is he very well informed, and he has done extensive research on the military's surveillance techniques. Among his sources are a number of websites and articles from the press, including Time and Popular Science. In the latter magazine, June 2011 (34-5), Guffey reports in a footnote on science writer Joshua Saul's description of the Defense Department's Raven with a 4.5 foot wingspan and the Nano Humingbird with a 6.5 inch wingspan. This is in the context of the "crows" Dion believes are following him (116).
Guffey contends that the military deliberately uses people like Dion Fuller who are in one way or another vulnerable and thus unlikely to fight against being used as unwilling or unknowing subjects for testing invisible midgets and miniature drones. He also shows, with the assistance of Richard Schowengerdt, that the military has many ways of shielding its projects from investigative reporters and other interested citizens. We are of course told that all of these inventions are designed to enhance our nation's security by enhancing the capabilities of our armed forces. And let us not forget the many intelligence agencies, which are also eager to try out all of these innovative surveillance devices and techniques--to keep us safe, of course. Many of these activities eventually reach the public's view, but I worry that they now come so fast and so often that they become accepted and established before we can judge the extent to which they erode our privacy and our liberty.
CHAMELEO consists of a number of narrative forms that include extensive interviews, especially with Dion Fuller and Richard Schowengerdt, letters written by and to the author, in addition to detailed footnotes as just noted, and an epilogue at the end. Guffey also employs a couple of subplots to add spice to the story, one about his work as a part-time English composition instructor and another about his romantic life, the latter of which culminates in his marriage to Melissa, who is a professional photographer. This provides a kind of happy ending to the romantic subplots, which begin on the first page of the book with Dion throwing Jessica out of his house for her blatant lack of fidelity, to put it periphrastically.
In the context of this journal, it is appropriate to note that Guffey (who published a story "The Walk" in the Fall 2013 issue of The Mailer Review: 347-56) makes what I am calling an Advertisement for Himself, when he mentions that his next book will be called The Opposite of Foolproof.
Most of all, I believe we should pay serious attention to Guffey's exposing of the surveillance techniques and tactics employed by what he calls "The Machine." And we should also heed his exhortations to fight against them--if only we had the initiative and the gumption to do so.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Peppard, Victor. "HOW THE NEW ORDER OF SURVEILLANCE REALLY WORKS." The Mailer
Review, vol. 9, no. 1, 2015, p. 345+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A514657637/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=06ef2884. Accessed 19 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A514657637
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QUOTE:
When I was 18, I discovered Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And around that same time, I discovered a book called AIDS, Inc by Jon Rappoport, which is a very hard-hitting investigative journalism look into alternative theories regarding the origin of AIDS. Was AIDS from a government laboratory, etc. It examines all the theories. I remember thinking it would be fascinating if you could combine the serious investigative journalistic tone of AIDS, Inc with this kind of crazy Gonzo narrative thing, like in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and I think Chameleo is a culmination of that interest on my part.
nterview with Robert Guffey, author of Chameleo (OR Books 2015), March 2015
Posted By: John Hawkins Mar 28, 2015
51y-YudF7iLThis was originally published on Tantric Disposition Matrix.
I sat down with Robert Guffey, author of Chameleo published by OR Books, for a riveting interview.
John Hawkins: Chameleo read like it would make for a brilliant screenplay. The whole thing came to life. I felt like I was reading a mash of Hunter S. Thompson, Philip K. Dick, but also a bit of Elmore Leonard, with the slick characterizations. The first third is extremely entertaining, but later you bring together a lot of threads – verbatim interviews, emails and phone call transcripts, all of which makes for an interesting combination of humor mixed with striking, frightening stuff.
RG: Yes, the first third is very narrative driven and then I get into the transcripts. I can see where the narrative might slow down some at that point. But I was hoping that at that point the reader would be interested enough to get to the end. And I wanted to maintain the transcript just so the reader could see that this was not just something I was making up. I very much didn’t want to be preaching or standing on a soapbox warning people about the coming apocalypse of the surveillance state. People tend not to listen to that and they tune it out.
JH: What influenced the structural choices you made in putting the book together?
RG: When I was 18, I discovered Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And around that same time, I discovered a book called AIDS, Inc by Jon Rappoport, which is a very hard-hitting investigative journalism look into alternative theories regarding the origin of AIDS. Was AIDS from a government laboratory, etc. It examines all the theories. I remember thinking it would be fascinating if you could combine the serious investigative journalistic tone of AIDS, Inc with this kind of crazy Gonzo narrative thing, like in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and I think Chameleo is a culmination of that interest on my part.
JH: A lot of otherwise open-mined readers might be repelled by your background in conspiracy theories, and yet, in Chameleo that tenuous narrative trope seems to be supported by the raw events unfolding in a kind of hyper reality. How is Chameleo different from other conspiracy-centric narratives?
RG: When conspiracy theorists publish–or, more often than not, self-publish–books, they are frantically attempting to disseminate what they feel is important, life-or-death information. This is not my main concern. I’m coming from a literature background. I’ve been publishing short stories since I was 25. Writers like John Fante, Henry Miller, and Charles Bukowski wrote about the reality around them. I’m engaged in the same process. It just so happens that the reality we live in today is overbrimming with conspiracies. If Mark Twain were alive today, I’m certain he would be writing about conspiracies. He wouldn’t be able to avoid it. I see Chameleo, primarily, as a work of literature. If the book does succeed in disseminating valuable information, it’s simply a byproduct of my desire to write about reality as I see it.
JH: Your book, especially early on, has a Gonzo journalist flavor added to the stir fry approach, which is in keeping with words attributed to Hunter S. Thompson: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.” This would seem to apply to the whole concept of your book. Care to elaborate on how?
RG: Actually, it was Joseph Heller who wrote, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.” That line is from Catch-22. I don’t have much to add to Heller’s statement except to say that I agree with it. When Chameleo begins, I don’t think Dion is paranoid at all; however, being constantly surveilled and harassed does tend to push people over the edge just a bit. I don’t think Dion has ever been clinically paranoid, but the events that were swirling around him might have induced symptoms that could be interpreted as paranoia by those not familiar with the full details of his dilemma. After all, exhibiting paranoiac symptoms is a perfectly reasonable response to being stalked by an organized group of strangers.
JH: We live in times when government is becoming more opaque in its processes, while, at the same time, the human self seems to be disappearing with the rapid evaporation of privacy and free-thought. It occurred to me that what Dion goes through in Chameleo brought this out with great effect.
