By Tom Bradley.
John-Ivan Palmer, Hypnotic Control: Reflections on the Nature of Staged Influence (Whistling Shade, 2025).
As a theatrical hypnotist, John-Ivan Palmer will make you crow like a rooster and chug like a wash machine. He will suspend a lady by her nape and Achilles tendons between two folding chairs and sledge-hammer a cinder brick on her tummy until her navel fills with grit. Simultaneously, with the other hand, he memorizes a complete issue of TIME Magazine at a glance, and is quizzed on specific pages by awestruck folks in the audience.
This formidable magus has deftly animal-magnetized the astral bodies of unsuspecting folks from Eastern Europe to the West Indies, from Latin America to Hirohito Hades. He has toured Mexico with a low-budget troupe of female impersonators, and huffed rubber cement while dodging death squads with Guatemalan street children. He has sojourned in the world’s largest Yugoslavian nudist camp, and tracked down the decapitator of Yukio Mishima. He has interrogated such daunting anima personifications as Annie Sprinkle and the formidable criminologist Sondra London. Deep in the jungles of Uxmal, he stumped the legendary entheo-botanist, Terence McKenna, on the identification of the kinky Psychotria viridis fungus.
And he is one of the finest writers alive. He is a virtuoso exploiter of what he calls “the evolutionary design flaw” of human suggestibility, which, he tells us, was hailed by Schopenhauer as “the most significant discovery ever made.” John-Ivan Palmer’s unique in Anglophone letters: a fearless professional spelunker of the human psyche who possesses the skills to climb back out of that fathomless bardo and give us a brilliant account of his findings, with such works as “Stick It In And Break It Off: New Discoveries In Prehistoric Homicide,” “Hostile Breakup, Sinister Reunion: Mesmerism and the Boob,” “General Semantics and the Chicken Suit Murders,” “Intellectual Seekers in the Notorious Tenderloin,” and “On The Roadkill: Is Kerouac Still Alive?”.
John-Ivan Palmer is clearly no physical coward, but is a man of action, as they say. And that informs every word he writes. So it comes as no surprise that he should possess in spades the uncanny skill of putting his readerly subjects inside his literary characters’ bodies, at wonderful moments and horrible, with intensity and verisimilitude. In his novel, Motels of Burning Madness: Confessions of a Male Stripper (Drill Press LLC, 2009), the chases, fights and fuck scenes in shopping malls are clearly the products not only of literary craft, but personal experience, all presented with a seemingly effortless, contrapuntally layered style, reminiscent of Joseph Conrad at his best.
In his memoir Master of Deception (Rare Bird Books, 2020), he tells of his formative years in the back of the family car, driven by his father, the stage magician Jack Pyle, as they criss-cross the United States putting on live shows. Between encounters with the strange denizens of the fifties stage entertainment scene, young John-Ivan reads everything he can grab whenever the car stops anywhere near a bookstore, and autodidacticizes to his present impressive level of eclectic erudition.
His new book, Hypnotic Control: Reflections on the Nature of Staged Influence, continues recounting his life, taking us on his own perpetual road trip as a “hypno,” from gig to gig. He spends years working rodeos, state fairs, dive bars, and the high school assembly circuit–until “the principals gave in to no-cost programs by military recruiters and religious proselytizers”:
With increasing momentum, I acquired ever more power to turn people into gyrating, agitating, screaming laughingstocks. My feet no longer trod the same ground as my fellow humans.
And, speaking of treading rarefied ground, along the way, we get to see yet another side of his literary self. This past master of the essay, the memoir, and the novel, reveals his original intention (carried out with resounding success, in this reviewer’s opinion) to be a poet. A performer down to the genetic marrow in his bones, for John-Ivan Palmer, poetry implies and necessitates public readings. No closet verse for him:
In the world of poetry, I searched for the highest truths. On stage I searched for the lowest… The number of people who reacted to [hypnotic gags such as] the Heat Seeking Dildo, the Man from Nantucket, and the Inflatable Woman, vastly exceeded those who read [my poems]. Versifiers will be flattered, or saddened, to know they make lousy subjects. They are unhypnotizable, because— To deconstruct accepted behavior, there has to be a consensus on that behavior to begin with. Poets have made that deconstruction long before they walk through the door.
The most affecting moment of this book is his relationship with one of the dozens of strippers alongside whom he occupies dressing rooms all across the midwest. She happens to be a fellow poet, and the two of them share a romance that is stoked with dueling quotations of Plath, Moore, Stevens, Doolittle, Bogan, Lowell, Ginsburg, et al:
In the realm of poetry, not only did I earn nothing, but my themes became ever more incomprehensible to anyone except a stage performer, all of whom were dedicated non-readers.
Interspersed with the autobiographical chapters, Hypnotic Control: Reflections on the Nature of Staged Influence gives the history of John-Ivan Palmer’s strange profession, with insight available only to a practitioner who has retained control of his own consciousness every step of the way. We are told of the early days when Anton Mesmer caused such a stir that Louis XVI summoned Benjamin Franklin and other luminaries to investigate:
With such publicity, of course, the practice gains mass popularity, and soon suggestible punters are being sewn together with carpet thread on stages and buried alive in city parks, only to emerge two days later in the expected state of health.
A double current oscillates through the book, as we are told the intertwined history of two “magnetisms”: Hans Christian Ørsted’s electro- and Mesmer’s animal-. They eventually come together in broadcast media and the internet — which gives rise to the book’s ominous conclusion.
The curtain rings down with a series of unnerving parallels drawn between professional mesmerists and fascist autocrats such as, for example, America’s current Sebaceous Cyst-in-Chief:
Methods long established by dictators on the world stage bear an uncanny resemblance to the workings of hypnotists on their own stage.
George Bataille is quoted as follows:
The force of a [fascist] leader is analogous to that exerted in hypnosis.
There is a “flow” [as Bataille called it], that unites dictator and followers with “violent and excessive energies that accumulate in the person of the leader.”
The next sentence embodies the fascination of this book: the honest appraisal of John-Ivan Palmer’s not entirely unassailable line of work, written in prose for which no apology is required:
I have never been a dictator, but I have been a hypnotist, and [that] describes precisely what I do….
His point: no difference between the two.
Aside from autonomous self-reflection, we have to rely on something more, some basic goodness, to temper the human alloy in its ongoing suggestive forge into steel-hard coldness…. As someone who profits from turning people into wash machines and human flies, it’s something I’m not worthy enough to sell.
But I’m all for buying.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom Bradley is the author of numerous novels, essays, and short stories.
