I DELIVER PACKAGES IN BEIJING - HU ANYAN

I got this one because it’s so buzzy and I’m always interested in what Chinese cultural products make it to America. I have two major thoughts on this book. The first has to do with the structure. Both the title and the way to book is laid out makes it seem like Hu is going to tell his autobiographical story about being a delivery driver. The first half of the book is about this, we follow him on his deliveries, we learn what is expected of a chinese delivery driver (which seems to be much more involved than, say, an Amerikan Amazon driver), we see how brutal the work can be, we learn about the pay and how he lives. This part was alright, but, for me, it went on too long. It wasn’t terribly well written so it does really come off as the blog post it started as. It’s interesting to think about the difference between work in Amerika and China, and the ways in which China’s economy is changing, but you have to really dig down under the text itself for this stuff, and the text is just mid. But then the book takes a turn in the second half. Earlier, Hu comes off as a sort of aimless slacker who’s drifting through life and taking this job because it’s what’s available to him and he doesn’t have some greater ambition so who cares what he does. Well, turns out this isn’t the case. The second half of the book follows Hu on his journey through employment in general and catalogs the various jobs he’s held. Plus, he travels around the country, from huge megacities like Shanghai and Beijing, as well as small, underdeveloped towns. It turns out he was ambitious, he attempted to run several clothing stores and to work as a writer. He has a sort of capitalist spirit, and inner entrepreneurism. He talks often about how stifling regular employment can be and how he needs to follow his dreams. He compares himself with his parents and their generation. So the Hu we see delivering packages at the beginning is more the outlier, especially now that he is famous (in China) and a full time writer. I found this section of the book much more interesting and wish it was longer relative to the package section. I also do not think the book benefited from this non-chronological structure. He could have just told the story as a traditional memoir and it would have been more affecting, I considered stopping at the beginning chapters. Because the sections about how the nature of work is changing in China is easily the most fascinating stuff to me. Here’s a passage where he talks about his love for Amerika writers and how he sees their artistic style as related to the mode of production in the country, “I was very fascinated by American realism; the lives and emotions described in these stories were powerfully resonant. This might have been to do with the fact that commodity society and consumerism were talking over the entire world: People’s life experiences were being universally homogenized.” Which is quite interesting but does bring up my second, more insane, thoughts on this book. Is this a psy-op? We get so little, culturally, from China. There is the Three-Body Problem (which is still pretty niche, despite a TV show) and some Kung-Fu movies (but not really any current ones) but that’s basically it. And it’s not like that region of the world is overlooked by American culture writ-large (like, say, central Asia), we’ve got Korean and Japanese culture out the ass, and all of that seems very purposeful. It’s not like we’re flooded with Chinese stuff and people don’t really like it, we just don’t get the stuff translated and brought to us. So when stuff does break through, I’m suspicious as to why this piece of Chinese culture is being highlighted. Hu is showing us a very American version of the Chinese economy, with small businesses (cool, street-wear adjacent fashion and drop shipping, no less), and gig work and alienation and precarity and all that. And while I’m sure his experiences are his experiences and he’s being honest about his life, I do think it plays into this idea that China is just like America and also capitalist in the same way and actually worse in some ways, in terms of workers’ rights. And I think that idea is propaganda and cope. The book “How China Works” does a good job showing how China doesn’t actually look very much like a Western capitalist country when you really understand what is going on. I think this line of reasoning is designed to stop people in the West from looking at what China was able to do and asking why we can’t have that, since it tells them that China is basically the US anyway. It’s a current variant on the There Is No Alternative (TINA) psy-op that they’ve maintained since the USSR fell. Anyway, I did enjoy the second part of the book, I’d love to read more about life in China generally. I hope this book’s success brings us more diversity in this area, China is going to retake its place as most important nation in the world during my lifetime, I’d love to know more about them.