RG: This process was predicted by Marshall McLuhan. All of his books, in their own unique way, explore how to maintain one’s private citadel of consciousness in a world ruled by The Machines. McLuhan predicted this situation as early as 1946 or ’47. Here’s a quote from McLuhan: “I once wrote an article, ‘The Southern Quality,’ back in 1946 or 1947 where I explained why there was no human life on this planet. Since then human beings have been grown inside programmed media-environments that are essentially like test tubes. That’s why I say the kids today live mythically.” This “mythic” environment is one of the main subjects of a book I’m finishing now. The book is called Hollywood Haunts the World. The final chapter of this book will explore the “loss of self” you refer to.
JH: You mention that you were inspired by the humorous skepticism of Hunter S. Thompson’s Gonzo journalism, but also by Jon Rappoport’s book, AIDS, Inc. Can you say more about how AIDS, Inc acted as an inspiration – or, in other words, what was Rappoport’s thesis and how did his methods and findings inspire your Chameleo approach?
RG: Rappoport is a Pulitzer-Prize-nominated journalist whose approach to documenting the true nature of the 1980s AIDS epidemic was unlike any other reporter at that time. He asked questions no one else even thought to ask. The field of journalism will always be far too limiting for a searching mind like that. In fact, I think it would be incorrect to refer to Rappoport as strictly a “journalist.” He’s a journalist in the same way that Mark Twain was a journalist. He’s a writer who has his eyes wide open, and he simply reports on what he sees. In a sense, one might say that Rappoport’s style of reporting is a more sophisticated and spiritual version of Hunter S. Thompson’s subjective, drug-fueled reportage. Rappoport’s later book, The Secret Behind Secret Societies, is even better than AIDS, Inc. I consider it to be a vastly underappreciated book, one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read. Everyone should read it and meditate on its central message. You might also want to check out Rappoport’s blog. [https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/]
JH: How would you sum up Project Chameleo?
RG: Project Chameleo is the brainchild of a scientist named Richard Schowengerdt, and resulted in the creation of Electro-Optical Camouflage that could be employed by soldiers in the battlefield. Schowengerdt’s findings were almost certainly stolen by a private corporation working in tandem with the U.S. military.
JH: Richard Schowengerdt comes across in your book like the fictional nutty scientist in Back to the Future, or the very real Edward Teller, a kind of futuristic genius, but also the stereotypical naif whose scientific inventions and forward-thinking get co-opted or stolen by government agencies with hidden agendas. I suppose Tim Berners-Lee is another. How do these comparisons work inChameleo, if at all?
RG: Richard Schowengerdt is not only a brilliant scientist, but also one of the most balanced people I’ve ever met. His ongoing fascination with the intersection between science and metaphysics belies a deep and curious mind, not unlike that of Nikola Tesla. If Schowengerdt is guilty of being a little too trusting of the U.S. military, he certainly would not be the first scientist to find himself in such a situation. A fellow named Albert Einstein comes to mind. In that sense, Richard Schowengerdt is in very good company.
JH: I can’t recall a work that featured cameos by so many secret or covert agencies. There’s NCIS and CAIS and Freemasons and group stalkers and the CIA, all immersed in what you might call the sub-primal juices of the Deep State or the Deep Net. But one also thinks of all the other groups out there – the NSA, KKK, Skull and Bones, the PNAC mob, on and on it goes, until you get the sense that our society, which is supposedly built on late Enlightenment principles, falls back rather readily into the occult, fundamental religiosity, the weird and bizarre. And then you look to science for antidotes, it instead exacerbates the problem with references to quantum theory, multiverses, and the Singularity. This seems to play into a central theme of Chameleo – the contemporary fragility of the self and the reality we collectively construct ourselves within. What do you reckon?
RG: The title Chameleo has multiple layers of meaning. On a literal level, of course, it’s referring to Schowengerdt’s attempts to create invisibility technology. On a higher level, it refers to the fact that Truth itself is often camouflaged–not only in the book, but in contemporary life. Politicians and priests and psychiatrists attempt to camouflage Truth every day. We camouflage Truth from ourselves, as well as from others, just to get through an average afternoon. But because Truth is hidden, we have to try to find it ourselves somehow. Occult organizations have been formed for this exact purpose since civilization began. Secret societies are certainly nothing new. You used the word “occult” in your question, and the word “occult” simply means “hidden.” The Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, and similar organizations have been delving for hidden truths since their inception. It has been argued by Robert Lomas in his book, Freemasonry and the Birth of Modern Science, that “Freemasonry, supported by Charles II, was the guiding force behind the birth of modern science.” In the 1600s many scientists were forced to form secret societies, such as the “Invisible College,” in order to study the secrets of nature in ways that were forbidden by the Church. If one feels the need to form a secret society to pursue Truth, due to the fact that the climate of the day is hostile to Truth, then so be it. All organizations are made up of people. A group of Imagination Vampires will probably end up creating a corrupt organization, while a group of humanitarian free thinkers will probably end up creating a worthwhile organization. It all depends on the intentions of theindividuals in the group, not on the group itself. Obviously, groups should always be subordinate to the individual.
JH: You mention that Edward Snowden’s breathtaking revelations, which detail the scope and power of the active global surveillance state, actually pale in comparison to some of the claims you make about gangstalking. That seems like a staggering claim, all things considered. Could you say more?
RG: I don’t think it’s that staggering at all. As far as I know, Edward Snowden never mentioned anything about invisible midgets, simian sharpshooters, leapfrogging robots, snooping flying saucers, and swarms of government-funded gangstalkers.
JH: If the Internet and the myriad digital technologies that have followed are like the first touch of the monolith by the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, then one might reasonably argue that the awakening process required of human consciousness right now to overcome our profound limitations is akin to entering the Stargate. Would you agree with that?
RG: Yes.
JH: What is gangstalking? Who gets gangstalked? Who gangstalks? How do you suppose gangstalkers get away with using expressions like “He’s evil,” as they stalk, while all the time, they are the ones committing the horrible crime of privacy invasion, character assassination, and, in some instances, conspiracy to commit brutal murders?
RG: The most concise and accurate definition of “gangstalking” can be found on fightgangstalking.com. Go to the home page, then click on the title “What is ‘Gang Stalking?’” [http://fightgangstalking.com/what-is-gang-stalking/]
JH: In your book you write: “Let’s not be obtuse: we’re dealing with a rule-crazy, Puritanical, hypocritical, Old Testament–style perception of reality that desperately needs to wipe out anything or anyone that is Other. Different. Contrary.” You seem to be arguing that such types are on the rise in America, and probably elsewhere as well. How do you explain such a backward, reactionary phenomenon at a time of so much futurism? If these kinds of humans prevail, what kind of future are we looking at?
