Kevin Revier's "Policing Pain"

Kevin Revier is an assistant professor of criminology in the department of sociology/anthropology at the State University of New York at Cortland.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Policing Pain: The Opioid Crisis, Abolition, and a New Ethic of Care, and reported the following:

Page 99 begins with a quote:

“Because we know that when addicts go to jail, if they don’t get treatment, if they don’t start on something, they go out, and they have such a high rate of dying the next time they use, because their bodies aren’t used to—because they haven’t used, and then they go use again, and they think they can use as much as they—and then they die.”

This is from my interview with the DSS/mental health commissioner in Broome County in Central New York. She comes after a string of quotes, where I cite the county’s district attorney and the emergency medical services coordinator who cited the same condition: people who use drugs are being locked up, they do not have treatment access inside the jail or upon release, and they overdose.

Yet, while officials discussed the risks involved for incarcerating people who use drugs, their solutions remained largely carceral-focused: add treatment to the jail and in reentry services.

Page 99 indeed represents the crux of Policing Pain: that while seemingly a reversal of the lock-em-up approaches to the drug war, public officials’ calls for treatment have tended to centralize treatment within jails, drug courts, and police programming. This creates harm, as jails, as this chapter discusses, are fundamentally places of degradation and abuse, both in terms of interpersonal violence by correctional officers and institutional violence, such as strip searches.

Importantly, page 99 also marks a shift in the book, where I move from an overview of what I deem as carceral care in police, courts, and jail treatment to envisioning what a new ethics of care looks like, abolitionist care.

Visit Kevin Revier's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Helen Fry's "The White Lady"

Historian and biographer Helen Fry is the author of The Walls Have Ears, Spymaster, MI9, and more than twenty books on intelligence, prisoners of war, and the social history of World War II. She appears regularly in media interviews and podcasts and has been involved in numerous documentaries.

Fry's new book, The White Lady: The Story of Two Key British Secret Service Networks Behind German Lines, provides a comprehensive history of two of the most important British secret service networks in Belgium in two world wars.

Fry applied the “Page 99 Test” to The White Lady, and shared the following:

From page 99:

‘With my pillow I fixed up a dummy to make the bed appear occupied. I placed some of my clothes on the chair, as if I had just taken them off. At eight o’clock, Maryan, the insider who agreed to help us, opened the cell.’ (Fauquenot).

Creusen was already waiting for Fauquenot and hiding in a store cupboard, having been smuggled out of his cell by Maryan. Maryan gave them a small hammer and an iron spike, then wished them luck and disappeared. Fauquenot and Creusen made their way to the chapel, climbed a spiral staircase into a loft and then onto the roof of the prison.

At 9pm, Chauvin asked Dewé if he had heard a whistle. Then a silhouette of a figure appeared on the prison roof and promptly disappeared. ‘Did you see him?’ Chauvin asked Dewé, but Dewé had not. A different shadowy figure suddenly emerged from the darkness of the street. It was one of their own agents, Juliette Durieu. She informed them that Maryan had safely reached the safehouse, ahead of Fauquenot and Creusen…

Meanwhile Fauquenot fastened a sheet to the skylight and began to slide down to the gutter, as he recalled: ‘The roof was slippery and much steeper than I had imagined. From the gutter, I let out the sheet. To my horror, it was too short to reach anywhere near the prison wall. I pulled myself back to the skylight, and whispered the tragic news to Creusen, who was still in the loft… Then I heard a hiss from Creusen: “The pile of sheets, I’ll go back and get some.”’

Creusen soon reappeared with a bundle of sheets and tied them into a long rope. Fauquenot slid swiftly down the drain pipe to the ground and ran towards Dewé and Chauvin. He gave the password, Joan of Arc.’ Just as they enquired about the whereabouts of Creusen, his head appeared over the wall.

‘The two Collards?’ asked Dewé and Chauvin asked simultaneously.

‘They are in a different wing in solitary confinement.’

If browsers open the book at page 99 they won’t have a sense of what the White Lady network was about, but they will be curious as to why two agents (Fauquenot and Creusen) were being broken out of jail in the middle of the night. It all feels very cloak and dagger. The double break-out is one of the few known incidents of a planned escape from a Belgian prison in the First World War. The agents were working for ‘The White Lady’ network (‘La Dame Blanche’) and had been arrested at Villa Les Hirondelles on the river Meuse when German field security police in civilian clothes raided the property and arrested them. The villa was a main centre for collecting military intelligence reports from the different sectors of the spy network in the region. Two other pivotal figures in the network, the Collard brothers, were arrested in the villa at the same time. Only in their early twenties, they were shot for espionage by a German firing squad on 18 July 1918.