NECROPOLITICS - ACHILLE MBEMBE

I believe I had read this guy’s essay with this name a while ago but never got around to reading the whole thing. Amazingly, the local library carried a copy, despite it being somewhat in the weeds, theory wise. Mbembe’s coinage of “Necropolitics” has become troublingly relevant in the decade or so since he wrote this thing. The term is a sort of fleshing out of Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, or the idea that power/knowledge operates by controlling and managing people’s lives through things like public health and hygiene. Now, between the rise of things like yoga-as-exercise or the pandemic or MAHA or GLP-1, this concept is not without relevance either, but Mbembe brings to light the dark side of these ideas and concepts when he discusses how power also operates by creating death-worlds or “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead.” He lists the colony and the plantation as the sort of precursor to this concept, the test run or version 1.0, while something like Palestine, especially recently, would be a current example. Or the vast homeless encampments that fill up or cities, or the ICE detention centers, or the racialized sections of our cities that have been violent and hopeless for generations now, or the post-industrial fentanyl-chocked rust belt areas, or the nowhere, emptied out also fentanyl-chocked rural wastelands. There really are no shortage of death-worlds in Amerika these days. Plus, it’s now how we wage wars. We don’t have a strategic aim in the traditional sense of taking something over and running it, instead we bomb it and use targeted death squads in the form of our Tier 1 operators as well as less elite proxy armies to sow such chaos and violence that a society collapses into total death-world which makes it easier to achieve some geopolitical goal. We did this in Iraq and Libya and Somalia and Syria, and were currently trying to pull this off in Venezuela and Cuba and Iran. Like most theory, I read this thing as a sort of assemblage of tools and concepts some of which are more relevant or interesting to me than others. There’s a lot about Fanon in this book and a sort of rehash of his ideas. I found this part less interesting, since I feel like I could just reread Fanon if I wanted these concepts, tho he does a good job of summarizing his ideas about how “Blackness” works as a psychological concept. Tho, the idea of the death-world is really the main takeaway here for me. Now, it is not all hopeless for Mbembe, he does, in my opinion, write beautifully about how we might get out of this mess. “Owing to this structural proximity, there is no longer any “outside” that might be opposed to an “inside”, no ‘elsewhere” that might be opposed to a “here,” or “closeness” that might be opposed to a “remoteness.” Once cannot “sanntuarize” one’s own home by fomenting chaos and death far away in the homes of others. Sooner or later, one will reap at home what one has sown abroad. Sanctuarization can only ever be mutual…a democracy-to-come will rely on a clear-cut diction between the “universal” and the “in-common.” The universal implies inclusion in some already constituted thing or entity, where the in-common presupposes a relation of co-belonging and sharing-the idea of a world that is the only one we have and to be sustainable must be shared by all those with rights to it.”