RG: Back in 2003, I was fortunate enough to interview Rev. Stephan Hoeller, Bishop of the Gnostic Church in America, and during that conversation Hoeller said the following words to me, which I’ve never forgotten: “Do you remember The Last Temptation of Christ, Scorcese’s movie? There’s a scene where Jesus is trying to tell Pilate, ‘Look, you know, we want to change the world, but we want to change it with love. I don’t want to start a revolution. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I just want to change it with love.’ And Pilate says, ‘My good man, you don’t understand, we don’t want it to be changed at all. By no means, we don’t want any change!’ So, it’s a little bit that way. People involved in the matrix, they are within the consensus reality, they want reality to stay that way. To poke holes into that reality by one means or the other is very disturbing to such people. Those are the deeper psychological motivations of the dislike for psychedelics, or for that matter for ceremonial magic or Gnosticism, or anything that alters consciousness in any significant way.”
JH: The other thing I wanted to ask you about is some macro pictures. If you could sort of relate all of this to the Snowden revelations.
RG: Well, I guess the over-riding motto is: Never waste a good crisis. It’s quite ironic because I think that some of these people [gangstalkers] are being sold a bill of goods and think that they’re being upright — you know, Neighborhood Watch type citizens are being told: “Oh, you know, that guy down the street, he’s up to no good, you better do something about him.” In the book, Dion mentions a part where the cops stop him and they say that they were told that he talked about “doing something”. The accusation is vague enough, you know, it sounds vaguely ominous. And so I think these people are being told that this man down the street, he’s a terrorist, or he’s been talking about doing something, or he’s a pedophile, or whatever, and they believe it, and then they tell them to go and harass him at the local supermarket, go spy on him, and I think they might actually be doing that thinking that they’re protecting, you know, apple pie, and God and country, not realizing that they’rethe real terrorists.
JH: Exactly.
RG: That’s the irony of it. Well, I know that when the George Zimmerman – Trayvon Martin tragedy occurred, Dion contacted me and wondered: Who’s this George Zimmerman guy? And who’s he actually working for? I mean, no one’s actually looked into that. I mean, George Zimmerman, his personality, is just the perfect gang-stalking personality. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he was trained by one of these organizations. You wouldn’t hear anything about that because no one’s looked into it… because, of course, gang-stalking doesn’t exist, so no journalist has ever bothered to look into it.
I think what’s going to happen is, if the whole gangstalking thing reaches a kind of critical mass at some point, people are going to be surprised at the fact that the Snowden revelations are just completely mundane compared to what’s actually going on. Just the tip of the iceberg. What Snowden’s talking about pales in comparison to whole neighborhoods being trained to be government-sponsored vigilantes, which sounds like a paradox — I mean, how could you be a government-sponsored vigilante? But that’s essentially what it is. I mean they’re taking these people and training them in how to be amateur COINTELPRO agents, and the idea that this could happen… I mean, most people are resistant to the whole concept of gangstalking. They don’t want to think gangstalking is even possible.
JH: If what happened to Dion, the experience he had in his apartment with the midgets or not doesn’t really matter, but the invisible bodies bumping against him, and the phantasmagorical hallucinations out his window, that kind of shit, that’s disturbing to the core, really. It’s the kind of thing that, if you realized that that was happening on any kind of scale at all, not just to a single individual, you’re talking about a very serious shift in consciousness, what you could call “real.” What would be true or real? You make reference to the Vallejo paintings that seem to fill Dion’s apartment window. What do you make of them?
RG: In terms of the paintings that they were using? You know, I think that they were using the technology that Richard Schowengerdt was describing. He on his own started talking about using the technology to be able to distort what people see, not just making things invisible but changing objects into something else. So I think they were testing that aspect of the technology, to see whether they could make a landscape just totally disappear and turn into something else.
JH: The thing I worry about out of all of this is — as you know there are like 1.5 million people on some kind of watch list in the States, and that’s just the known lists, the publicized lists. The number of people being watched actively because they’re targets of Obama or DOJ targets. The government has actually acknowledged the number of people on this list. And you know they can’t all be terrorists. So there have to be people who watch them. Then you realize the number of people out there who have these top secret clearances out there. Last I heard there was something like 750,000 people who have top secret clearance. Then you find out that all these private companies are basically stocked with people who are “retired”, meaning they left the service to go work for these companies and get lucrative awards for it.
RG: Well, there’s a surprising amount of these private corporations that are currently involved in this. Last August, this ad popped up on craigslist. And for years I wondered what the people involved, the gangstalkers following Dion, what they called themselves. Because obviously they don’t call themselves gangstalkers. That was the name applied to them by the targets, the victims, if you will. So I wondered: what do they call themselves? And this ad popped up from a corporation that was based in San Diego — and the headline of the ad read: “Surveillance Role Players and Practical Exercise Role Player, San Diego.” And this was the ad: “The MASY group — M-A-S-Y– is looking for motivated surveillance role players (SRPs) and scenario-driven practical exercise role players (RPs) to support military training activities in the San Diego, California region. Qualified personnel should demonstrate an established track record of conducting surveillance operations at various discretion levels, supporting surveillance training and military practical exercise training. Individuals with previous military intelligence community and law enforcement experience are highly preferred.” And then it says, “The mandatory prerequisite qualifications for role players is a minimum of 5 years of counterintelligence and/or human intelligence experience, with at least two operational deployments in a CI unit military occupational specialty, or as a member of a civilian intelligence community organization.”
So surveillance role players is the term they use to describe themselves. The ad quickly disappeared after that, but I saved it. And the MASY group, which is the organization that’s advertising this, they describe themselves as a “global provider of high impact national security intelligence and private sector capital management solutions.” These organizations — there’s MASY, there’s DSAC, which is the Domestic Security Alliance Council; there’s something called PKS Group, Prescient Edge; ITA International; Whitney Bradley and Brown; all these private companies working in tandem with these ex-military people. And in reality, they’re actually working in tandem with people who are currently military as well.
JH: Yes. You put your finger right on it. Because that’s the problem: There’s all of these assumptions about authority, such that the accuser is an authority requiring trust. When what all this Snowden-Surveillance State business should tell us, going all the way back to Nixon especially, all of our experience should tell us totally the opposite.