The reader will be drawn to read more about a world in which heroic Belgian men and women risked their lives to gather intelligence for the Allies from behind enemy lines and smuggle it out of German-occupied Belgium. Couriers took the reports to undercover British intelligence officers in Rotterdam, Holland. The network was so successful that it was described in the official MI6 history as ‘the most successful single British human intelligence operation of the First World War’. What an accolade. It became the model for a successor network in the Second World War called the Clarence Service, led by the same men and women who developed all kinds of fascinating spycraft.

Visit Helen Fry's website.

The Page 99 Test: The London Cage.

The Page 99 Test: The Walls Have Ears.

The Page 99 Test: MI9.

--Marshal Zeringue

Derek S. Burdette's "Miraculous Celebrity"

Derek S. Burdette is an assistant professor of art history in the School of Art + Art History at the University of Florida.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Miraculous Celebrity: The Christ of Ixmiquilpan and Colonial Piety in Mexico City, with the following results:

My book, Miraculous Celebrity: The Señor de Ixmiquilpan and Colonial Piety in Mexico City, reconstructs the history of one of colonial Mexico’s most important miraculous statues. The Señor de Ixmiquilpan (sometimes called the Señor de Santa Teresa) was a life-sized crucifix made around 1545, which fell into disrepair at the end of the century before being “miraculously renovated” in 1621. After this remarkable event, the statue was enshrined in the Carmelite convent in Mexico City and promoted as a powerful figure that could help people in their times of need.

The Page 99 Test works perfectly on my book! Readers who turn to page 99 will find themselves near the end of my analysis of painted and printed representations of the statue. Page 99 is divided in two. At the top, readers see a black and white photograph of a small devotional pamphlet printed in the statue’s honor in 1784, now housed at the John Carter Brown Library. The pamphlet’s binding has been completely ripped apart, revealing the prayerbook’s antiquity the toll that years of use took on the object. On the lower half of page 99, readers can learn more about the prayerbook itself and how it was intended to be used. I explain that the prayerbook’s author, Domingo de Quiroga, instructed devotees to begin their prayers once they were “prostrate on your knees in front of the Sacred Renovated Image of the Holy Christ, or any copy thereof.” I go on to argue that “Quiroga’s instructions to complete the prayers in front of the Cristo Renovado [the Señor de Ixmiquilpan] must surely have driven some to the Carmelite church, where they could complete the prayers in the presence of the miraculous statue. Quiroga himself seems to recognize, however, that for most people this might not have been possible. Instead, readers would deploy a printed portrait as a substitution for the original.” Thus, on page 99 my readers find evidence of one of my central arguments in the book: printed portraits of the Señor de Ixmiquilpan circulated throughout Mexico, both inside and outside of prayerbooks, and offered devotees tangible points of connection with the miraculous statue that reinforced its cultural importance. Remarkably, if this page was all you read, you would have a pretty good sense of what my book is all about!

Learn more about Miraculous Celebrity at the University of Texas Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brahim El Guabli's "Desert Imaginations"

Brahim El Guabli is an associate professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University and an associate professor of Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences, and reported the following:

I wrote Desert Imaginations to explain why what happens in deserts is almost expected to unfold in them. Given that the abundant literature about arid lands has not really been able to furnish a concept that can connect its variant threads, I have defined Saharanism as the ideology that undergirds the myriad ways deserts are perceived and acted upon. Accordingly, Saharanism is always at work in the manner deserts are talked about and (mis)used whether we are thinking about their exploitation for extractive industries and their use for storage of lethal waste or whether our attention focuses on approaching them as loci for experimentation with new technologies or as areas outside the realm of law and ethics where anything can be undertaken.

