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Wild Animus (What the Conspiracy!)
21 Plays2 years ago
M tells Josh about the 2004 book, "Wild Animus."
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
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Transcript
Introduction and Hosts
00:00:00
Speaker
Today, in a most momentous and spectacular what-the-conspiracy, the one, the only, the most associated, associate professorial professor, the M, the dentist, associate professor, M, dentist, will tell me about... about... Oh, come on, give me a clue. Okay, I'll give you three clues. Clue number one, it involves words. Clue number two, it's all about the Benjamins, baby.
00:00:26
Speaker
Clue number three, it's often found in op shops and charity stores. Uh, veteran character actor Steve Busini. Are you right? Are you wrong? Who knows? I mean, this particular line is part of a pre-written script, so frankly, even if you manage to guess the topic, which passed me very much doubt, I'm saying nothing.
00:00:47
Speaker
Gah. Well, it says here I say gah in the script, and it says here gah, well, it says here I say gah in the script. Frankly, if I hadn't lost the will to live, this would disturb me. If something got very meta here, just like the topic of this week's episode of What the Conspiracy... I have Brussels sprouts in my pants. But why would you put that in the script? I don't know. I'm not even sure I'm the person who wrote this.
00:01:16
Speaker
curious.
00:01:35
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. My name is Josh Addison here in Auckland, New Zealand, and in Zhuhai, China, we have associate professor of philosophy and inventor of the aubergine, Dr. M. R. Xtentis. That's true. I am responsible for all the eggplants.
00:01:53
Speaker
My new plan is to introduce an interesting M fact at the start of every episode, and one of them is going to turn out to be true. I can't wait to find out which true thing you're going to say, and also just how many lies that people might think are true you're going to talk about in future.
00:02:14
Speaker
But not now. So it's about the Conspiracy episode, which you have taken time out of your fairly busy schedule to put together, I'm assuming, because you have that conference coming up quite soon.
Conspiracy Conference Challenges
00:02:28
Speaker
Yes. So basically next week I will be helping to organize a conference, the first international conference on conspiracy theories, which is technically being hosted by Brian Keeley at Pitsa College all the way over in LA. But I've been
00:02:42
Speaker
doing a certain amount and I'm saying that vaguely of organization for this conference over well basically since November of last year but because the conference is getting awfully close there is a lot of administration going on in the background which is why we will not be recording an episode next week because next week I am envisioning there's going to be an awful lot of administration to be done because mixing an online conference
00:03:11
Speaker
And academics is never a good idea. People, by and large, do not understand technology. Academics, by and large, understand technology even less. I mean, it's also possible they're not people, but if they're not people, I have to come up with a completely different argument.
00:03:31
Speaker
I'd like to leave things to the last minute today, those academics. Well, it's more you send them a link and then they click on the link and they don't understand what the link does. Or they click on the link and it invokes for some reason the wrong browser. Or they click on the link and you discover that they're trying to click on the link on a Commodore 64. Frankly, that's not unsurprising.
00:03:54
Speaker
So that's why we're letting you know right now there will not be an episode recorded next week. But there is an episode recorded this week, because that's what we're doing right now. If we weren't recording the episode right now, our lives would be slightly stranger than normal, I think. This is the point in time where we discover that we've forgotten to click record, and thus we've talked about recording an episode while we're not recording an episode. Although, of course, if you're listening to this, this means either we are recording an episode,
00:04:23
Speaker
or we had to go back and start recording the episode again and then put in the possibility we weren't recording it in order to cover our bases. Things get very confusing from here on in. But maybe only half as confusing as normal because once again this is what the conspiracy episode and it's your turn so I kind of get to sit back and go, hmm that's interesting every now and then as you do most of the talking. So
00:04:51
Speaker
Unless we have any other admin, should we just, should we just make a start? We shall start a roundabout... now. It's time to play Want the Conspiracy.
Unveiling 'Wild Animus'
00:05:12
Speaker
So Josh, I think this might be a topic you've at least heard of, although I'm hoping you won't know that much about it. Josh, have you heard of the book Wild Animus? It sounds familiar, but I'm going to say no, because I'm not recalling any details. Okay, well you might be in for a time. Now, I'm not entirely sure that this actually is a conspiracy.
00:05:37
Speaker
It's more a mystery than a conspiracy, although it's also fairly easy to see how parts of it involve secrets and requires large-scale organization across the globe, which at least suggests some degree of conspiracy given that we don't really know much about what I'm going to talk about. And actually one of the problems with the entire wild animus discussion
00:06:04
Speaker
is that we're dealing with an... Oh, I see. We didn't ask these three questions.
