Aged 31: A Few Reactions in Writing to What Got Published in 1975

In Year 1975, maybe you were waiting to be born. Maybe it was a busy year, so you did little recreational reading. Were you zonked out on something chemical; off trekking around the globe?

Well link to the 'Cafes.net's Page F75' ---- to catch up. (I found F75 while looking up a book I found and purchased today written by Ira Progoff, The Death & Rebirth of Psychology.) I knew that Progoff was credited as being one of Bandler's mentors circa 1975 and was regarded as an inspiring foundation for the neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) school. Now that I am reading Progoff, I find him a convincing authority.

On -- Page F75 -- the review in one paragraph of an NLP classic that published that year regards the book as far from being one of the best titles for easy reading enjoyment . The review is amusing:

Bandler, Richard, and Grinder, John, STRUCTURE OF MAGIC, THE, 1975, Science and Behavior Books (Palo Alto, CA), Trade. Subtitle: A BOOK ABOUT LANGUAGE AND THERAPY. Pity the poor heavy metal kid, looking for some quick surface spells, or the D&D* freak looking for a book on fantasy games, who bought this and discovered that its about Transformational Grammar and semantics. The cover has a nice color wizard, of the generic sort used on D&D* book covers. There's no wizardry within, though. It's just a boring bit of psychobabble about how to get from the "surface structure" to the "deep structure" through the use of the authors' linguistic "meta-model." This book stands as a good example of the paradox which exists in the whole pseudo-linguistic world. Why is it that those who are obsessed with language as the prime mover of human experience can't write better?

If these pseudo-heavy books bore right through your occipital lobes or overwhelm your retinal nerve-matrix (or are merely so boring you skip right past them in every used bookstore), then try this book for a juicier 1975 Book Title :

(SEE PHOTO)

Anger, Kenneth, HOLLYWOOD BABYLON, 1975, Straight Arrow, HB. Anger was a character more outrageous than most of the Hollywood denizens he wrote about. He grew up around the movie biz and picked up a lot of leads about the sleazy side of Hollywood. Here's what really happened at Fatty Arbuckle's disastrous party, and the whole gory truth about Jane Mansfield's death, with tales of seduction, rape, suicide, and murder. Anger published most of this in Europe, but a lot of the information had worked its way back to the States to become part of the pop/folk tradition long before this edition was published. At times, Anger seems to be gleefully dancing on the grave of Hollywood myths. Anger, a fan of Aleister Crowley, opened the book with a quotation from the Magus: "Every man and woman, a star". It is one of the most ingenious misquotes I have ever encountered.

*D&D = Dungeons and Dragons