DEVIL ON THE CROSS - NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O

I’ve had a lot on my plate recently, so my reading has suffered a bit. As such, I’ve been trying to focus on some shorter books that are a bit easier to knock out. I had long heard this was a classic of modern African literature, and when I saw that the library had it and that it was only about 300 pages long, I jumped. I believe this is the only book by a Kenyan writer I’ve ever read. Thiong’o famously wrote this on toilet paper in prison and in Kikuyu, despite being more than able to write in English. This is sort of the African equivalent of Dante choosing not to write in Latin. This is an obviously political choice, as well as an artistic one, that resonates in a very political book. Usually, the African literature I’ve read either deals with a pre-colonial time period, the colonial time period and/or the struggle against colonialism but rarely the neocolonial period after official colonialism ends. And this book tackles exactly that period. Actually, the book really reminded me of the Iceberg Slim book, Trick Baby. As in that book the main character here gets a sort of behind the scenes look at the evil plan at the heart of the world. In this novel a young Kenyan woman, Jacinta Wariinga, tries to live her life in post-colonial Kenya, where she is taken advantage of and exploited and fucked with until she reaches the point that she wants to kill herself. At her lowest point, she’s saved and invited to an event called The Devil’s Feast, which she decides to attend. The event, run by the Organization for Modern Theft and Robbery, is a sort of forum for the newly liberated Kenyan bourgeois to discuss their schemes and plots by which the rob the people of Kenya, and their desire to join the ranks of the international bourgeois, many of whom are in the audience (from the US, UK, Japan, etc.) and are going to judge who the greatest thief in the country is. If all goes well, the Kenyans hope to get their chapter of thieves and robbers accepted into the trans-national vampire class. That part of the book is a bit didactic. There are chapter long speeches where different businessmen talk about how they cheat and rob people, how they swindle working people out of their money and live off of the toil of others. Now, I’m someone who believes we can’t hear this message enough, and I’m someone who has been to and lived in post-colonial nations across Africa and the rest of the so-called third world and this is a very, very real dynamic. There is a stark class divide and a handful of shockingly evil vampire clans that control all the wealth in a country while everyone else lives in the most dire poverty you can imagine. And I’ve never read a work of fiction that makes this dynamic clearer. Now, I don’t want to make it seem like this book is only a political economy lesson, though it is primarily that, the story that wraps around these speeches is also quite good and concludes quite nicely. There are some really striking images, like the titular devil on the cross, as well as some really succinct and cutting descriptions of how the world operates. In the almost 50 years since this book came out, the Devil’s Feast has only become more clear. As the transnational cartel of thieves and robbers continue to do their work, with deeper and deeper perfidy and greater and greater skill, it’s more important than ever to be clear-eyed about what is really going on. I’m going to use the Devil’s Feast as a useful metaphor for some time.

THE REVISED BOY-SCOUT MANUAL - WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I live in Lawrence, which, among other things, is famous for being the place where Burroughs lived longest. For the last 17 years of his life. True, it is the least celebrated of his homes, he didn’t kill anyone in a drunken game here, he didn’t write any major work here, it’s not where he influenced the early punk scene. It’s no Beat hotel. But, despite how gnarly so much of his work is, the town has quasi-embraced him, there is a nice little trail by the creek that is named after him. Also, you would think this would mean that the second most famous writer associated with the city (Langston Hughes being the first, tho, in a sort of reverse way in that he spent his early life here and never returned) would have more of his books available at the library. They do not. But, they do carry this volume, which is one of the more obscure, late-period Burroughs work and the only one I hadn’t read from their collection so I grabbed it and checked it off of my read-all-the-Burroughs quest (I’m getting close, but there are a lot of obscure, hard to find volumes). I would not say this one is essential. It’s a sort of distilled and less literary version of his major themes. It is a manuel in that it’s didactic and instructional. It’s about Burrough’s major theme, resisting control. As always, it goes from base-level control, as in drug addiction, to governmental/cultural control, up to esoteric or religious control (like the Nova Mob, or Mayan calendar control, or the One God Universe or any number of Burroughs obsessions or names for what is basically the same thing). To him, it’s all the same, and we can resist them in the same ways, namely, by scrambling up the scripts, through cut-up techniques. He mentions using tape recorders all the time and mixing up the tapes and playing them back, or overlaying something like the call to prayer over the sound of pigs or other transgressive acts meant to short-circuit the scripts that are running the world. He also suggests acts of assassination against the 10% of the world that runs the show (which actually lines up with the 5% ideology; if only Burroughs had met the Wu-Tang Clan) but decentered, as sort of leaderless resistance. It’s interesting how much he was correct, but in sort of a reversed way, in that the systems he was trying to combat actually adapted these techniques. Nothing says cut-up like scrolling a social media site, or trying to read the news. Music is quite sample based, people can’t even watch movies any more, their attention spans is so shot. Everything is pastiche and jumps moment to moment. So Burroughs was right about that. What he was wrong about was what the effect of this stuff would be. Instead of liberation and a breakdown of control, these techniques have alienated us from one another and driven us insane. The ability to swipe through dog videos and drone footage and rage-bait and family news destabilizes but also traumatizes and trauma leads to a desire for safety and more control. Likewise, this type of low-level warfare that Burroughs is describing is also de rigueur these days. Assassinations, sabotage, decentered resistance, psyops, terrorism, drugs as weapons, all of this is much more effectively deployed by forces of control than by any resistance force. Seems bad to live in a world more depressing than the one Burroughs foresaw, but here we are. Anyway, this is easily the most straightforward presentation of Burrough’s ideas. I prefer the novels, which covers this material but in a more artistic manner, you get his super-bugged out (pun intended) flights of fancy, but this is a pretty good distillation of his obsessions and theories.