00:06:10
Speaker
I thought we were doing things differently for a new year. No, it's too late now. It is too late, although you know it's a book. Can you guess what the time frame is? I suppose we can do the time frame. We know the what. Where is the world of literature? It's the literal earth. But the when, wild animus, it sounds a bit
00:06:38
Speaker
I don't know, is it a little bit early 90s maybe? 2004. 2004. Yeah, there you go. I'm either ahead of or behind my time in some way. But 2004 internet time is kind of weird.
00:06:55
Speaker
in that an awful lot of stuff from 2004 no longer exists on the internet. I mean, in 2004, we still have geocity pages and the like. And of course, they're completely gone. A lot of the websites which would have contained information about wild animus have been lost to history. And so to a certain extent, the mystery here is the fact that we don't know much about what was going on at the time.
00:07:22
Speaker
All we've got are the stories being told after the fact. So World Animus is a book. It is a book by a man by the name of Rich Shapiro. It was published back in 2004 by the press Too Far. Now Too Far was Rich Shapiro's own publishing company.
00:07:43
Speaker
And he published his own book, Wild Animus, in a print run of 50,000 copies for the first edition. Is he related to Ben Shapiro? No, spelt completely different from him. Different Shapiro, right? I thought there might be some color there. S-A-P-E-R-O as opposed to S-H-A-P-I-R-O. I think so, yes.
00:08:06
Speaker
I should point out it does appear that whilst Rich Shapiro has some interesting views, he doesn't appear to be the asshole that Ben Shapiro turns out to be. Well, that's good. That's a little bit of political colour for this controversial opinion. Ben Shapiro's a bit of a dick.
00:08:23
Speaker
Now, self-publishing your own book is one thing. Self-publishing your own book with an initial print run of around about 50,000 copies is another. People have tried to run Becker the envelope numbers for the cost of such a print run.
00:08:38
Speaker
And it would have been remarkably high. But it's a bit hard to work out what the economies were back in 2004, because we're dealing with different costs of production. And we've got the advent on print of demand occurring at that time. And so it's a little bit hard to know how much this print run would have cost. And we're also not entirely sure that the 50k number is correct.
00:09:06
Speaker
because by and large that information comes out of rich Shapiro and his talk about the book as opposed to an actual number in a ledger, somewhere. However, at the same time we've got a good reason to think that 50,000 copies for the first print run has to be somewhere in the ballpark because Wild Animus was distributed worldwide. So if Shapiro lives in the US, he's still alive,
00:09:35
Speaker
the book was distributed around the world, but more importantly, the book was distributed worldwide for free. No one has ever bought a copy of Wild Animus. Okay, so how was it distributed? I assume it wasn't put on bookshelves with a price of free, or was it? Well, so
00:10:01
Speaker
The book was given away normally at festivals or events or on the street. And when it was given away, it was given away in fairly interesting circumstances. So for example, at some book events, the book was given away by actors who were dressed as rams who would literally stampede into events.
00:10:26
Speaker
In Europe and Australia at music festivals, women dressed up as wolves would encircle people and hand out the CD version of Wild Animus, because I forgot to mention, Wild Animus is not just a book, it's a book, it's an audiobook, and it's an accompanying soundtrack to the book and the audiobook.
00:10:48
Speaker
My goodness. And this was all just given away, given away, given away. Just given away, given away, given away, given away now. A joke that only New Zealand listeners are going to understand. Well, it's great to actually keep this joke short. Oh, I see. No, sorry. No, you are quite right. I was thinking that was a super groove reference.
00:11:07
Speaker
ah that's can't get enough yeah see i was i was confusing my my chili papers give it away give it away give it away now with my can't get enough can't get enough now carl would be so disappointed in me so very disappointed your your your prize student your number one oh no no i i i never taught carl i i i didn't graduate work at the same time as carl yeah i see anyway enough enough star
00:11:36
Speaker
promoting, breaking, I don't know, whatever it is you're doing, stop it and tell me more about this book. So Shapiro also paid for the creation of book club directories of book clubs in the US. So you could then offer the books for free to those clubs. And not only is he giving away his book, he's paying for the creation of directories of book clubs to then be able to send free copies of those books to those clubs.
