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This book was a wild ride for me. I started it during a beach vacation--which probably tells you something about me--and finished it a month later. It's only 500 pages, but the footnoted sections are in 10 point font which means that the entire book is more like 1500 pages and since the book is self-published there are typos and strange formatting throughout the text. If you can't stand these types of imperfections, then Teach's book is not for you. How do I know? He basically says so in the book! The book opens with a porn story that involves a passed out husband, a turned on wife, a male co-worker stud muffin. You get the picture and you're supposed to because it's cliched and meant to be. The point of the porn story? It's meant to turn off readers so that only those who really want to delve into Teach's twisted and luminous prose will make the journey. I don't know if I should feel special or cursed in some way, but there it is.

Forgetting the DFW split between the main text and the footnoted section ( a chore that made reading House of Leaves feel easy in retrospect), the book is all over the place; however, the main point--is there really a main point?--is that Americans are ripe for tyranny because social media/Hollywood. "Ed"- ward "Teach" (not his real name but a sort of play on words) is at his most convincing when re-interpreting The Giving Tree, New Testament writings (mostly) and Gone Girl. He uses these digressions to show how easy it has been for the majority of people to misread these texts and so misread our twisted state of affairs. He is also using these texts--minus the NT-- as examples of our cultural situation which is that we want others to make decisions for us and that our default moral code is tit for tat, which has led us to envy others and wish for their less-than meagre success or outright failure (if it will make us feel better about our own miserable lives). Beyond this, we want someone (anyone) to save us from our lack of desire/ability to choose/act--Teach argues that when we view pornography we are not viewing it to fulfill our own personally constructed sexual desires. We view porn because porn has desired for us. Porn has its categories and they are shape that our desires can take. It's the same with Hollywood films and every other media. We never get to decide anything regarding our desires because the media machine has seen to it that these desires are always already on display for our choosing. Yes, we have choice, but the choices are not ours.

Edward Teach is a pseudonym for a brilliant Lacanian psychoanalyst who had retired from print but decided to launch a comeback of sorts. The attitude of the writer struck me as being on par with Nasim Nicholas Talib's attitude in Skin in the Game, but unlike Talib, who trashed academics who, well, have no "skin in the game," Teach is out for blood and it may be yours that he is after.

I'll end this short review by saying that this was an intriguing, perplexing, laughable, serious book that turned my brain pretzel-like as it considered Teach's claims. I enjoyed it for that reason. It's rare to find a book that touches you in so many different ways and whose scent remains on your clothing long after the affair has ended. There is so much material in this book, I've only touched on what comes to mind months after finishing it.

Update: it's been a year since I read this book and after a couple of major epiphanies I think that I see that the writer is exposing the unreality of what we call reality.