ANSWER TO JOB - C. G. JUNG

One forgets how fucking weird Jung is. Freud and Jung are, for obvious reasons, often thought of together, with Jung being the 'funkier’ of the two and Freud being more “scientific,” but both of them sort of co-creating modern science of psychology. While this is certainly an oversimplification and psychology most certainly isn't a science, it also elides how strange and out there Jung can be. He’s much closer to a religious thinker and writer, he’s vibes-based, he’s relaying his dreams and intuitions, he’s doing something closer to what a shaman does than a scientist or academic does. Even in this book, which is religious commentary, he’s not writing in an academic way. He’s not citing sources or telling you what the archaeology or history says about the circumstances under which this book of the Bible was written or the intellectual history of biblical ideas, he’s doing a sort of Terrance McKenna-style free associative rant. And it’s very unique, I’ve never heard this take on Job before. To back up, Job is certainly one of if not the most baffling book in the bible. I’ve always found it strange that the book ends with God explaining to Job why he allowed all these horrible things to happen to him by citing is own immense power and knowledge and basically saying, “I’m god, you don’t need to question what I’m doing, just trust that I have a reason” which is crazy since we, the reader, know the actual reason for Job’s issues, namely that god made a bet with the devil. And this bit of dramatic irony has endless layers of bafflement. Why are god and the devil talking? Do they regularly do this? Why is god trying to “prove” something to the devil? Especially since he’s omnipotent and knows everything. Why doesn’t God just tell Job the real reason? What does the devil think of this afterwards? Jung takes this story and really blows it up wide. His take is that God is shamed by Job since Job ends up being the most moral character in the story and more moral than God himself. This prompts God to become man in the form of Jesus to sort of “make up” for this transgression against Job. And since it’s Jung and he’s so interested in archetypes and enantiodromia and dualism, he posits that since there is an all-good version of God in Jesus, this explains why there will be an all-evil version of God, perhaps in the anti-christ. And he really folds in a lot. There’s stuff about Sophia and the gnostic versions of christianity. There’s lots of talk of Jesus and revelations and the woman clothed with the sun. He has an interesting take that protestism lacks a female divinity figure like Mary and is thus incomplete. He’s all over the place. It’s quite a great little rant. 100 pages, really heady and strange. I would highly recommend if you want to hear some far out shit about the bible.

