For both Feral House and our sister company, Process Media …

Coming in the door today from the printer are copies of Priestess of Morphine: The Lost Writings of Marie-Madeleine in the Time of Nazis, edited with an Introduction and Notes by Ronald K. Siegel, translations by Eric A. Bye, foreword by Stephen J. Gertz, afterword by Amy Shapiro.

So, you might ask, who might this Marie-Madeleine be? Like Dr. Siegel’s other Process Media publication, Hashish, the Lost Legend, Priestess of Morphine revives forgotten, lost, decadent and disparaged literature in a beautiful, well-printed edition complete with many color images, in Priestess of Morphine, the remarkable work of a lesbian drug addict in Third Reich days.

 

At this time, Priestess of Morphine is solely available online through Process Media, as it will take several more weeks or months to access it through bookstores or online sellers. Its first printing was limited to less than one thousand copies.

 

To see a video trailer, and ways to order Priestess of Morphine, go here: http://processmediainc.com/priestess-of-morphine/ …

 

Marie Madeleine Gunther was born on April 4, 1881 in Eydtkuhnen (then East Prussia, today Russian) to Karl Gunther, a merchant, and Emmy Siemssen. On August 2, 1900, at age nineteen, Marie Madeleine married General Heinrich Georg Ludwig Freiherr (Baron) von Puttkamer. He was 35 years her senior. Three years later she gave birth to her only child, Jesco Gunther Heinrich. They lived in Grunewald, a top-grade suburb of Berlin. In her time, under the name of Marie Madeleine, she established a name for herself as a writer of unusually lyrical, stunningly sensual, shockingly erotic and hotly passionate poetry and prose (she wrote short stories and novellas). She published individual poems in journals (such as “Champagne frappe” in Das Narrenschiff [Ship of Fools]). In 1900, she published her first collection, Auf Kypros [“On Cyprus]. Most of her early material stemmed from the pen of a young girl of 15-16 years.

Her primary works that followed included In Seligkeit und Sunden [In Bliss and Sin, 1905], Katzen [Cats, 1910], Krabben [Crabs, 1910], Die rote Rose Leidenschaft [The Red Rose called Passion, 1912], Die drei Nachte [The Three Nights], Pantherkatzchen [Panther Kitten, 1915] and Taumel [Ecstasy, 1920].

The von Puttkamer family is an old Baltic aristocratic family documented back to the 12th century. They have been landowners for hundreds of years in a sandy (not very fertile) area at the coast of the Baltic Sea, later known as Pommerania. Today the land is under Polish rule. As a family, they held highly protected and treasured conservative traditions-a God-fearing Protestant work ethic valuing hard work, pride in diligence, frugality and loyal service to country and sovereign.

To the family, the publications of Marie Madeleine, both by virtue of content and having been published by a woman, was considered shocking and embarrassing. Critics at the time-while admiring her talent, rhyming skill, and brightly colorful imagery-described her work with adjectives like “shameless”, “lewd”, “lascivious,” and “lecherous.” Some saw that her writing came from the mind of a young, well-read, impressionable, and highly imaginative girl who probably wanted to rebel against the oppressive “Spiessburgertum” of her time and place-the narrow-minded bourgeoisie of the outgoing Victorian era. As a free-thinker, she was ahead of her time, as an individual and more so as a woman.

General Major Heinrich was born in 1846. He fought in the Prussian infantry in the wars of 1864 (against Denmark) and 1866 (against Austria) and was highly decorated. In the 1890’s, shortly before marrying Marie Madeleine Gunther, he commanded Infantry Regiment #118 in Mainz. Later he served in the Order of the Knights of St. John (Johanniter-Orden) and in 1914 acted on behalf of the Red Cross for the military at the start of WW I. In the years after his retirement, General Heinrich happily made some enemies himself by publishing incisive political-military satires and critical analyses of the Prussian military system. In protest to the Puttkamer Family’s reactions to his writings and particularly his wife’s “obscene” poetry, he rescinded his membership in the tradition-bound Puttkamer Family Association. On August 25, 1918, he died of pneumonia.

The reaction to Marie Madelein’s first book was incredible. People were floored. The initial shock and notoriety of the 19-year old’s Auf Kypros of course meant instant fame for the young lady. In later years, that recognition spread in high society as she turned what had started as the steamy imaginations of a young girl into a highly successful career, buoyed (and driven) by a heavy and eventually lifelong morphine habit. Apparently having neither the desire to be nor the makings for a mother, Marie Madeleine gave her young son over to the same traditional military Cadet’s Academy (Kadettenschule) in Berlin that his father had attended, and later was rarely available for him.