00:12:04
Speaker
So the impression I'm getting is of a person with a fair amount of time and money on their hands who really, really wants people to read slash listen to his book. Yes, and not just that. He may even have paid people to fake demonstrations against the book on the basis it contains descriptions of animal cruelty.
00:12:26
Speaker
So as to drum up a bit of controversy and buzz around the book, I assume. I mean, that is the assumption that's being made. I mean, there's no other reason why you'd pay for someone to demonstrate against your book unless you thought that all press was good press. Now, remember, this is back, this is back 2004. The book is still being given out.
00:12:49
Speaker
in 2010, because we have an instance where the Yale Police Department and the New Haven Bomb Squad responded to what they thought was a report of a suspicious package outside Woodford Hall at Yale, where said package turned out to be a brown cardboard box loaded with copies of Wild Animus, about six years after the book's first print run and still being given away worldwide.
00:13:18
Speaker
So, have we reached the point where it's time to talk about what wild animus is?
Personal Encounters with 'Wild Animus'
00:13:23
Speaker
No, no, no, no, no, not because. Okay, okay. I have a personal story here because I received a copy of this book, which would have been sometime around about 2005-2006. I didn't get it from a woman dressed as a wolf.
00:13:40
Speaker
or a person dressed as a ram. I was sitting in my office at the University of Auckland and someone came in who'd been given a copy of it on the street. Oh, so they claimed. And they said that this person was not just giving away a single copy. They had a box of books at their feet and they were giving away copies to anyone who would walk by.
00:14:05
Speaker
And so they'd snagged two copies so I could have a copy of it as well. And it sat on my shelf at the University of Auckland for quite some time. I hate to say I never cracked open the cover. I never read a single word within it. It was simply a weird book that had been given to me by someone who'd been given a copy of it. But nonetheless, I have seen copies of Wild and
00:14:31
Speaker
animus in almost every single Salvation Army store I've ever been to back home in Aotearoa, New Zealand. It seems that a lot of copies were given away, and they all sit pristinely on the shelves of second-hand stores and opportunity stores back home, because I don't think anyone's actually ever read this book. I think it's been given away. I don't think it's been read to any large extent.
00:15:00
Speaker
It almost sounds like some sort of a, I don't know, like a drug dealer with a really bad business model or something and the fact that nobody opens them means maybe if you had you would have found it would have been hollow on the inside with a shape cut out of the pages and he was smuggling something somewhere for no obvious reason for free. So I'm not saying he's a good drug dealer, I'm saying he might have been a very very bad one.
00:15:24
Speaker
Well, actually, now I'm thinking about the possibility. Maybe there was money in every single book. Maybe the fact that none of us ever cracked open the pages meant that there are hundreds of dollars sitting in copies of those books and op stores all around the world. And we missed out on a windfall. I mean, it could go a lot deeper. No one's read the book. So no one knows what's inside of it.
00:15:50
Speaker
Actually, that's not true. Some people have read the book. However, if you go to Goodreads and you look at reviews of the book, most of those reviews, a little bit like the Todd Noy book we discussed last year, are stories about how people got a copy of the book.
00:16:07
Speaker
rather than being reviews of the content of the book. Now, in the Todnoy situation, we know that that is a kind of elaborate prank. People are telling weird and wild stories about how they got their copy of the Drago book because part of the legend of Spreading the Legend of Todnoy is making up strange and unusual stories. But when it comes to wild animus,
00:16:31
Speaker
People tell stories about receiving a free copy of the book when they bought a pizza online. And these appear to be legitimate stories because, once again, no one buys this book. This book is given to you in weird circumstances. That's the animus behind Wild Animus. Well, now I'm thinking
00:16:53
Speaker
That's some sort of a, it's more of a horror movie vibe and he's part of some weird cult and if you'd actually read it, it would have opened your mind. Some sort of bizarre secrets and you would have been transported to an alien dimension or something. So I'm thinking, now I'm thinking you might have dodged a bullet.
00:17:11
Speaker
Well, so you asked about the book itself. Do you want to talk first about the book or about the author? Which direction do you want to go, Josh? Book or author? I think start with the book.
00:17:24
Speaker
And then we'll look at the man behind it. OK, well, let me let me give you the abstract of the book, which actually comes from Rich Shapiro's web page. So here is the abstract of Wild Animus, the first book he wrote. There are seven other books we can discuss. But here it goes. Here is the abstract for Wild Animus, the book, the CD, the soundtrack.
