Bart Huges needed enlightenment like he needed a hole in the head. And that's exactly what he got. In 1965, the boyish-looking Dutchman applied a strong local anesthetic, then took a drill to his skull and performed a self-trepanation, creating "a third eye." Huges claimed that the bloody procedure raised his cosmic consciousness. That he was briefly locked up in a psychiatric ward seemed a small price to pay for becoming, in Huges's words, a Homo sapiens correctus.
The story of Huges's hole is recounted, with ghoulish detail, in Donna Kossy's book Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief. Kossy, a computer programmer turned author and folklorist, is an expert on kooks, having run a small magazine on the topic from 1989 to 1992. She looks at bizarre beliefs, thwarted theories, and general flights of fancy. Her book provides a welcome and timely update to Ivan Stang's High Weirdness by Mail. Unlike Stang, Kossy has a genuine, if sometimes uncomfortable, affection for her subjects.
Kooks is more than an intellectual freak show or a Weekly World News for the tongue-in-cheek college grad set. Kossy reminds us that today's weirdo might be tomorrow's genius. She's right, of course. It happened to Galileo, whose belief that the Earth spun around the sun was once deemed outrageous and heretical; and, in this century, to Alfred Wegener, the geologist scorned for his theories about tectonic plates and continental drift.
Still, it seems unlikely that the posthumous recognition of these scientists will be extended to the likes of Paul Laffoley. Inspired by H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, Laffoley predicts someone will craft a working prototype of the device by 2013.
If the book, filled with closer looks at crackpots and mad prophets, is not enough to satisfy your hunger for wacky ideas, surf over to www.teleport.com/~dkossy. There you'll find excerpts from back issues of Kooks magazine and The Kooks Museum with its Conspiracy Hall, the Hall of Hate, The Gift Shoppe, the Schizophrenic Wing, and the Library of Questionable Scholarship.
Kossy's work offers a rare chance to tunnel into the minds of some of the most original thinkers around. It's a fascinating trip, but make sure you can find your way back; it can get pretty dark and claustrophobic in there.
Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief, by Donna Kossy: US$16.95. Feral House Press: +1 (503) 222 4902.
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