Interestingly, this except from page 99 is the start of my chapter on “Experimental Saharanism,” which an important theme that runs throughout the book:

In April 1927, botanist Walter T. Swingle, who worked for the US Department of Agriculture, was invited by French authorities to participate in an investigation into Fusarium oxysporum’s infestation of palm groves in the Moroccan desert. Swingle, who happened to be affiliated with the University of Lyon, was asked by his French contacts to accompany them to Figuig and Boudnib, which had a reputation for the high quality of their dates, but whose groves suffered from this illness that made palms wilt and die. This proved to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Swingle to set foot on what he called “the single date planting place in all Africa.” In addition to learning about Bayoud disease, Swingle observed how local people tended to the groves, pollinated the trees, and cleaned them in preparation for the harvest season. During his time in Boudnib, he met a tribal leader who gave him eleven Medjool palm offshoots that he sent to Washington, DC. Once there, the offshoots were quarantined on a Native American reservation in the Nevada desert for a period of two years. A hundred years later, Swingle can be said to not only have imported a new plant but also to have placed the Sahara at the heart of the multibillion-dollar Medjool (pronounced Mejhoul/ljihl in Morocco) date economy in the US. Swingle’s story is only one manifestation of a practice that I propose to call “experimental Saharanism,” which subsumes all endeavors to test new ideas and undertakings in desert spaces.

Page 99 of Desert Imaginations gives a clear idea about what the book is about in two ways. Firstly, it demonstrates the extractive and experimental as well as the inter- desert nature of Saharanism through Swingle’s and his contemporaries’ endeavors to transplant plants and husbandry from other deserts to the American west. Secondly, the passage takes us to France, Morocco, Algeria, and the United States, indicating the imbrication of histories of Saharanism and the existence of an trans-desert grammar that the book delineates to help readers understand why deserts across different geographical

Learn more about Desert Imaginations at the University of California Press website.

Read an interview with Brahim El Guabli about Desert Imaginations.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patrick Adamson's "Projecting America"

Patrick Adamson is Associate Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, Editor at Open Screens, and Assistant Editor at Film Journal.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Projecting America: The Epic Western and National Mythmaking in 1920s Hollywood, and shared the following:

Page 99 finds me moving between two major case studies from Chapter Two of Projecting America, wrapping up a discussion of North of 36 (1924)—a film that looked to present the first post–Civil War cattle drive from Texas to Kansas in 1867 as a decisive episode in America’s national story—and beginning one centered around The Pony Express (1925)—which looked to do similar for the eponymous mail service. A heading, “‘Saving California for the Union’: The Pony Express (1925)”, divides the two and hints at what they look to do with their respective topics. As is indicated here, both the cattle drive linking the postbellum South with markets to the north and the express riders racing west to California against the backdrop of a looming Civil War are presented on film as episodes where “the very course of national history is at stake”. In turn, page 99 signals why 1920s Hollywood was attempting to contribute to, and even reshape, popular understandings of what was then widely seen as the most important period in American history, quoting Billboard magazine’s assessment of North of 36’s success: “That the public is not supporting socalled [sic] sex pictures, society dramas, stories of beer-drinking revels, petting parties and whatnot overloaded with Boccaccio frankness is borne out in blazing proof.”

Here we see why the Page 99 Test works well for Projecting America. One of my book’s larger arguments is that silent-era Hollywood turned to epic Western production in a moment in which the morals of its films and stars were under scrutiny, and the chapter this page comes from is a detailed exploration of what this actually entailed in terms of film production and promotion. My quotations and framing here give a sense of how this effort was received and what the intent behind it was: by linking the nation’s most pervasive form of mass entertainment to a stated aspiration to educate the public, the new American film capital positioned their historical films about the frontier as interventions in the period’s pressing debates around cinema and, in particular, its social influence.

The result was that epic Westerns were acclaimed by many at the time as a new, distinctly American way of engaging with history that could unite diverse filmgoers via inspiring lessons in the “making” of the nation. What the Page 99 Test highlights is that, in doing this, the film industry of the 1920s actively looked to expand standard narratives of Westward expansion, presenting those responsible for the Texan cattle drive and the express riders delivering news to the frontier as “pioneers” comparable to those who had traversed the Oregon Trail in The Covered Wagon (1923)—the film that inaugurated the cycle. This was a major aim of my study. While it is tempting to assume that the film industry simply restated the favorite myths of American audiences, the idea that cinema could offer a new way of engaging with history—visual, wide-reaching, and understood across linguistic and national divides—was a crucial part of these discussions. Revisiting this page brought me back to the simple questions that first guided my research: what did it mean to make a successful historical film in the first decades of Hollywood, and why did it matter?

Learn more about Projecting America at the University of Oklahoma Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert E.C. Davis's "Lieutenants and Light"

Robert E. C. Davis spent twenty-five years on active duty in the United States Marine Corps and retired in 2008 as the colonel of an artillery regiment. He holds a BS in geography from the University of Utah, an MA in national security and strategic studies from the College of Naval Warfare, an MS in geographic information systems technology from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in remote sensing and earth observation from Penn State University. He is certified as a mapping scientist by the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.