00:17:51
Speaker
How far would you go to find yourself? Wild Animus tracks the reckless quest of Ransom Altman, a young Berkeley graduate who, roused by his literary heroes and love for his girlfriend Lindy, resolved to live in a new world of inexhaustible desire.
00:18:09
Speaker
Ransom's deepening identification with the wild mountain ram, whose passion and wisdom he seeks, drives the young lovers north, first to Seattle, then to the remote Alaskan wilderness. Alone on the unforgiving ridges of Mount Rangel, his imagination increasingly unhinged,
00:18:26
Speaker
Ransom begins to devise and act out a dangerous animal mythos, which he documents in a first-person manuscript and in songs or chants that details his transformation and pursuit by a pack of strangely familiar wolves. The feverish hunt leads from the wilds of civilization and back again, and when the lovers return to brave the perilous mountain together, the truth behind Ransom's imagined transformation emerges.
00:18:54
Speaker
What they discover in those frozen heights threatens their love as well as their sanity in their lives. Is Ransom inspired by a transcendental truth or prey to a misguided fantasy? As his grip on reality weakens, the reader shears Ransom's fears, his hopes, and his extraordinary discoveries.
00:19:13
Speaker
Right, I have to say, the first, I don't know, three or four sentences of that were exactly what I was expecting. Some sort of trashy, erotic, maybe softcore pornography thing, but then it starts getting a little bit more existential, so I'm not quite sure what to think.
00:19:34
Speaker
Now, here's a plot summary from Goodreads, and it's very short. I'll tell you the ending. A column of lava erupts from beneath his feet while he is dressed in a goat costume and wolves are mid-air tearing him apart. Is column of lava euphemism? No, column of lava. Oh, lava? Is that a euphemism? I mean, although maybe I misread that. Only the tape will tell. A column of lava erupts from beneath his feet.
00:20:00
Speaker
Now, apparently this is actually not much of a spoiler, because apparently the book starts with a flash forward to the main character being dead. Okay. I mean... Couldn't set that...
00:20:10
Speaker
My basic reaction to that synopsis, I think, could be summed up as, what? What? No, believe me, you don't know what what means until you find out about the synopsis of his other book. So he has eight other books. Okay, keep him coming. I've got Too Far, The Hope We Shall Seek, Arms from the Sea, Rin Tongue and Dawna, Balcony of Fog, Island Fruit Remedy, Dissolve, and The Slide That Buried Rightful.
00:20:40
Speaker
And some of these, some of these abstracts are, they're pretty neat. Let me give you the abstract for the hope we seek. What kind of vision and subterfuge might it take to inspire the kind of belief that drives human aspiration and achievement? Zachary Knox, a sharp shooter known as the Bullseye Telepath, heads north in search of gold. On his way he meets Cephi, a magnetic woman on the trail of her lost brother.
00:21:07
Speaker
but on arrival they find the mining campers home to a cult. The mine boss, Trevillian, rules the camp like a despotic priest, and at the centre of his faith is Hope, an elusive goddess for whom the miners toil, enduring increasingly perilous trials as they pursue her into the depths of the earth. Zack determines to overthrow Trevillian, guided by Cephe's cryptic directions, till Hope appears, and reveals the astonishing future she has in mind for him.
00:21:36
Speaker
Can I hear the synopsis for Island Fruit Remedy? Because out of all of those titles, that one kind of stuck out as a... sounds slightly more like a sequel to Dr. Mario or something, I'm not sure. Okay, here it is. What might it take for a spurned fantasist to find Harth in home? What is a romance writer whose wife leaves him, stung with a head full of fantasies he hastens to Key West to heal?
00:22:01
Speaker
On the key, Wood encounters women with names and personalities of tropical fruit. Each holds a mirror up to his romantic ideals, and with one he forms a deep connection. But the mystery of the elusive papaya is a fantasy he can't set aside.
00:22:17
Speaker
and it refuses to destroy everything until it is the greatest number of need would conjure the ultimate teacher. Those elusive papayas, honestly. I've long suspected. I don't see any papayas around here, do you? No, that's how elusive they are.
00:22:35
Speaker
Yeah, that all checks out. Let me give you the synopsis. I'm totally with you. Arms from the sea. What kind of sea change in our ideals might we need to refashion our world for the better? Lyle is a young man who hates his life in the state of salt, a cultural and literal desert. He vandalises a state icon, then swallows a poison pill that transports him not to death, but to a liminal realm, blue, aquatic and holly alien.