BLOOD IN MY EYES - GEORGE JACKSON

Another quick reread of a book I read in college. I wanted to use it for a project I’m working on and it turned out to be quite apropos for the current situation, sadly. Jackson, it goes without saying, is a total hero. Someone who’s life and death put into sharp contrast one’s own cowardice. He really lived his politics and died in a vain attempt to give us all a better world. His legacy is so powerful, still, that when Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote a statement about why he was going ahead with Tookie Williams’, the founder (not really, there will be an essay on this website soon explaining Tookie in more detail) of the crips, execution, he listed Tookie’s admiration for Jackson as proof that he wasn’t reformed and deserved to die. Think about that. Just admiring Jackson is cause for denying clemency. It’s hard to image another 20th century American figure like that. The other 60’s radicals, even the assassinated ones like Malcolm X have been sanitized to a degree that frankly isn’t possible with Jackson. He didn’t have a non-militant or accommodationist bone in his body. This is his second and slightly less famous book, written right before his assassination. The official story is that he died during an escape attempt, but there’s a lot of fishy stuff about that story that hopefully someone will dig into one day. Jackson spent his entire adult life in the California prison system, which makes this book all the more remarkable. The later section of the book is a quite erudite study of the history of fascism, particularly in Italy, where he discusses so pretty obscure (at least to me) Italian thinkers from all sides which is both intellectually interesting and flabbergasting when you consider that he learned all this under the genocidal thumb of the California department of corrections. The beginning of the book is much more focused on ideas of guerrilla warfare and communist uprisings. He, I would say correctly, pushes the MLM line that a vanguard party is needed to wage a people’s war, that the masses themselves are not going to do it. I would disagree with him when he says,“The outlaw and the lumpen will make the revolution. The people, the workers, will adopt it. This must be the new order of things, after the fact of the modern industrial fascist state.” I think that history has shown that this isn’t the case, the lumpen are quite easily distracted by personal material gains and, since they aren’t involved in production on the societal level, they don’t really have any leverage against the state. But these are minor quibbles. This level of radicalism is needed now more than ever, it’s insane how far we’ve fallen since he died, how little of this type of attitude we have left. The ICE pigs are killing on camera with total impunity. No one, and I'm including myself here of course, is striking back. We’ve so internalized the There Is No Alternative line that all we can do is non-violently protest and appeal to our rulers, who we now know (and learn more about every day) are psychopathic pedophiles. A grim place to be. But we have to also take Jackson’s attitude that it’s always worth fighting. He was in a worse spot than us and never gave even an inch. It’s hard to imagine how American and thus the world would have been different if he’d pulled off the escape, or been released due to pressure, and had been free during the turmoil of the late 60’s/early 70’s.

COTTON COMES TO HARLEM - CHESTER HIMES

This is my first Himes book. I got a collection of 4 of them at the library and choose to read this one because I know they made a movie about it, so I assume that someone who’s read a bunch of his stuff thought that this novel was the most filmable. This was quite good, so I anticipate reading at least a couple more of his works, so I should have a more informed opinion at some point in the future. This book is basically perfect as a detective/crime novel. It features an interesting crime, the cop main characters are engaging, the action is continuous and the world it takes place in is well-rendered and fascinating. The story involves a con man who, in mid-century Harlem, is running a scam where he’s collecting money for a “Back to Africa” organization. The money get stolen in a robbery and then (spoiler alert) placed in a bale of cotton that multiple characters are trying to find. The detectives on this case are Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. While they are Black cops, they are not, how should we say? progressive cops. HImes makes it clear they frequently kill suspects and get into shootouts and assault people. They have a pretty dark view of the population of Harlem, though they do seem to really care that regular people got ripped off in the scam and are trying to get them their money back. There is another plot line where a YT man is trying to encourage Black Harlem residents to return to the South, which is a pretty funny twist on the Back to Africa angle. The way HImes renders the milieu of Harlem, the shitty soul food restaurants, the Jazz clubs, the petty criminals and street people is amazing. You can tell he really lived this. Like I said, the pacing is really what sells this thing. It moves quickly and strikes the right balance between the plot and the background. This tightrope walk is the most important aspect of genre fiction and HImes nails it. I’m going to have to check out more of his stuff.