Davis applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Lieutenants and Light: Mapping the US Army Heliograph Networks in Late Nineteenth-Century Arizona and New Mexico, with the following results:

On page 99 there is a map of the Lyda Spring heliograph station. On the map, the station is located on elevated terrain west of the small village of Mule Creek, a village that still exists. A single sightline connects the station to the heliograph station at Siggins’s Ranch. Nearby features include Mule Spring and the Lyda ranch house, both situated along Mule Creek. Present-day Highway 78 is labeled to the north. An inset map shows the station’s position within the broader heliograph network.

The Page 99 Test reflects the character of the book. The map shows how a remote corner of New Mexico fit into a broader system of military communication and introduces the heliograph, a form of wireless communication that uses reflected sunlight to send messages. It also underscores a central feature of the project, since much of the book focuses on mapping each station and interpreting its role within the wider network. Page 99 offers a small view of the system, yet it represents the larger story.

The Lyda Spring (also called Mule Spring and Lydia Spring) was one of the most difficult heliograph stations for me to find (even then, its location is only speculation, but based on the best available data and analysis). This station is part of a group of heliograph stations extending up the San Francisco River valley, all emplaced in late August 1886. Alone and off to the west, the Lyda Spring station was placed almost three weeks later after considerable difficulty and effort by the soldiers tasked to establish it. I surmised that the connecting station at Siggins’s Ranch was not positioned to support a station to the west, which likely would have been the case if this site had been part of the original plan. Nevertheless, this station, emplaced on September 15, 1886, eleven days after the surrender of Geronimo, as well as another complete line of stations running to the east from nearby Fort Bayard to Fort Stanton, built by Lieutenant John J. Pershing in November, shows that the Army’s interest in the heliograph networks did not wane as the Apache War ended. The heliograph networks emerged from the 1886 campaign as an important communication tool that enhanced the Army’s ability to effectively command and control tactical forces and secured a lasting place within the Army’s field practices into the early twentieth century.

Visit Robert E.C. Davis's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Al Filreis's "The Classroom and the Crowd"

Al Filreis is Kelly Family Professor of English, founding faculty director of the Kelly Writers House, director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, codirector of PennSound, and publisher of Jacket2 magazine, all at the University of Pennsylvania. His recent books include 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern (2021), and he is the host of the podcast PoemTalk.

Filreis applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Classroom and the Crowd: Poetry and the Promise of Digital Community, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book happens to be the final page of a chapter about a massive open (free) online course (a MOOC, called “ModPo”) that drew tens of thousands of people to it during the lockdown months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Why did they come? What did they want from this (already existing) online community set up for the purpose of collaborative close readings of poems? (Yes, poems!) Well, they came because they were lonely. Because (for those in schools at the time) classrooms didn’t or didn’t yet know how to accommodate remote, quarantined citizens. Because they needed the kind of connection some of them were used to having in conversational spaces (living rooms, restaurants, coffee shops, and seminar rooms). Page 99 describes and defines a variation of MOOC—the weird and iconoclastic “bMOOC.” The bMOOC pushes back against instruction-led learning. In bMOOCs the learners shape the material from which they are to learn. Ken X., one of the 90,000 ModPo people, was alone one night. He entered the ModPo discussion forums and was worried that no one was there. It was late. He needed to talk. He pondered the meaning of loneliness, and the poem he chose to discuss, seemingly by himself, was about loneliness. The primary teaching choice of teachers who set up bMOOCs is to create a learner-centered course that includes content meant to disorient learners. Ken learned to live with disorientation. And, by the way, he wasn’t alone. I was there that night too. We talked. To this day, I don’t know where he was located, nor what his personal situation was. Nonetheless, I felt a connection to him, because…weren’t we all at least a little bit lonely. In a successful online community, no one is lonely for long. ModPo is not truly a bMOOC but on page 99 we happen to encounter an example of what an open online course could look like if we all took seriously the idea that a crowd can not just fit into a classroom but indeed can assume the role of teacher.

Learn more about The Classroom and the Crowd at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rebecca Jumper Matheson's "Artisans and Designers"

Rebecca Jumper Matheson is a fashion historian. She is the author of The Sunbonnet: An American Icon in Texas and Young Originals: Emily Wilkens and the Teen Sophisticate, among other publications. She is an instructor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, in the Fashion and Textile Studies MA program.