00:23:04
Speaker
He's rescued and shepherded by henchmen of the polyp, god of the oceanic world they call heaven. A series of encounters unfolds between Lyle and the monstrous, seductive god who greatly reveals his grandeur and mysterious purpose. Lyle is horrified at first, but soon finds himself falling for the polyp and the potent and bizarre creative potential he represents. It's reminding me a little bit of... I'm trying to look it up.
00:23:34
Speaker
There's a film, a film that I was reading a thing about recently as a Spanish sort of horror drama film. What was it called? It's sort of about a woman who's sort of having weird times and her husband is being distant, but then it turns out he's secretly gay and sort of relationship dramas. Meanwhile, on a farm,
00:23:59
Speaker
An elderly couple has recovered a sex alien from a meteor website, and various women come and have tentacle sex with the sex alien. It's like very serious foreign film relationship drama with tentacle sex with aliens. The synopsis of it is basically one paragraph
00:24:22
Speaker
um, relationship, oh series, series S, the second one starts Veronica is a young woman who's been having sex with an alien in an elderly couple's farm. That's, that's the vibe I'm getting off of these. I'm not sure. Well, there was that film last year, the Irish film starring Christopher Walken doing an apparently very bad Irish accent where it turns out that it's a romance story between two neighbouring farmers, one of whom thinks he's a bee.
00:24:49
Speaker
Right, I don't manage to find it, it's The Untamed. So just as a point of comparison, this is what I'm hearing when I'm listening to you read out these synopses, it sounds to me just like, this is the Wikipedia page of The Untamed. A young mother of two, Alejandra, this is a Mexican film rather, not Spanish,
00:25:10
Speaker
is unhappy in her marriage to her husband, Angel, who is in a secret affair with Alejandra's brother, a nurse named Fabian. In public, however, Angel makes fun of Fabian and gays in general. Alejandra is just really unhappy in her marriage and almost extremely sexually frustrated.
00:25:25
Speaker
Veronica is a young woman who is sexually infatuated with a tentacled alien creature originating from a crashed meteor that an elderly couple has kept in a barn in the countryside. She has been visiting the alien for years, having sexual encounters. That's what I'm hearing. That's what you sound like to me, anyway. I'm going to give you one more, then we'll move on to Rich Shapiro, the man, the myth, the legend. This is a synopsis for the book Dissolve.
00:25:49
Speaker
What if you could imagine and embrace a transmutation story about your own ending? Wiley is a dying man, gripped by the memory from his time as a young textile trader on a remote island. His mentor, an aging gem hunter, had unveiled to him a stone never seen before. A watery rock replete with pearly orbs that, when bazed by moonlight, came alive.
00:26:12
Speaker
What Wiley witnessed left an indelible impression. Decades later from his hospice bed, Wiley resolves at last to pursue the Orbs, conscripting a younger man, Rowan, to locate, extract and deliver the extraordinary rock back to him. Against staggering odds, Rowan holds up his end of the bargain, but remains mum about the mysterious conditions under which he carried out the work.
00:26:35
Speaker
With the rocks in his position, Wiley and Paul were allowed to stay and surround himself with family, close and estranged.
00:26:43
Speaker
hoping the orbs will afford him the aesthetic send-off he envisions. That's not far from alien tentacle sex, quite frankly. Precisely. So, look, I'm enjoying this. I'm enjoying hearing about all of this, but I'm not seeing, aside from why would a person do this and give them away for free, I'm not seeing a lot of secrecy yet. Secrecy that could possibly be explained by a conspiracy. Well, I mean, the secrecy here is more...
00:27:12
Speaker
This is a worldwide organization of someone organizing and giving away books, not just in North America, but around the world. So there's some large-scale organization going on here to be able to distribute these books worldwide. And as I say, part of the problem for this particular story is that all the information we have
00:27:36
Speaker
is basically lost due to large sections of the internet from the early 2000s not existing anymore. So there's actually very little we know about Rich Shapiro the Man. He has a website where he has a very potted bio that basically boils down to born in 1948 in LA
00:28:00
Speaker
majored in English Lit at Berkeley, always wanted to be a writer, but basically became a venture capitalist instead, and when the tech bubble burst in 2000, he resurrected one of his dormant writing projects, Wild Animus, which is
The Author's Ambitious Distribution
00:28:19
Speaker
because there's a curious fact if you go to his website and you look up wild animus the copy of the book you can you can get is the 50th anniversary copy now i know that we're both not very good with numbers but a book that came out in 2004
00:28:39
Speaker
is not a book that, as far as I can tell, can be more than, say, 20 years old. Which means that this book's genesis goes back an awfully long way, because the 50th anniversary copy marks the first time he tried writing it.
