Journal Entry 1 by darkpunkangel from Barrie, Ontario Canada on Friday, July 31, 2009

>i> Skandalon is a philosophical thriller; a carnivalesque investigation into little secrets and the big mystery of why they get kept. “The author,” writes one reviewer, “has tossed out all literary inhibitions and produced a lyrical biographical collage filled with a kitchen sinkful of images and ideas that add a key emotional dimension to the story. As the multi-faceted narrative unfolds, content and form become inseparable to the point where telling the story any other way would seem unthinkable.” Every page of the book has a photo raided from family albums or a hand-written letters, postcards, drawings, newspaper clippings or stills from Disney’s Dumbo, Chaplin’s City Lights and Mary Pickford’s Little Lord Fauntleroy. As if this were not diverse enough, Skandalon is littered with old British ballads and songs of Hank Williams, Charlie Rich, Leonard Cohen and The Incredible String Band. Scattered through the narrative are personal anecdotes involving R. D. Laing, Karl Stern, Lady Miriam Rothschild, Dr, Sigmund Holinhed, Oonga Oscar Kabunga, Hendsum Printz, Mick Jagger’s mother and The Rolling Stones. The storytelling spans the spectrum from the Odessan oral tradition to the highly-eclectic academic, from cryptic scribble to web-text and hotmail. And to polish things off, every chapter is introduced with a pithy text from the key thinkers who shed light into the dark corners of this investigation: Ivan Illich and René Girard, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, Mark Twain, Hamerton-Kelly, Karol Capek and David McCracken - whose learned work, The Scandal of the Gospels, provided the guiding influence and unlikely title to Skandalon.