Matheson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Artisans and Designers: American Fashion Through Elizabeth and William Phelps, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Artisans and Designers: American Fashion Through Elizabeth and William Phelps is part of a discussion of Phelps Associates’ 1944 American Fashion Critics’ (Coty) Award win, and their contribution to the fashion show during the awards ceremony.

About three-fourths of the page is Figure 4.3, a page from the Coty Awards program, with my caption and the image credits to the Coty Archives and the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Special Collections and College Archives (SPARC). The awards program shows photographs of the Coty Award statue by Malvina Hoffman, as well as photos and bios of the award winners: “Claire McCardell, Casual Clothes Designer,” “Sally Victor, Millinery Designer,” and “Phelps Associates, Accessory Designers.” At the bottom of the program, there is text explaining the award criteria, “These Awards are made to the most outstanding American fashion designers who, in the opinion of the Jury, have best interpreted the fashion trend in 1943, under the restrictive influences of war-time economy.”

At the top of page 99 there are two partial paragraphs of my own text about the types of bags that Phelps Associates showed at the Coty Awards, including a bag “of worsted surcingle webbing with llama hide gussets,” with my observation that this combined a woolen textile used in horse harness with leather not in demand for military use. The second paragraph begins a discussion of how the Coty Awards publicized Phelps Associates’ production of leather shoulder bags that met the WWII-era women’s uniform specifications for branches of the US military, including WACs, WAVEs, SPARs, and Marines.

Between my text, and the text and images of the Coty Awards program that is reproduced on page 99, readers are introduced to several important themes in the Phelpses’ work and in Artisans and Designers. Firstly, the working partnership between Elizabeth and William Phelps is evident in their joint award, photo, bio, and even the name of the business. This page also highlights the Phelpses’ work in leather shoulder bags inspired by historical military forms and the hands-free freedom these bags give their wearers. Another theme is the way that Phelps Associates reused vintage metalwork in their pieces—a concept that was an innovative way to handle wartime scarcity, but also resonates with today’s interest in sustainability. Readers will also learn about the influence of hand-worked horse harness on the Phelpses’ work, and the related theme of the Phelpses’ interest in hand craft traditions from both the US and Europe. Finally, the page emphasizes that William and Elizabeth Phelps designed from the perspective of being makers themselves, and that they personally worked out the initial design samples for their accessories.

However, 1944 is only at the beginning of William and Elizabeth Phelps’s years in American fashion. Reading page 99 alone, the reader would not know about later developments in their careers, from workshop moves (New York to Pennsylvania to North Carolina) to the introduction of sportswear in the post-war period.

In terms of my methods, what the reader can see from this page is research using archival materials such as ephemera, but readers would miss out on the object-based research that is also key to the book. Each chapter of Artisans and Designers is anchored by an introductory object or objects—extant garments or accessories that I have studied in person, each object telling more of the story of Phelps Associates and their clients.

Learn more about Artisans and Designers at the The Kent State University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Edward Huth's "A Sense of Space"

John Edward Huth is the Donner Professor of Science at Harvard University. He has done research in experimental particle physics since 1980 and is currently a member of the ATLAS collaboration at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN). He participated in the discovery of the top quark and the Higgs boson and is the author of The Lost Art of Finding Our Way.

Huth applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, A Sense of Space: A Local's Guide to a Flat Earth, the Edge of the Cosmos, and Other Curious Places, with the following results:

Page 99 in A Sense of Space is the close of chapter 5 on spatial and cultural/social connections in Dante's Divine Comedy. It represents a segue from the end of that chapter to the next chapter on the concept of extraterrestrial intelligence that emerged with the invention of the telescope.

Here force failed my high fantasy; but my
desire and will were moved already—like
a wheel revolving uniformly—by
the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

(Par. 33 133–45)

Here, we have the final writing of le stelle.

Three centuries after Dante, the telescope was invented and revealed structures associated with the planets, like the rings of Saturn, phases of Venus, and the moons of Jupiter. Observations triumphed where pure reason could not solve riddles, which spelled the end of Aristotle’smodel of space.

But our inclination to project human-like qualities onto space persisted. Where Dante populated the heavens with virtuous souls, some astronomers contemplate whether the universe could be home to intelligent beings like us.