00:28:59
Speaker
So it's been 50 years since he first put me into paper, but not necessarily 50 years since it was first published. Yes, precisely. So 50 years ago, he was an aspiring writer who just stumbled into being a venture capitalist instead. And from the sound of it, a very successful one in that he was a managing partner at Crosspoint Venture, obviously has enough money to be able to write these books.
00:29:24
Speaker
give these books away for free and commission soundtracks because all of these books have soundtracks associated with them. Not just the one about the guy. All of them have soundtracks. Some of them have picture books associated with them as well. So there's an entire market around Rich Shapiro books.
00:29:45
Speaker
Some of them have even been reviewed in big book trade magazines. So you have things like Kirkus Reviews, which is kind of the book publisher's magazine that publishers and distributors read. Historically, Kirkus Reviews are very hard to get. Turns out at some point in the late 2000s, Kirkus Reviews allowed people to pay for their books to be reviewed.
00:30:13
Speaker
So whilst Rich Shapiro's books all seem to have Kirkus reviews associated with them, there's a little bit of a suspicion that these reviews have been paid for. And of course, if you pay for someone to review your book, you are going to kind of expect them to give you at least a relatively positive review. It is also notable that when these reviews are cited by Shapiro's website,
00:30:37
Speaker
he cites single lines from those reviews, which means he could say, this book is awful, but he does have an interesting turn of phrase when it comes to describing weird pearls from the ocean depths. And he might go, oh, just take the word, the weird pearls thing there. So the readers themselves don't mean particularly much. Let me give you from what we have surviving
00:31:01
Speaker
from interviews with Shapiro back in 2004-2005, some choice snippets of things he said. So he was asked, do you have any special writing rituals? What do you think his answer was? Just give a guess, what do you think his special writing ritual is? He writes alone in a damp basement
00:31:28
Speaker
on an ancient typewriter while masturbating. Actually, so you're almost... There's the masturbating... Here's the answer. I like to have sex while I'm writing. Okay, there we go, yeah. Now, and Missy, I'm quite curious to know how that works logistically.
00:31:49
Speaker
I mean, is he writing by hand? Is he using a laptop? I actually really want to know how to have sex whilst also writing at the same time. That would be an important skill, I think. He's also asked... Could be you. Getting two things to heart once, it's efficient. Yeah. He also asked, what types of music does he like? Now, what kind of music do you think that Rich Shapiro likes? A man born in 1948.
00:32:13
Speaker
I'm going to say ever. His answer was music without predictable meter. Music that doesn't follow predictable scales or chord progressions. Music with verses and no choruses. Now the interviewer follows us up with such as, and Shapiro's answer is quite telling, well there's not much of that kind of music available, but I hear it in my head. I see.
00:32:39
Speaker
Yep, yep. I'm forming a picture of the man in my mind, and nothing you've said so far has contradicted that picture. Now, here's a nice bit. He was asked about why he writes, and his answer is, some people like to write because they enjoy putting their thoughts down. They enjoy the act of self-expression, the way a child likes to finger paint. You know, it just feels good. It feels good to me.
00:33:04
Speaker
But I don't think it's worth doing unless something important is being expressed. I liked words, I liked the power that words have to illuminate and change people's lives, but I didn't think it made sense for me to be a writer until I had something to communicate that was important. So the reviewer follows up with, and you found that? And his answer is, no, I just got tired of waiting. Ooh, it's almost a little bit of, I don't know, sounding a bit sort of anti-warhol.
00:33:33
Speaker
there, like he's got a bit of a, he's putting on, he's got a bit of a persona, he's just like messing with with interviewers.
00:33:41
Speaker
and is probably smiling smugly to himself the entire time. Oh, and believe me, I've got one final interview snippet, which really does confirm that. So the interview asks him, look, Tufar, which is the publisher, is your baby. Lots of readers avoid self-published books or dismiss them sight unseen. And his response is, well, I don't blame them. Everything worthwhile is put out by random house. Large corporations are your guarantee of quality.