It’s very Stasi-like in that sense. The Stasi brought people in and would say to people either you’re working for us or you’re going away for a long time. And so some of these people did some sick things. And that’s how the whole thing grew. I think the last figure I had for the Stasi was that their number had grown to 350,000 people working for them, in a population of 17 million.
RG: It’s important to point out that this isn’t just happening to marginal people like Dion. This is also happening to people like Gloria Naylor. Do you know who she is? She’s a very famous, well-respected African-American writer. She wrote Mama Day and The
Women of Brewster Place, and a lot of other well-respected novels. I mean, she’s a well-respected literary figure. But not a lot of people know that she is also a target of gangstalking. She wrote a whole book about it called 1996, which is ostensibly a novel, but she said it’s actually autobiographical. She sort of slightly fictionalized it. But according to her she moved to an island off the coast of South Carolina. She was living in this isolated house off in the country somewhere, but she had a neighbor, and the neighbor had a dog, and the dog ended up getting accidentally poisoned somehow, and the neighbor blamed her. They thought she’d killed the dog. And it turned out the neighbor had a brother who worked in the NSA, and suddenly she was getting stalked. And all of the stuff that Dion describes and I described in the book happened to her to a greater or lesser extent. And that’s before 9/11. So I think 9/11 did open the door to — it just widened the door, the door was already open — this stuff was already happening, but then it intensified after 9/11.
JH: I did a review of a book about two months ago, Suspicious Minds, written by two psychiatrist brothers, Joel and Ian Gold, and they write about the growing delusional trend in America, where people literally believe that they are actors in a Truman Show. Where everything is being directed by outside forces beyond their control, and that everybody else has a script.
RG: On the surface it sounds like a wonderful way for a psychiatrist to explain away people who claim they’re being gangstalked.
JH: I am mostly anti-psychiatry because I think they’re mostly full of shit. I think a lot of people forget that they’re not really out there to tend to individual humans; they are out to make you adjust to what’s out there, society. As R.D. Laing said, “An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal.” Or bring in Nietzsche who said, “Insanity in individuals is rare, but in nations, states and societies it’s the norm.” So it’s that kind of thing going on here — you are trying to get people to adjust to a horrible, shitty situation. The structure of society can be such that its lies… that individuals pick up on that and it creates a real crisis in their own identity because there are some things you can’t adjust to without losing your mind.
RG: Earlier I mentioned a wonderful book called the The Secret Behind Secret Societies by Jon Rappoport. In that book he tells the story about a hypnotist he knew who worked in Beverly Hills. And the hypnotist’s name was Jack True. And the hypnotist told Jon Rappoport — he was a hypnotherapist — that when he has patients come into his office he often found that in order to put them into a trance he had to first break them out of a trance. That a lot of his patients came in already in a trance, and they had been in a trance for decades. And he had to break them out of that trance to then put them in a trance to do the hypnotherapy on them.
Maybe Chameleo will shatter a few trances here and there. You know, if Chameleo in any way helps to bring some of the targeted individuals together and talking to each other I would be extremely proud. Even if it succeeded in bringing just a few people together I would be very pleased. You know, maybe things are changing. There was a Washington Post article from last July. The title was “America’s Freedom Reputation Is on the Decline a Year after NSA Revelations,” and the first paragraph of the article read: “The main selling point of the U.S. brand on the international stage has long been summed up with the screech of one word: Freedom. But in the wake of revelations of U.S. surveillance programs from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden from last year, the world is less convinced that the U.S. has respect for personal freedoms, according to new survey results from Pew Research.”
It goes on to say: “The Snowden revelations appeared to have damaged one major element of America’s global image — its reputation for protecting individual liberties. In 22 of 36 countries surveyed in 2013 and 2014, people are significantly less likely to believe the U.S. government respects the personal freedoms of its citizens. In six nations the decline was 20 percentage points or more. Pew calls this decline the Snowden Effect. And some of the drops are significant, especially in countries where NSA surveillance received major domestic news coverage, like Germany and Brazil.”
So that’s the Snowden Effect. Maybe there’ll be a Chameleo Effect. Who knows?
JH: The thing about that Pew Poll that is interesting, America is the leader when it comes to democracy, at least symbolically, at least when it comes to freedom, the rule of law, and due process — the kingpins of the Bill of Rights, which is the single most important thing about American democracy — you always have to face your accuser and then you have a process of evidentiary revelations, the cross-examinations, the witnessing, all that kind of stuff. That was the key thing for American justice. That was it. And throwing that out, not only by what the Pew Poll is saying, but also with Obama and his Drone Kill Tuesdays, where he sees himself dealing judicial review as a form of due process… and we just made it a lot easier for emerging democracies to ignore any attempt at installing a Bill of Rights, they won’t pursue them any more. If supposedly the greatest nation on Earth is suspending its own due process, then there really isn’t much point for any other nation to pursue it any longer.
RG: I teach at CSU Long Beach, and I recently assigned the graphic novel V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. There’s a wonderful line in the book early on, where the masked anarchist vigilante figure, V, is having a conversation with a statue in London: it’s called Madame Justice. And he’s having this imaginary conversation with the statue. He’s basically talking about the difference between justice and anarchy, and there’s one line he says to the statue, “Justice is meaningless without freedom.” And the reason why this is in my mind is that a student of mine — I was reading his paper this morning, and basically his paper was all about that sentence. And the student wrote this really interesting introspective essay about how in the United States you hear a lot of talk about justice — the Justice Department, no justice no peace — there’s all these articles about how we need justice for what went down in Ferguson or whatever, but his whole point was that we need to be focused on freedom, not justice.
And you know, this is like an 18 year-old kid; he never read a graphic novel before. And he was really jazzed about this graphic novel and wrote this very thoughtful piece about it, and so that gives me hope when I see my students come in on the first day and they’re kind of ready to be bored, because that’s what they’re used to, and I’ll just pose questions, or I’ll give them something to read. And you see that they’re not entirely stupid; they’re not entirely sheeple. There’s a kind of a stereotype of teenagers plugged into their videogames or their iPod or Facebook, and their zombies, at least that’s the way older people might see them, but there’s actually this creativity and this intelligence that’s ready to burst out, but they’re so used to being told not to use their imagination that they’re stuck in a trance. So I kind of try to do what Jack True did; I kind of try to break them out of a trance in my own subtle way. I remain optimistic.
I wrote an article called “Concentration Campus,” which you can find in my first book,Cryptoscatology, and it’s an entire history of American education. My thoughts about the educational system are really summed up by that title. But I also wrote a follow-up article that’s not in the book called “The War Against the Imagination.” [You can find the article here:https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2014/02/22/the-war-against-the-imagination/] And basically it’s about the current state of education, and I really see that there’s some people who seem to want to go out of their way to deaden the imagination of the students and it’s quite distressing to see it. But whatever I can do to kind of counteract that is what makes me want to wake up in the morning.
JH: What is gangstalking and how do you fight it?
RG: I mentioned earlier that site fightgangstalking.com. It’s really good and I wish it had been around in 2003 because it would have saved a lot of trouble for me and Dion. It’s a very good site, very thorough. And there’s one section on the site you need to see. If you go to fightgangstalking.com, on the left side of the screen and you’ll see various headers, and one of them is “Tactics for Fighting Back.” I really recommend that anyone who is being gangstalked, or thinks they’re being gangstalked, or knows someone who’s being gangstalked, go there and read about all the wonderful, clear, concise and easy to do methods — I mean, these are within your reach, things that the common person can do to kind of offset or fight these people. Dion came up with his own unique methods of fighting them, including hurtling spaghetti at times, but these might be slightly more effective in the long run. The “Tactics for Fighting Back” section on that site is a really good list of defensive and offensive measures you can take against these perps.
JH: You are writing a long essay called “Nation of Stalkers.” Can you give a rough outline of what you might be covering?
RG: Basically it’s updating things that have happened since the end of the book, but also I offer other advice on fighting back, other than the sort of more prosaic level that’s being offered by the fightgangstalking website. I’m trying to go into some more esoteric methods to fight back as well.
JH: You mean like playing Bob Dylan songs backwards? That kind of thing?
RG: Well, I know a woman who’s very well-versed in remote viewing. She was trained by one of the major proponents of remote viewing, and she’s very good at it. I mean, other remote viewers come to her to ask her advice. My late friend Walter Bowart, author of Operation Mind Control, knew a remote viewer who could basically view from a distance these secret underground military installations and come back and give Bowart detailed information about them. And I began to think of how that technique could be used in the context of the gangstalking problem. I’ll touch on these types of things in “Nation of Stalkers.”
JH: There’s a gap between the narrative time and when Chamelo got written and published — a decade or so — what explains that?
RG: The only reason that I did end up writing the book finally was that random encounter, when I was teaching a Literature of Science Fiction class in 2010 at CSU Long Beach, and after class a student asked me the question: “Can you think of something that we think of as science fiction that is not science fiction?” And then he mentioned invisibility as an example of that, not knowing at all my interest in that. And so I answered the question, and I went into a brief synopsis, and I stood there talking to him for about a half hour. And I then I left, went home, and forgot about it. But then the next day the student had become so captivated that he wanted me to tell the whole class the story. So I told the whole class the story, and then speaking about it out loud, having a live captive audience to bounce the story off of, made me realize how to tell the story. I had been thinking in terms of maybe a short article, and I immediately wrote down in my notebook an outline with bullet points of everything that I had said in the order I had said it to the class. When the semester ended, and the summer break began, I just started writing it. And it quickly ballooned way past 30 pages and became over 300 pages. The process of writing the book went pretty smoothly.
Overall, I think Chameleo works because the tone of the story is not depressing. It could easily have been, but it’s not. In my nonfiction work about conspiracies I always try to include some sort of possible solution to whatever the dark problem is. There are a lot of writers who don’t do that. They sort of wallow in apocalypse culture. So I always try to have some kind of optimistic silver lining. Because it’s always important to have some kind of proactive solution, and not just wallow in what can be a very depressing reality.
JH: In the book the last word on Dion is in 2013 and I was just wondering if there has any word from him since then — you know, in the last couple of years?
RG: I’m in contact with Dion. He’s living in the Pacific Northwest. At one point he was living in a van. He actually has his own apartment now. He’s painting all the time. And the incidents are now intermittent.
“Chameleo” is available at OR Books and Amazon.
QUOTE:
If Guffrey is sensible regarding secret societies and the like, he is, or professes to be, more than slightly paranoid about the US government and intelligence services, who he holds responsible for just about everything less than pleasant that goes on in the country.
Though Guffey like many writers both on the left and the right, see the state as the sole source of evil, much of the repression in the United States comes from very local authorities and civil society rather than the 'Federal Government'
CRYPTOSCATOLOGY
Robert Guffey. Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as an Art Form. TrineDay, 2012.
The subtitle of this book is intriguing, as is the blurb which suggests that Guffey is going to examine conspiracy theories from a cultural studies perspective. However this is not really what this book is at all, actually it is not really a book at all, rather it is a collection of previously published essays with all the usual drawbacks of such a form, such as repetition, and in parts being very out of date by the time this compilation was published.
🔻
As one might expect from such a collection they very in quality and in stance, presumably depending on how the author felt when he wrote them, and the expectations of the publishers. Some are good; there is a hilarious piece where Guffey accompanies a Jewish friend on a demonstration against a Moslem speaker, conveying the sense that neither side was remotely interested in anything approaching a rational dialogue. Not really about conspiracy theories but really insightful. There is a bitterly humorous piece on some fundamentalist nut trying to breed a pure red heifer, so that it can be sacrificed and the Jews can re-enter the temple and start the holy war which will trigger Armageddon, so that God can send all the Jews, Moslems, Catholics, atheists, and just about everyone else who do not support his particular brand of nasty pseudo-Christianity, to hell. Right wing forces in Israel exploit the Christian fundamentalists for their money, and right wing Christians exploit right wing Jews in order to provoke global war.
As a 32 degree Mason, Guffey has no truck with anti-Masonic conspiracies, and his comments here seem generally scholarly. However, pace chapter 9, hermetic and occult symbolism in Shakespeare’s plays is far more likely to have come from John Dee and his circle, than third-hand through nascent Scottish Freemasonry. The sections on Albert Pike suggest how reducing complex characters to either demons or plaster saints is always foolish. There is also an interesting chapter on Masonic influence on the Book of Mormon.
If Guffrey is sensible regarding secret societies and the like, he is, or professes to be, more than slightly paranoid about the US government and intelligence services, who he holds responsible for just about everything less than pleasant that goes on in the country. When not rigging elections, abusing their own children, and spraying drugs on French villages, they are responsible for the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy, John Lennon, Martin Luther King etc., the Columbine school massacre, the Peoples Temple and Heavens Gate, and the faking of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon. In this world view nothing is unconnected, and nothing happens by chance nor accident, it is all part of the vast plan. The fact that Guffrey quotes people like Jim Marrs, Phillip Corso, Timothy Good, Fletcher Prouty, Richard Hoagland, Cathy O’Brien, and Preston Nichols and Peter Moon of Montauk infamy as credible sources does nothing to add to the credibility of this.