She was a very beautiful woman, dark-haired and dark-eyed. She was also exceedingly wealthy. Residing in her stately villa with an apparently non-descript aristocratic life-companion by the name of Herr von Cramster she liked to travel in great style and to dress in the latest grand fashions from Paris, with a particular penchant for extravagantly elaborate and expensive hats. Her writings were quite popular among the sophisticated Berlin in-crowd, particularly the somewhat blase “Offizierskorps” (body of military officers) — but her writings were considered too bawdy for women. She was probably quite typical for those Roaring Twenties in Berlin which the Nazis later called a “decadent” age,- perhaps a little a la “Cabaret”, the musical.

In 1902 (in An der Liebe Narrenseil, On Love’s Fool’s Leash) she wrote about her great frustration about how the poetic experiments of her youth, written as “dream songs” for her own amusement, had been misunderstood as confessions of a “much-experienced” person. A verse of hers went like this (roughly translated from German):

I cannot understand at all
why all your heads are twisted
by what I modestly call
the lyrics of puberty.

Much of Marie Madeleine’s considerable wealth disappeared in the economic crash and inflation in Germany. Some of her wealth probably also went toward feeding her morphine habit, for which, as a hard addict, she had a permit. If her later poems reflect actual experience, she also must have experimented with cocaine. The lifelong heavy addiction to morphine (close to 30 years) was quite destructive to her health. She attempted to quit several times to no avail.

Around 1942 or 1943 she bought herself into a sanitarium in the city of Katzenelnbogen. A relatively short time later, on Sept. 27, 1944, she died there under obscure circumstances. When her son returned from WW II captivity around 1951, there wasn’t much left information about her death. He believed that Nazi doctors in the sanitarium had used her addiction to obtain what was left of her wealth and then “helped her pass on”. The sanitarium, a private institution, still exists, but the records of that time are long gone, but not, with the release of Dr. Siegel’s Priestess of Morphine, are the writings of Marie-Madeleine!

We’ve taken this before on many occasions. The train from Seattle to Portland. The slowness of it, the views through the morning gray, the terrible coffee. It was always kind of wonderful, despite not being able to open windows like Amtrak’s European cousins.

This recent trip, though… oh, the humanity!

I was seated in Car 7 on the aisle in front of a yowling Polish family… how did Amtrak cram so many people on one aisle? Where I was sitting, a very nice but P.T. Barnum-sized woman also took up half of my seat. Could this have been some sort of reality show?

The restroom on this and surrounding cars were flooded with urine, diarrhea and soiled toilet paper … even the car with stale bagels and bad coffee was packed tight with passengers trying to escape the bad scene.

We finally arrived some four and a half hours later at the Portland destination. Everyone speaks of the gentrification attacking Portland, but as yet, it has not seemed to reach the train station’s surrounding blocks where homeless beggars wreak vengeance on passersby as retribution for their poor life experience.

This trip to Portland did not start off well, but picked up after we met with four different Feral House authors. Why so many writers this town? It’s unplanned, I can promise you that…

Markus Wolff and I spoke about his coming book about the remarkable German artist Fidus and his back to the land compatriots. Can’t wait for this.

Then Phil Stanford (of White House Call Girl fame) brought up his research for his coming title about the time in Portland when it was run by corrupt cops and mobsters. Now that’s the true Portlandia.

Then the delightful Jennifer Robin took me around to dive bars downtown as we spoke of her book describing conspicuous human traffic in all areas of Portland.

The next morning long-time friend Jerry A. (of Poison Idea) caught me up on his long-gestating memoir of rock and roll weirdness. He gave me two pins. One says “Pig and Jerry, Not Fred and Carrie”… I put that on immediately in respect of Tom “Pig” Roberts and the remarkable Jerry Lang who offered vocals for some of my SWAT and Tards recordings.

The train ride back North to Seattle wasn’t much better than the one South. Why has Amtrak become the new Greyhound?

The nasty reality of the publishing business was revealed to me when I labored for New York’s Strand Bookstore. My job involved hauling “review copies” downstairs to the book buyer. It was overwhelming to see all the garbage launched onto the planet in the form of a printed book. This was the publishing and resale business up close and ugly, and I could not help but become cynical and dispirited by it all.

Is this where my fellow humans received profound helpings of information and creativity? God, I hope not. I owned remarkable examples of the printed book, and knew they had the possibility of being far more interesting.

Fortunately we were introduced to friend of a friend (thanks Georganne Deen!) who I convinced to assist me with publishing more intriguing titles than the horrible norm. For the next couple years we began an imprint called “Amok Press.” After Amok Press had its run, I moved to the West Coast from NYC and started Feral House in 1989.

Feral House became identified as a company that largely did dark, nasty, and conspiratorial stuff, and became a kind of publishing testing ground. In time other publishers —big and small — started to do Feral House variants once we proved that it was possible to do so. One of the founders of another firm said his company was founded to be a “better branded” Feral House.

Still, there’s a wide world out there, and most of the time Feral House was first and best. Throughout the years, when Feral House showed its wares at publishing conventions, many bookstore owners would look at our table, and give us the hairy eyeball as they moved on down to get their Suzanne Somers cookbooks signed.

Few people might believe this, but my interests run further afield than death, corruption, violence and insanity. A decade ago we founded the imprint Process Media with Jodi Wille as a forum for other sorts of books, many those in the realm of self-reliance, unorthodox lifestyles and books that undemonized the idea of “cults” and drug-taking. Though Jodi is now primarily involved with filmmaking (you should see the remarkable documentary, The Source Family, that she co-directed with Maria Demopoulos), Process Media continues on strong as ever.

Process’ most recent title, Power of the Seed, by Port Townsend native Susan M. Parker, is an amazingly clear Self-Reliance Series book on the true idea of what “essential oils” are and their creation (it’s decidedly not what you purchase at the supermarket or Body Shop).

The book has just rolled in from the printer, and is now available here.  A great video for it is coming next week!

Next week we also will introduce the new Feral House book, Pulp Macabre: The Art of Lee Brown Coye’s Final and Darkest Era edited by Mike Hunchback and Caleb Braaten (and co-published by the great Sacred Bones Records). The books have finally rolled in despite the strike at US’ West Coast ports!

This morning we heard the sad news of the passing of actor Leonard Nimoy who worked, non-Spock like, with my own long-gone father in The Man From UNCLE (The Project Strigas Affair) and a Henry Fonda tv-movie called The Alpha Caper. My father enjoyed acting with him a great deal. May he rest in peace.

Yes, it’s now arrived. The Essential Mae Brussell: Investigations of Fascism in America, edited by Alex Constantine and Introduced by Paul Krassner, can be purchased today from Feral House.

The Lance de Haven-Smith book Conspiracy Theory in America (published by the University of Texas) reveals that the phrase “conspiracy theory” was invented by the CIA to discredit doubters of the Warren Commission that claims John F. Kennedy’s assassination was carried out alone by a single “lone gunman.”

Distraught by the murder of President Kennedy, a Beverly Hills housewife named Mae Brussell took it upon herself to buy all 26 printed volumes issued by the Warren Commission report, and attempt to make sense of the thing by cross-indexing the entire work. Mae was disturbed by the contradictory information and unreported realities she discovered in those volumes. As a result, she started subscribing to many major newspapers and magazines, whose stories she filed and organized, uncovering disquieting connections and patterns behind government and corporate malfeasance.

An impressed John Lennon donated money to Paul Krassner’s hip counterculture magazine, The Realist, so he could afford to print Mae Brussell’s work. Throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s Mae reported, in radio programs primarily, about the horrors infecting American culture. Mae’s work was followed by a number of devoted listeners who were known as “Brussell Sprouts,” who often expanded upon the conspiracy theories with their research.

The current administration’s legal “Czar” who goes by the name Cass Sunstein was recently appointed to serve on the “NSA Oversight Panel” despite the fact that two words “NSA” and “oversight” rarely if ever fit together. He also wrote a book called Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas to make sure that the academics and the American public dismiss so-called conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination and other American events of a largely fascist nature. Cass Sunstein claims that this sort of reportage only leads to discontent Americans who turn violent with their distrust.

If Mae Brussell hadn’t died in October 1988, she would have no doubt investigated Cass Sunstein’s background and printed material to fill us in on why Cass Sunstein is encouraging American academics and intelligence and police agencies to move against those who write and publish “conspiracy theories.” Now that Mae has passed, it’s now a job for one or more of Mae’s Brussell Sprouts. Get on it!

 

Feral House/Process Lupercalia Party

Celebrate Wolves, Yé-Yé Girls, Witches, Feral House & Process Media!

It’s a full moon on Saturday, February 15, the day celebrating the Roman wolf festival Lupercalia.

It’s also the perfect night to celebrate Feral House’s new Yé-Yé Girls of ‘60s French Pop book, and Feral House and Process Media’s releases for the new year.

The lovely white witch Maja D’aoust (who co-wrote The Secret Source: The Law of Attraction and its Hermetic Influence Throughout the Ages) will speak about the pagan Lupercalia ritual.

We’ll have a freshly printed and bound copy of Hashish, The Lost Legend, which some have said is the most extraordinary special edition they’ve ever seen.

Adam Parfrey will discuss the recent and forthcoming Feral House and Process Media releases, including Chemtrails, HAARP and the Full Spectrum Dominance of Planet Earth, Citizen Keane: The Big Lies Behind the Big Eyes, and Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult.

Adding more delirium to the festivities, DJ Kitten Sparkles will spin prime examples of the Yé-Yé Girls experience.

This event will be held at Los Angeles’ Wacko and La Luz de Jesus Gallery, 4633 Hollywood Blvd., from 7 – 10 pm on Lupercalia, Saturday, Feb. 15.

Be there!