This captures the theme of the book quite well: that social concepts are interwoven with spatial concepts. Here is an additional detail. Dante was very taken by astronomy, and the last word(s) in each of the books (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) is "the stars" (le stelle). I wove this into A Sense of Space as well. The first words are "the stars" in my preface and "the stars" at the end of the concluding chapter. Stars also feature prominently throughout the book in various guises: Ancient Greek astronomy, astrology, cosmology, and the fundamental forces of nature.

The book examines the interplay between visions of space and associated social/cultural manifestations over the eons from the Ancient Egyptians to modern physics and cosmology. I lead off with the cognitive psychology underpinning the interplay. Dante adopts Aristotle's model of the universe, with the earth at the center and spheres of the moon, sun, and planets in the heavens surrounding. I explore his spatial/cultural connections in the context of the Divine Comedy. Likewise the astronomers later speculated on whether the planets were home to intelligent beings. HG Wells, partly inspired by an astronomy report of a strange light from Mars, wrote War of the Worlds, which was a jump-off point of our modern culture of extraterrestrial aliens.

Learn more about A Sense of Space at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rob Miller's "The Hours Are Long, But the Pay Is Low"

Rob Miller is the cofounder and former co-owner of Bloodshot Records.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Hours Are Long, But the Pay Is Low: A Curious Life in Independent Music, and reported the following:

I think Mr. Ford Madox Ford would be reasonably pleased with his hypothesis in this instance.

Page 99 finds the reader in the latter chapters of the first half (or, as I call it, this being a book about music, “Side A”) as I stumble along the circuitous path that led me to start an independent record label, Bloodshot, that became internationally known as a home for a curious blend of punk and roots music. Jumping back and forth in time between an adolescence in the 70s that looked upon what is now “classic rock” with a mixture of horror and boredom, and the origin story of the label in mid-90s, the book to this point devotes itself to the important idea of finding freedom, identity, and community in the music of the underground. In my colossal leap from comedy records and AM radio baseball, to hardcore punk rock---skipping any incremental steps in between, I discovered an openness to exploration, without foreknowledge or judgement. It was in this manner that I started to hear whispers and echoes of the music that came before, the weird underbelly of Americana. One particular band that had a powerful impact was The Cramps and their song “Human Fly.”

The Cramps were the mysterious distant uncle I secretly wished would come to family reunions. He’d tell stories about knife fights and scoring with showgirls, hand me a shrunken head he bought at a bazaar somewhere in the East and then wink, give a boozy, smoky laugh, and let me take a pull off his flask if Mom wasn’t looking. And while both sides of the family of rock and roll sang about the virtues of wanting to kiss your sweet lips, the Cramps aimed a little lower, and a little closer, to the truth than most spoke of in decent company. “Human Fly” was a baptism in the murky waters that course past us unseen, but not unfelt. Thanks to that pulsing, aural equivalent of an opening rusty crypt door, I have taken the road more strange and less popular, and that has made all the difference.

After an ornamental section divider in the middle of the page, I describe the insidious creep of tribalism and intolerance I started to experience in the punk rock scene, the very qualities I was trying to escape in the first place.

By the end of high school, the bloom had, as they say, fallen off the rose of much of punk’s promise. A friend of mine once remarked that hardcore had the shelf life of unpasteurized buttermilk, and many aspects of a scene that had arisen from a dissatisfaction with conformity quickly slid into the age-old traps of tribalism and self-destruction. One orthodoxy was traded for another; boots and braces became the new IZODS and boat shoes. Hair too short at school was now not short enough at shows. I’d been to this movie before, and I didn’t get into punk and hardcore only to feel out of place again.

At the bottom of page 99, I draw a throughline from my distaste for conformity and the stifling expectations of codes and rules to my reflexive impulse to blaze my own trail.

Worse, there was an emerging absolutism regarding the music itself. It was hardcore or it wasn’t. There were “right” albums to have, and “wrong” albums to have, “right” shows to go to and “wrong” shows to go to. Wearisome What is versus What is not arguments of authenticity--which I’d encounter ad nauseum in a different context later with Bloodshot--overtook the conversation with Talmudic gravity.

While page 99 does not deal with the any of the specifics of the growth and development of Bloodshot Records, nor the issue of the business of independent labels in general that takes up much of “Side B,” it is an informative glimpse into the tone and beating heart of the book, and highlights a theme that reverberates throughout. That is, as another band I cite as an influence, Crass, put it, “if you don’t like the rules they make, refuse to play their game.” Be it in the usual pairing of punk and country, or in the way I chose to run the business.

Visit Rob Miller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue