Operators and Things

[Magical Realist]

"The always-alert Robert Nedelkoff just tipped me off on the release of one of the most memorable and–until now–rarest neglected books discussed on this site: Barbara O’Brien’s 1958 memoir of schizophrenia, Operators and Things: The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic. First published by an obscure press, Arlington Books, then reissued as an Avon paperback with a cover that probably led more than stores and buyers to consider it a pulp SF novel, O’Brien’s book remains unique in its depiction of schizophrenia as experienced from the inside out.

In the book, O’Brien describes waking up one morning to find herself living in a world populated by “Operators,” who are the ultimate embodiment of the paranoic’s concept of the people in control, the ones working according to a secret plan, the ones pulling the strings of power and influence–and by “Things,” the puppets manipulated and exploited by the Operators. She, of course, is a Thing, and she spends the next six months travelling around the country by Greyhound bus, following (but also trying to resist) the instructions of the Operators.

Operators and Things: The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic was reissued back in the mid-1970s as a mass-market paperback in both the US and the UK, but it’s been out of print since then, commanding prices ranging between $25 and $250 in the last decade. Now, however, it’s available in trade paperback from Silver Birch Press with an introduction by Michael Macoby, who’s better known for his books on leadership in the business world, a preface by scriptwriter Melanie Villines, and an afterwood by Colleen Delegan. Villines and Delegan have written an unproduced screenplay based on the boook.

However, I also found that, over a year ago, someone published Operators and Things: The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic as an eBook on Smashwords.com. You can read it online or download a copy in PDF, EPUB, Kindle, and other formats–with Macoby’s introduction but sans Villines’ and Delegan’s pieces.

Either way, I recommend discovering this remarkable book–which moved 14 different people to post 5-star reviews on Amazon despite its being out of print and virtually unheard-of in the last decade."===http://neglectedbooks.com/?p=1076

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[C C]

What a zoo of cthonian mutations there were in the 1950s and some prior stretches, serving as addled precursors for the pop market ideo-spheres of the future. The prescriptive norms and inhibition priorities of that era hid or obscured the writhing bulk of them beneath a Rockwellian veneer. As a result I occasionally forget how far more diverse it was than the few half-domesticated items which escaped out into the open for a few tolerable moments of display on the generic templates which Ed Sullivan, Life magazine, and a newspaper column exemplified.

Simply purveying the covers of pulp-trash novels, offbeat magazines, weirdo exploitations, and proto-NewAge confections of those times is a fresh reminder of how larcenous or ape-like mimicking the next decade and the rest of tomorrow was -- rather than being original / innovative / revolutionary. Just bringing what was already there up to the sunlit surface to finally fester and bloom with syrupy tentacles, allowing it to adapt to the trivial quirks of a current, local social environment.

[Magical Realist]

It's part of our tendency to define our cultural evolution in terms of decades that stereotypes the 50's as stepford wives in dresses with high heels baking bread and Joe McCarthy and the Nuclear menace. But the counterculturalism of the 60's didn't just appear out of nowhere. The Beat Movement, Lenny Bruce, Alfred Hitchcock, Sylvia Plath, Truman Capote, James Dean, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, pulp fiction, rock n roll, jazz, etc. were all kicking down the doors of prudery and classism and moralism that censored free speech and thought for so many years. People were starting to question their values even back then. What was counterculture and underground in the 50's surfaced as revolution and anarchism in the 60's and 70's.