00:34:10
Speaker
Well, he's a funny guy. I'll give him that. I think I like the sound of him. Would that inspire you to read one of his books? Well, you know how I feel about reading books. It's like I asked that question, I realised that even if it did inspire you to want to read one of his books, you're still not going to do it. Well, I tell you what, I do read books. I read books over the usually sort of one to two week period when I'm on holiday after Christmas.
00:34:39
Speaker
and there's generally literally nothing else to do. And I've read some doozies in that environment. I think Wild Animus would actually fit right in. Maybe next year I should get you to read some Dan Brown.
00:34:54
Speaker
I mean, the place where we've gone in the past, sometimes we'll bring books and sometimes there'll be books lying around. We often borrow a place that belongs to a friend of a friend. And yeah, there's been some stuff that I would refer to as sub-Dan Brown. So I think it's probably safe to say I will read almost anything.
00:35:19
Speaker
when I'm in a beach town flopping around in the hot summer sun, not wanting to do anything. Sweating like a person who sweats profusely. Sweating like an ox. Now I've got one final little factoid here, which is, so as noted, there's an audiobook of wild animus. As noted, the book, the soundtrack, and the audiobook were given away for free around the world.
00:35:48
Speaker
which meant that in 2009, according to WorldCat, which is the catalogue that libraries use to track what is held in libraries worldwide, the audiobook of Wild Animus was the number one audiobook in libraries around the world. It's not
00:36:07
Speaker
reflecting its popularity. It simply reflects that there were more copies of Wild and Animus the audiobook in libraries around the world than any other audiobook and by a significant margin. Oh, now I didn't ask, does Rich Shapiro himself read the audiobook? Or did he hire actors? No, he hired someone to read it for him. Right-o. Hmm.
00:36:33
Speaker
I believe he produced the soundtrack for the first few books. Yes, I'm going to say I assume he must have composed the music. Yes. Well, I believe the latter books have soundtracks composed by other people, or at least soundtracks which are co-composed by other people. So yeah, I mean, all of this is painting a picture of either
00:36:55
Speaker
someone who has an inflated view of their own talents and has enough money to force their self regard onto the world at large, or someone who's just a bit of a funny bastard and likes messing with people and has enough money to force that upon the world.
00:37:18
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, to me, the story of World Animus is a case of someone who always wanted to write, happened to get incredibly rich in the tech boom at the end of the 1990s, cashed out at just the right time, and then realised, well, I'm quite rich now.
00:37:39
Speaker
I can just publish my book regardless and then when I can not just publish my book regardless, I can get people to read it by simply giving it away for free and then when
00:37:56
Speaker
I'm just gonna do that for all my books, all of my books. I mean, you can technically buy copies of his books from his website if you really want to purchase a copy, but the website is quite clear. Rich gives his books away for free. If you're in the right place and at the right time, someone's gonna have a Rich Shapiro book to put into your greasy palms. That's an interesting story. So what is it that we don't know? What have we lost?
00:38:25
Speaker
These websites that no longer exist,
Lost Information in the Digital Age
00:38:28
Speaker
were they... So apparently there were a lot of interviews with them back in the day, which were all transcribed onto things like Geocities sites and the like. There's a lot of discussion, apparently, back in the day about people getting copies of the books, which have just simply gone because Geocities sites and the likes have all disappeared. So there's kind of...
00:38:50
Speaker
An oral culture of people going, look, there needs to be a lot more information about wild animus online, and now basically it's gone. It's now just this book which is ubiquitous in charity stores around the world, which does lead to the question as to why is it found everywhere from Auckland to Washington State?
00:39:13
Speaker
And because of that, we've kind of lost a lot of the information. It does seem that Rich Shapiro is quite happy to really not say that much about it. And that I think he kind of likes the mystery. So he is still alive. He must be in his mid late 70s now. Still alive and still writing books.
00:39:32
Speaker
Ah, bless him. Yes. So is that the end of our tale of Richard Shapiro and his Australian books? This is one of those things where I knew the story of wild animus, and I thought with a bit of research it would become a fairly interesting story because of the way it was distributed around the world and the kind of mystery as to why was it distributed en masse around the world. So when I got my copy of wild animus,
00:40:00
Speaker
and heard it was being given away for free. My assumption was it was a local New Zealand riser giving away promotional copies to drum up interest. And then the surprise to find out that no this is an American book being given away for free was oh what's going on there. But Unfortunately it's also one of those things the more I looked into it
00:40:25
Speaker
the less information there was to actually talk about. We kind of have covered everything there is to know about Wild Animus and Rich Shapiro in under 40 minutes. So that website of his, is that just synopses of the books and ways to get your hands on it? Yeah, and a very short potted biography of his life. Ah well. Nothing on YouTube? No video interviews?
