Bizarre & Naive Surreal Book Titles: Sex, God, Food, and Clean (and Colorful) Blood

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 552

Continuing a minor thread on bizarre and spectacularly mundane book titles comes today's entries on the various uses of "sex" in finding high-ideal  religion and a proper waistline. Harry Haas had a very simple answer to sex (a concept that I was frankly surprised to see described in three words):"low cultural sex instincts" lead to "low cultural levels", the reverse evidently never entering the writer's mind.  Sex "was not a moral issue", but an instinct "which like other instincts must be satisfied in one way or another". It is also "Nature's unscientific way of propagating the human races--the pre-logical and instinctive, the animal way".  He asks the reader "why do some of us read these risque publications if they are so degrading? Tobacco Road and various other pornographic diversions, I mean "[sic]. Mr. Haas doesn't know, but he does believe that the sex problem was vast, "a modifying agent in our personality growth" which "is responsible for an enormous amount of neurosis (and) seen to be at the bottom of the world's greatest achievements".  This leads of course to babies "blind, crippled and diseased and mentally hopeless--all of which find their common origin in sex troubles, feelings processes or chemical changes.  Probably nine-tenths of our anxieties, if not the major cause of world unrest, can be traced back to sex". Mr. Haas then gets to his major and remarkably scarce question:  "could it be that the writers and interpolators of the Bible were themselves unconsciously afflicted with sex troubles?"  He then takes this issue far and wide, and frankly by this point everything got so muddied and biblical that I just lost interest.  But the title is still good enough to stand firm and true, even if the the author didn't get to an answer, except to suggest that you purchase his pamphlet on the  psychoanalysis of  the bible--it was available for one dollar, postpaid, and had something to do with Albert Einstein.  He published this booklet on his own  in Orangeburg, S.C., in 1941, while the world was hell bent on some religico-sex-fueled instinct war.

Ernst J. Stevens ("Chromo-dietician and Expert Human Analyst") let loose his spongy  Nulife Sex-Diet Book III of the Social Science Series (Illustrated) in 1934--it is one of that class of books that doesn't look right, doesn't feel right, and smells a little like it spent too long lost under the cushion of a chair in a bad place.  His book is a hopeless melange of shrinko-babble, blood coloring and therapeutic color use wrapped around dietary "laws" of dubious value.  Having dispensed with 10 chapters in 15 pages, Dr. Stevens takes on "Color, Music, Taste and Skin Odors" after having established a priority in "colors in our flesh, colors in our thoughts and colors in our foods" and their connects to color balance and blood cleansing skin beautifiers.  That sounds like a lot to deal with in 15 five-inch-tall pages, but that's the least of it--the true metier of the book was also woven through everywhere, the messages of vim and vigor and health sense and mixing of the sexes colliding at every level with everything else.  It is a powerhouse display of some sort of need that I cannot identify.  The title, of course, is super. 

 

Comments

[Jeff]

This made me chuckle. But of course, there is no parity in the moral universe.

[Jeff]

Huh. It dropped my quote. This is the part to which I referred: "low cultural sex instincts" lead to "low cultural levels", the reverse evidently never entering the writer's mind.

[John Ptak]

Probably someone like Hume would have something to say on the parity part (which is a *great* quote, JD), but it would probably have to involve heaven/hell stuff, and god only knows where the moral in that would come.