Of course in much of this nonsense there are tiny fragments of reality, the neo-conservative movement in the United States is very far removed from West European centre-right political parties, and there is a strong authoritarian streak in the US (its many stupid laws are a constant butt of British comics for example). The 2000 election was stolen by Bush (but only because Gore couldn’t be bothered to fight for it in the streets)., and no doubt the rich and powerful there are only too happy to have fake churches and fake ministers endorse their rule. This doesn’t mean that anyone sits around a table and plots it all out.
Though Guffey like many writers both on the left and the right, see the state as the sole source of evil, much of the repression in the United States comes from very local authorities and civil society rather than the 'Federal Government'. Guffey has to fight for his academic freedom not because the 'Government' did anything, but because the father of a student complained about a misheard comment on Jesus Christ. – Peter Rogerson.
Conspiracy Theory is Now an Art Form, Claims New Book CRYPTOSCATOLOGY from TrineDay
TrineDay is pleased to announce the publication of Robert Guffey’s debut non-fiction book, Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form. Examining nearly every conspiracy theory in the public’s consciousness today, this investigation seeks to link seemingly unrelated theories through a cultural studies perspective.
Cryptoscatology
People who enjoyed such conspiratorial books as Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats will learn about the little-known ties between the Unabomber and the CIA, intelligence propaganda and the origins of science fiction, mind control and the…
Walterville, OR (PRWEB) May 14, 2012
TrineDay is pleased to announce the publication of Robert Guffey’s debut non-fiction book, Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form. Examining nearly every conspiracy theory in the public’s consciousness today, this investigation seeks to link seemingly unrelated theories through a cultural studies perspective.
While looking at conspiracy theories that range from the moon landing and JFK’s assassination to the Oklahoma City bombing and Freemasonry, this reconstruction reveals newly discovered connections between wide swaths of events. Linking Dracula to George W. Bush, UFOs to strawberry ice cream, and Jesus Christ to robots from outer space, this is truly an all-original discussion of popular conspiracy theories.
People who enjoyed such conspiratorial books as Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats will learn about the little-known ties between the Unabomber and the CIA, intelligence propaganda and the origins of science fiction, mind control and the American public school system, genetically-engineered cows and genocide in the Middle East, microwave weaponry and the reanimation of the dead; the influence of secret societies on revolutions, wars, and political assassinations; the always bizarre world of UFOs; and much, much more.
Cryptoscatology is being delivered to bookstores in May of 2012.
Award-winning author Robert Guffey is a lecturer in the English Dept. at California State University–Long Beach. He has published numerous articles, short stories and interviews in a wide range of publications such as After Shocks, Art From Art, Catastrophia, The Chiron Review, Fortean Times, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Paranoia, Pearl, Postscripts, and UFO Magazine. His website is http://www.cryptoscatology.com
TrineDay is a small publishing house in Oregon that specializes in suppressed non-fiction.
For interviews or review copies, please contact:
Kris Millegan -- 1.800.556.2012 -- publisher(at)trineday(dot)net
Publisher
TrineDay
QUOTE:
By turns mystical and ashcan-real, insanely funny and grimly ghastly, Guffey’s novel cuts a zigzag trail through conventionality as it follows Elliot Greeley in his half-serious, half jesting quest for some deeper meaning to existence. If you build your life on laughs, what happens when the laughs disappear?
Guffey’s standup debut is standout speculative fiction.
Paul Di Filippo reviews Until the Last Dog Dies by Robert Guffey
December 20, 2017 Paul Di Filippo
— Special to Locus Online —
Until the Last Dog Dies, by Robert Guffey (Night Shade Books 978-1-59780-918-4, $15.99, 320pp, trade paperback) November 2017
Locus Magazine, Science Fiction FantasySomewhere up on a cloud–or somewhere down in the abyss–the ghost of Lenny Bruce is leering approvingly upon Robert Guffey’s Until the Last Dog Dies, after which the savage shade will nod off with a spike in his arm. Guffey’s book is a rarity these days, the essence of satirical, no-holds-barred SF, hilariously mean-spirited and meaningfully disdainful. It’s a book that might have issued in an earlier era from the pens of William Tenn, Robert Sheckley, or Ron Goulart. At the same time, it’s a black tragedy with a tiny feather of hope wafting in its passage. You will laugh continuously while reading it, while simultaneously looking over your shoulder to see if the Thought Police are monitoring your reactions to this heretical screed.
However, despite all these virtues, the book falls intentionally short of a full-blown societal détournement or transfiguration in the manner that perhaps the team of Pohl & Kornbluth might have enacted with the same premise. What, precisely, do I mean by this characterization of the novel? Only that its novum–a contagious virus that wipes out the brain’s capacity to enjoy or understand humor–is viewed solely through the lens of the narrator’s personal life, its impacts on him and his crowd, and so we see hardly any of the larger cultural effects that a Pohl & Kornbluth treatment might have focused on.
Let me use this analogy to make things clearer: if Guffey’s book were about telepathy, it would be Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside, not Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man.
Our tale opens in the year 2014. This choice of a recent past era as venue for world-shattering developments immediately casts the book as a counterfactual. We all know this scenario did not go down as specified. This is another lateral move that a different SF writer more intent on near-future frights or warnings might have eschewed. But Guffey is pulling the same move PKD used in Radio Free Albemuth: seeking to highlight our historical times by an allegorical or parallel world.
We are in the hands and mind of Elliot Greeley, a moderately successful standup comedian who survives on a circuit of comedy club gigs. Greeley’s shtick is kinda observational comedy, kinda surreal musings, kinda non-PC transgressive bits. Guffey is not shy about transcribing large swaths of Greeley’s material, which actually delivers the promised riffs. It’s analogous to having a protagonist who is described as a genius poet. You have to prove it and make the audience believe it with some samples. This Guffey does, conjuring up the deep reality of Greeley’s talents and life.
Greeley has a circle of friends, also comedians: Heather, Danny and Karen. Instantly, one begins to cast them in Seinfeldian terms, with Elliot as the lead. Heather, cynical and standoffish, would be Elaine. Danny, relatively quiet and schlubby, would be George. And Karen, an adventuresome angry black lesbian–well, I guess the Kramer role falls to her. Indeed, I think Guffey plays deliberately on this famous quartet, but his version is no mere parody. The relations amongst the quartet are unique, and soon go off any predictable sitcom rails, especially once the news reports about the brain-damaging virus arrive. Guffey’s description, late in the narrative, of the dying comedy scene and the lobotomized crowds is matter-of-fact chilling.