00:40:54
Speaker
Not that I saw, but then again, I don't even want to kind of ruin my YouTube algorithm. I've trained it very carefully to only show me the kind of pleasant computer restoration videos or long plays I like to watch. If I start putting stuff in about conspiracies, it's going to get very dark very quickly.
00:41:19
Speaker
No, my YouTube algorithm is just chaos. My children, I think, use the same account as me, so there's
00:41:27
Speaker
Annoying shouty YouTubers and meme-ridden stuff, plus whatever random crap I happen to rouse, is at my whim, so I think I'm a lost cause. Do you have some of the old baby shark on your YouTube? There's a little bit before the time of my kids, I think, or possibly after. Whatever it was, it wasn't a thing at the time when my children were most susceptible to that sort of thing.
00:41:57
Speaker
So pretty much my kids find Baby Shark just as annoying as you or I do, so at least we're spared there. But anyway, we didn't come here to talk about Baby Shark. We came here to talk about Rich Shapiro and for me to go off on an intention to about Mexican tentacle sex movies. Well, I'm not even sure how that happened now that I think back on it, but it did.
00:42:21
Speaker
So, thank you for one thing that I do feel my life has been enriched by hearing the tale of Rich Shapiro and his numerous books.
Comparative Analysis and Humor
00:42:33
Speaker
So I think that's basically it for this episode, is it? I'm going to read out one more abstract. Yes, please do. So this is for the book Rim, Tongue and Dawner. What if our inner voices revealed a tug of war between powers that secure us to reality and those that for good or ill want us to hurl it away? A new ice age has driven mankind to settlements at the equator. In clemency,
00:43:00
Speaker
A metropolis sheltered inside a transparent dome surrounded by glaciers, planning luminary dawner, hears female voices in his sleep. As the voices become more insistent, he seeks help from neuroscientist Rin, who runs tests to identify the location and import of this interior woman, who calls herself Tung.
00:43:20
Speaker
Rin's increasingly invasive experiments help Dorna to visualise tongue, until he's able to fly through the cosmos of his brain and find the distant asteroid from which tongues, voices beckon and provoke. Meanwhile, Rin and Dorna fall in love.
00:43:36
Speaker
Is Tung an agent of change bringing desire and passion to their lives? Or is she Rin's worst enemy? With Rin's guidance, Dorna lands on an asteroid where Tung reigns supreme and explores mysterious landscape of flames and human monuments, a realm of rapture and portent that threatens to undo them all.
00:43:57
Speaker
Actually, you know, the other thing that reminds me of is Australian comedian Alice Fraser, who is a regular guest on the Bugle podcast, the one that John Oliver used to do with the current host Andy Zoltzmann before he moved to America and got famous.
00:44:13
Speaker
She now hosts her own spin-off podcast called The Gargle, and she had a running gag for quite a long time of comedy synopses of romance novels by this fictional author, Nancy Lagarde, who she invented.
00:44:33
Speaker
They are pure comedy for books that don't exist and yet very, very similar. I should put a link in when we put this online because frankly, they are all worth reading as well. Fantastic. But yes, so there we go. Our lives have all been enriched, I feel.
00:44:50
Speaker
by the tale we've born with us to today. So we're going to go now, but we're going to go and record a bonus episode for our beloved patrons. We will talk about current events. We'll talk about life in the time of coronavirus, which has recently maybe claimed the life of singer Meatloaf.
00:45:12
Speaker
There's been a bit of a bit more interesting protesty stuff happening in New Zealand around COVID. So this, although, I mean, we haven't got as sick of talking about coronavirus as we did get sick of talking about Donald Trump, but it's probably getting a little bit close. But nevertheless, that is going to be the main thrust of our bonus episode this week. And if you'd like that thrust in your direction,
00:45:39
Speaker
then be a patron. If you are a patron, congratulations, your work is done. If you're not a patron and you'd like to be one, you can go to patreon.com and search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. And if you don't want either of those things and don't want us thrusting anything near you right now, a fair call, just thank you for listening in and tuning in this far. So I think
00:46:03
Speaker
with all of that said, that it's time to bring this whole affair to a close, which I will do in the traditional method of saying goodbye.
00:46:19
Speaker
Let's see, it's good, cos meatloaf was in Rocky Horror Picture Show. He was indeed.