STALIN: HISTORY AND CRITIQUE OF A BLACK LEGEND - DOMENICO LOSURDO

I’ve lately, for the past few years, been fascinated by the ways that Boomers are still obsessed with and fearful of Russia. On the one hand, you have to remember that they were the targets of one of the largest propaganda pushes of all time, the Cold War era anti-communism, a push that had many flavors and versions. There’s a right wing version where they’re an asiatic hoard of godless communists. There’s the compatible left version where it is a distortion of “real communism,” or “good leftism.” In both version they’re totalitarian, and seen as the moral equivalent of the Nazis, a sort of horseshoe theory argument that has had surprising staying power. Even today, if you talk to Boomers, especially ones that consider themselves progressive or liberals, they’ll talk about Russia like the communists are still in charge and engage in the most bird-brained conspiratorial thinking imaginable, seeing Russian control over all sorts of events. It’s sad and stupid, but it’s all down hill from this concerted effort that the West took to denigrate and diminish Bolshevism and especially Stalin. Losordo is here to challenge that and rescue Stalin and the CCCP more broadly from the “black legend” that has grown up around it. He starts with the obvious, that the Soviets defeated the Nazis. There is a consistent Western narrative that it was America that saved Europe and made it so the French aren’t “speaking German” as chuds love to say, but this quite simply isn’t true. The soviets fought the hardest and the longest and conquered Berlin. It’s not up to debate. He then takes on this idea that Hitler and Stalin are sort of demonic twins with somewhat different ideologies that really both amount to the dreaded “totalinatrism” a pretty useless term suited only for propaganda. Losurdo shows how Nazism and Hitler himself drew much more from America and American history to build their ideology. People will accuse current America of being the Fourth Reich but this term elides and switches the cause and effect, Nazi German didn’t inspire and shape current America, America inspired and shaped Nazi Germany. They were trying to be us. Hitler and co. were quite open about wanting to emulate America. They would speak of the Volga river as being their Mississippi, Liebesraum is their translation of Manifest Destiny, the concentration camps were actively modeled on NDN reservations, they sent legal scholars over the the united states to study Jim Crow laws and arrangements. The book does a good job putting a new spin on Stalin without making him into a hero beyond critique. Losurdo acknowledges issues and missteps and major problems. He does try to put them in context. Typically you hear about the show trials and gulags as results of pure evil. Stalin was evil, and he did monstrous evil things because it’s who he was and it’s how communism works. These are fairy tales, we can look seriously at what the conditions at the time were and see his actions in this context and critique them and learn from them. Losurdo focuses on the period of 1917-1945 calling it  a "Second Thirty Year's War.” In his telling, it is a war of a communist state besieged from the moment of its creation with Stalin and others working as hard as they can to preserve the soviet experiment.  There is no reason to resort to simple answers, he was a tough man in a very tough predicament who made some very tough choices. We can think about his choices without resorting to the Black Legend. I wish the book contained more straight information about Stalin and his life, it’s much more of an argument that deals with the conversation around Stalin rather than the bare facts of his life, but I suppose I should just read a typical biography for that. There are a lot of Boomers and leftists who need to read this. 