Clubs began closing late in November. At first this didn’t worry me. Older comedians assured me they’d lived through such busts before. When the comedy boom of the ’80s–which gave birth to thousands of clubs with names like Chuckles and The Laffery–finally came to a screeching halt at some point during the first Bush administration most of the alternative comics were relieved. After all, too many clubs could only mean too many bad comics. I had a similar reaction when I first heard The Rumor, which was spreading through the back rooms of comedy clubs all over the city early in December. The Rumor was this: The humor virus had taken its toll. Five major clubs in L.A. were going to be shut down in the same week. All across the country fewer and fewer people were showing up at the clubs. Why should they? Imagine a blind man paying hard-earned money to go to a strip joint. Even the core clientele, who I think had continued to show up for the past couple of months just out of pure force of habit, had ceased coming in. Playing at the clubs, once the high point of my life, had now become a torturous ordeal that I underwent only to pay the bills. I ceased coming up with new material. Why bother? No one was listening. That was my excuse at any rate.
But prior to this Comedy Apocalypse, Greeley will undergo a wild-eyed series of adventures, something that Matt Ruff or Jonathan Lethem or Thomas Pynchon might have conceived. Most of his bizarre exploits revolve around a rock band named “Doktor Delgado’s All-American Genocidal Warfare Against The Sick And The Stupid” and their sexy but messed-up guitar player Esthra. The fact that Esthra’s drug-crazed boyfriend is also in the band and highly jealous of any rivals adds deadly spice to the doings. This part of the tale is like the Coen Brothers film Inside Llewyn Davis as if scripted by a pair of Wilsons: S. Clay and Robert Anton.
By turns mystical and ashcan-real, insanely funny and grimly ghastly, Guffey’s novel cuts a zigzag trail through conventionality as it follows Elliot Greeley in his half-serious, half jesting quest for some deeper meaning to existence. If you build your life on laughs, what happens when the laughs disappear?
Kissing cousin to Max Barry’s novel Lexicon, about killer language, and to Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet, about language killed, Guffey’s standup debut is standout speculative fiction.
Paul Di Filippo has been writing professionally for over thirty years, and has published almost that number of books. He lives in Providence, RI, with his mate of an even greater number of years, Deborah Newton.
QUOTE:
By turns exuberant, resourceful, hilarious, dubious, and emotionally affecting, Chameleo thrives on the contact high of the possible, much like the twin arts of paranoia and conspiracy, from which it takes its manic energy
Flavorwire Exclusive: Invisible Spies, Heroin, and Conspiracy Theory as Art in ‘Chameleo’
Books | By Jonathon Sturgeon | April 23, 2015
chameleoThe below excerpt comes from Robert Guffey’s Chameleo, a breathless true story of “invisible spies, heroin addiction, and homeland security,” out now from OR Books. By turns exuberant, resourceful, hilarious, dubious, and emotionally affecting, Chameleo thrives on the contact high of the possible, much like the twin arts of paranoia and conspiracy, from which it takes its manic energy. True to its title, Guffey’s book camouflages itself in bouts of obsession and incredulity, recounting an episode of American insanity that weirdly implicates the Department of Homeland Security, the NCIS, and the state of American welfare, among other parties. Along the way, Guffey’s book also proves that a certain strain of powerful but thwarted American intellect — one often wielded by the disenfranchised, American loser — is alive and well in our homeland today.
But the thing I love most about Chameleo is that it’s a story about a sustained American friendship. Also, it deals with invisible little people and shapeshifting rooms.
What do you need to know about the chapter below? Dion, a heroin addict, the narrator’s friend, has already been apprehended and released by government agents after a man he doesn’t know brings stolen military equipment, including night vision goggles, to one of his drug parties…
— Jonathon Sturgeon
3.
While attending the Clarion Writers Workshop back in 1996, I learned a phrase that describes an error many young writers make while beginning to write stories. The phrase was coined by novelist James P. Blaylock. It’s known as “the Octopus On the Shelf.”The Octopus On the Shelf is an element in a science fiction or fantasy story (though I suppose it could just as easily occur in a mainstream story) that causes the reader to think, “What the fuck? Where did that come from?” But not in a good way. Not in a way that keeps you interested in the story, but in a way that makes you question the sanity and skill of the writer.
The first Octopus On the Shelf (oh yes, there were several) occurred when Dion called me one day in a panic and told me that invisible midgets were infiltrating his apartment.
“How do you know they’re midgets?” I said.
“Never mind that,” he said, then proceeded to regale me with stories about people brushing up against him in his living room when no one was around, pushing him over, moving furniture around, and making a general nuisance of themselves.
I had now reverted to my old opinion that Dion had gone nuts. After all, it was more than possible that government agents were indeed watching him (because they thought he was still hoarding their precious night vision goggles) and that Dion was also suffering from meth paranoia at the same exact time. These were by no means mutually exclusive situations.
But as Dion kept babbling I became intrigued by the weird little details that tumbled from his mind. For example, at one point he said he was in his bathroom getting something out of the medicine cabinet when he caught sight of one of the little fuckers. In the split second that it took him to open the cabinet door, he spotted a little man in the background standing only about ten feet behind him. He didn’t get a detailed look, but he saw enough to know someone was there. Dion started opening and closing the mirror like mad, but by that time the homunculus had skedaddled. I thought this was a very intriguing detail. As the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon once said, “Always ask the next question.” If someone had an experimental invisibility suit based on light-bending technology, it made some sort of cockeyed sense to me that the suit might become visible temporarily while the mirror was in motion. Dion was hardly a science fiction fan, nor did he own a subscription to Popular Science. It’s not the kind of detail he would make up off the top of his head. He was just reporting what he was seeing.
Another detail he noticed was that, occasionally, parts of the little people would become visible. Depending on the background, a vague outline would appear represented by dots of light floating in the air. Dion said they looked something like the auras he would see when suffering from a bad migraine. In fact, at first he thought that’s what they were. But then he began seeing them more and more frequently, often when he wasn’t suffering from a migraine, and only when he could sense the presence of other people in his apartment. I had no idea what this detail indicated. The flashes of light made me think of visual phenomena that some people report while hallucinating. Again, there was something about this detail that seemed authentic to me. I couldn’t explain why, however, so I just put it in my “gray basket” (neither positive or negative, just gray) for the time being and promised myself I’d try to follow up on it later.