CUE THE SUN! - EMILY NUSSBAUM

This was a pretty buzzy book from last year that I had been meaning to get around to and finally saw it in the library. I do love me some reality TV. I'm almost exactly the right age for it. Survivor and the Apprentice and the classic Real World run and the really extreme throw anything at the wall to see what sticks era (where there was a Flavor Flav dating show) all started or were going on while I was in high school and it still scratches a very particular itch for me. Sadly, this book was a bit of a disappointment. Nussbaum is a critic, so I’d hoped she’d take a handful of shows and trends in the genre and trace them and share some ideas and theories about them. But, I didn’t really pay attention to the subtitle, which is “the invention of reality tv” which turned out to be more accurate. A large portion of the book is about the proto-reality TV of an earlier era. There is a lot of time spent of An American Family, a show that does presage so much reality TV that took place in the Seventies. The problem is that most people have not seen that show, and despite predicting reality TV in form, it does not seem to be a direct inspiration for anything. She’s clearly very interested in it and interviews almost everyone involved, but I would rather time had been spent on true reality TV shows. She actually does the same thing with the show COPS which is also a sort of proto-reality TV show she spends a lot of time on but I would argue isn’t really a reality show in the modern sense. Paradoxically, it’s not really a reality show because it’s too real; reality shows in the modern sense are artificial in a very specific, interesting, and slippery way. She ends up following a bunch of different threads but not really committing enough to any one of them. For example, the behind the scenes stuff about writers’ strikes and trying to unionize reality stars was really fascinating but it could have been it’s own book. The discussion of how reality start fame works, ie you are really famous but you don’t get any money so these stars build their own ecosystem outside of the shows themselves (doing things like club appearances, and now podcasts) to capitalize, and how it changed over time as stars began to be cognizant of how the shows worked and how editing worked and changed their behavior to maximize their ability to make money after the show was over, is fascinating and really new and really presages the social media era where everyone is like this to some extent. But, again, this could have been its own book. She deep dives on a couple of shows, interviewing all the people involved and gives us a pretty complete behind-the-scenes. Survivor, the Bachelor, Queer Eye, Big Brother and the Housewife shows get this treatment. All of this stuff is fascinating but it’s more interesting for a show that I watched and cared about. She also goes deep on the Apprentice for obvious reasons and this too could have easily been a separate book, given the insane way that show has changed all of our lives. She reports that Trump repeatedly pitched a Blacks vs. YTs season which, sadly, they never let happen. Reality TV really is the rosetta stone for so much of our culture now and it deserves a close look and critical scrutiny beyond a simple turned up nose. This book does a good job adding some historical context but there is so much more there that I wish she’d have dived into. 

SOMETHING TO DO WITH PAYING ATTENTION - DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Now, does this count? I keep track of the books I read, as you obviously know since you’re reading this. I do review almost all of them (it is pretty rare I read something all the way through and don’t review it, though it has happened), including rereads, and I keep a count. So, I ask, could this count towards a total? This book is a section, about a 125 page section, of DFW’s Pale King, the book he was writing when he killed himself. I read the Pale King when it came out on tax day 2011. DFW was pretty ascendent in the culture at that point (he’s fallen off hard since his suicide, I would say, you don’t hear alot about Infinite Jest anymore) and I believe I had then read all his stuff. I remember thinking the book, Pale King, was quite good in parts, but overall, unfinished. It was no 2666, the other massive posthumous book from that era that is very much finished and perfect. In a strange twist, I had been thinking about it when I heard that they’d published part of it as a standalone volume and then found out the local library carried it and that it was short enough to read in a day. This is some of the best stuff in the Pale King, at least as I remember it. Interestingly, I remember a few details from this section I read over a decade ago, but I don’t remember them being part of the same monologue. It’s actually a sort of nested monologue. The whole thing is a character’s speech to new IRS agents (Pale King is about an IRS office in Peoria) which itself contains a speech he was given when he joined the IRS himself. Say what you will about DFW, and I’ll get to all that in a second, the man is really a top notch writer. Very technically skilled, he can meander and spin out a yarn to incredible lengths but still maintain the sense that every word is perfectly selected and you never lose track of what’s going on, even when things go big. Unfortunately, it suffers the flaws of the other DFW works: it’s often corny and treacly. The good part of Infinite Jest (the tennis academy stuff, the junky stuff is maudlin to a degree that almost sinks the book) focuses on aimless young people, who feel like they have potential but can’t seem to live up to it. They’re wastoids, to use DFW’s term. And no one is better than him at rendering how this particular lostness feels. Interestingly, this feeling along with the paralyzing self-consciousness that accompanies it has only become more pervasive in general and especially among young people since he died; he would lose his mind if he could see social media. The problem is that he gets so preachy and corny when he tries to offer a solution. Work hard, be boring, pay attention to your life. This is all fine advice, and he offers a better version of it in his “This is Water” speech, but to me, it rings hollow. The problem is bigger than one’s individual life and perspective. For instance, he doesn’t really go into the issues one might have with the IRS or what those taxes are being used for or why some people don’t pay them at all while others sit in jail for avoiding them. The problem for him is always individual. He says in this that all the facts of the world are settled, the question now is how you react to and deal with these facts. This worldview will always make the solution individual, which isn’t really a solution at all. You read this stuff and it’s clear why he killed himself, the exit he thinks he’s found is another dead-end. Anyway, great writer, I like the idea of taking sections out of longer books and publishing them by themselves. I’ve only ever seen this before with the Grand Inquisitor section from Brothers Karamazov. It’s funny to imagine them doing this with 2666.