Meanwhile, Dion kept insisting on referring to his visitors as “invisible midgets.” This was partly an example of Dion’s dark humor, but also semi-serious. He seemed to think they were very diminutive people. If you were going to use these super-suits in order to infiltrate sensitive military locations in other countries, you would want to train small and agile people to use them. Gymnasts, perhaps? Dancers? Jockeys from the nearby Del Mar Race Track? Dwarves? Why not? (“Naval Intelligence In Need of Vertically-challenged Individuals for Sensitive Intelligence Work. Must Be Willing To Terrorize Harmless Drug Addicts 24/7. BYOB.”)
Not long after the invisible midgets started showing up at the apartment, Lita Johnston made a return appearance. Early one afternoon, all the terrorist madness just ceased. The jarheads who were parked outside drove away. “Huh, maybe they gave up,” Dion thought. About twenty minutes later, however, Lita herself appeared on his back doorstep with two male agents in tow. She was polite and friendly. She asked Dion how he was doing. He said he was okay. She then asked him if he’d changed his mind and would like to tell her where the goggles were hidden. He insisted he didn’t know. She said that was too bad, because if he did know she could probably help him out.
At that point Dion just came straight out and asked her if she had people tailing him. She laughed and said that was silly. She then gave him her business card and told him if he changed his mind he could call the number at any time of the day or night. He said he couldn’t call the number because he didn’t know anything. She just nodded, and all three of them left in their unmarked, government vehicle.
A few minutes later all the chaos re-ensued. The flotilla of spies resumed their positions, invisible people started moving furniture around the apartment, and jarheads camped out in the supermarket parking lot next door and blatantly took photographs of him. All day, all night. Some of these guys would remain parked in the lot outside the apartment and play loud music for hours while beaming their headlights right through his bedroom window. Strangely, none of the neighbors seemed to mind. It’s important to note that since his arrest in July almost all of Dion’s neighbors, one by one, had moved out of the building. All the apartments were now occupied by new people, people Dion had never seen before.
The landlord started acting more and more nervous and kept asking Dion—seemingly for no reason—if he was planning on moving soon.
One time Dion asked him, “Is there any reason why I should move?”
Perspiring like mad, the landlord said nothing and crept back into his apartment.
Then the room started growing. Dion called me one afternoon—several months after this whole mess had begun—to tell me that earlier in the day he had entered his apartment through the front door and was surprised to see that the living room appeared far larger than normal. “This house is evil,” Dion told me, “and it grows!” At this point he (and I) thought he had definitely lost his shit, until a couple of days later when his friend My Lai came over and said, “Say… does the place look, like, way bigger to you?”
Again, I didn’t have the technical knowledge to explain such phenomena, but I knew it was not a typical Dion hallucination. I had known him since we were both sixteen, and by this point I was used to how he behaved while under the influence of a panoply of different drugs. None of these symptoms were familiar. I’ve known a lot of drug addicts in my life, and not one of them ever hallucinated that their apartment had transformed into a tesseract house; no one ever shoots heroin and dreams that their domicile has become the stand-in for Doctor Who’s Tardis. Hell, heroin and meth aren’t even hallucinogens. Dion despised hallucinogens and always had. His personal kinks were heroin and speed, and that was pretty much it. All those mellow hippie drugs just put him in even worse moods than normal.
Again, I wasn’t sure how one could make a room look bigger on the inside than it appeared on the outside, but my intuition told me it wasn’t impossible.
Then came the Boris Vallejo virtual reality mindfucks. One day Dion glanced out his living room window and noticed that the scenery that should’ve been there had disappeared. Instead he saw what he described as the background of a cheesy Boris Vallejo painting: swirling green mists, alien vegetation, three suns in the sky, everything but the furry throat and the big breasted woman in the loincloth. I thought it was significant that the scene didn’t even look like a Frank Frazetta painting; it looked like a Vallejo painting. Leave it to a U.S. intelligence agent to pick the second-rate cheesy painter instead of the first-rate cheesy painter for their little virtual reality scenario (it’s important to note that this scene didn’t appear to be a mere two-dimensional painting—it looked real, as if Dion could open the door and step into it).
After seeing this Vallejo Wonderland, Dion ran over to the windows on the other side of the apartment and saw the same things he’d always seen: the grocery store and the gas station and the power line next door. No weird vegetation, no green sun, no swirling mist.
He went back to the other side and glanced out the window again. Nothing had changed: Vallejo everywhere. When he opened the door, however, he saw exactly what he was supposed to see. Only when looking out the windows on one side of the building did the scene look surreal.The scenery remained this way for a few hours, then morphed into something else. This continued for several weeks, driving Dion nearer and nearer to The Edge.
Late one night, fearing for his life, he wrote out a huge sign that read “PLEASE DON’T SHOOT ME” and hung it in his front window. He crawled into bed and within seconds saw a shadow projected onto his bedroom wall on the other side of the room. It was the silhouette of a giant hand gripping a gun, and the gun was pointed at the silhouette of his own head. It kept tilting up and down, aiming at his forehead and pulling the trigger. Over and over again.
The strange occurrences persisted as the weeks turned into months, from July of 2003 to January of 2004. About seven months. Now, you might be asking yourself: Why didn’t Dion just leave? This question often comes up in regards to haunted house scenarios. How come these idiots don’t just bail if it’s so damn scary? Well, when you don’t have a lot of money it’s kind of hard to leave. Also, Lita continued to warn him over and over again not to leave the city.
Yes, Lita continued to show up at his door from time to time with the same two agents in tow, asking if he’d found the damn goggles. He kept saying no, of course, since he’d never even seen them in the first place.
But it was around October that Dion began doing his own detective work in Pacific Beach. He went to all the thugs he kept for friends and asked if any of them knew what Lee/ Doyle had been up to. Had he really been running some kind of smuggling ring out of Camp Pendleton? Dion uncovered some scuttlebutt that indicated Lee/Doyle had stolen the goggles in order to sell them to the Hell Angels. At first this might sound ridiculous, but the Hells Angels are involved with a great deal of drug smuggling in San Diego and Mexico. A supply of hi-tech night vision goggles is exactly something you’d need to make your job easier while smuggling major loads of contraband over the border at night. However, it’s not clear to me that Lee/Doyle understood the severity of his crime. It’s not possible that those night vision goggles were just normal everyday goggles. They couldn’t be. You could repurchase twenty-five pairs of those babies through eBay for far less money than it would cost to keep this psychological warfare game going against Dion Fuller.