PALO ALTO: A HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA, CAPITALISM AND THE WORLD - MALCOLM HARRIS

It’s only the third day of 2026 and I’ve already finished a book that will almost certainly be on my “best of the year” list come next December. It will be one insane year of reading of this thing doesn’t end up making the cut. I’m someone who likes a book to go big. I think that books are uniquely situated to get really down deep and sprawl out and take all sorts of weird turns. I like long books and big swings. And this is certainly that. In some sense, this is the NorCal equivalent of Mike Davis’ classic City of Quartz. Normally when you think NorCal and the Bay you think San Francisco or maybe Oakland but Harris finds the dark-beating heart of America in the south bay city of Palo Alto. As he puts it in the book, California is America’s America and Palo Alto is America’s America’s America. Many of the trends and occult movements and tendencies that plague our nation, especially the more tech-flavored ones, come from this part of the world. And they don’t come out of nothing. Harris starts with the natives that occupied the area, before going onto the Califronia genocide followed by the railroads and labor unrest. But, when he gets to Stanford, both the person and later the university, he really gets cooking. Harris posits that California’s unique take on capitalism involves cultivating human capital and technology to an extreme degree. Stanford, the person and later the school, are obsessed with eugenics. Stanford’s great passion is horse breeding and he takes the ideas and mindset he cultivates in that world into the world of human education. The book does a great job tracing the career of Herbert Hoover, who ends up, among many other things, including being president, funding an institute (that still exists and currently is run by arch-demon Condoleezza Rice) at the school that injects a heavy dose of anti-communism that remains to this day. Once the post-war world allows Stanford and the larger NorCal community to tap into the endless military-industrial complex money, the Palo Alto we know really gets going. Harris really shows how the current crop of world running and ruining tech companies that we associate with the area come out of these relationships. Which themselves come out of the YT supremacist project that is California writ large. The book is full of all sorts of amazing anecdotes and facts and recreations of specific milieus, the stories about how the Chinese were used to build the railroads and how they navigated life in California was not a topic I was particularly interested in but ended up being fascinating. But the real wonder is how he’s able to connect all this back to these central ideas and forces. We never lose sight of what this all means. Obviously, I’m more interested in the more recent stuff. I would love to read Harris, who’s work I’ll be seeking out, on tech by itself. He has one of the best explanations of Peter Thiel (as always, I will remind us that his name is an anagram for “the reptile”) I’ve seen in print. The book ends with a suggestion that this problem could be solved, at least in part, by doing Land Back and giving the Bay back to the Ohlone. This strikes me as pretty un-Marxist, the issue is clearly the relationships of production, but I understand the sentiment and agree with Land Back (I just don’t think it’ll solve the problems). A towering achievement. If you’re interested in Amerika, you gotta read this thing.

SLAVERY AND CAPITALISM: A NEW MARXIST HISTORY - DAVID MCNALLY

A fun take on the famous CAPITALISM AND SLAVERY book by Eric Williams, which I believe I reviewed last year. This book, thankfully, takes a different angle on the capitalism/slavery debate. Williams points out how the money made during slavery gets funneled into industrialization and capitalization in England and then the rest of the world. It shows us how Slavery was from an earlier mode of production, but the surplus made off of slavery allowed for capitalism as we know it to develop. McNally thinks that this dividing line is actually much more blurry, and that Atlantic Slavery was not a totally distinct, pre-capitalist mode of production, but was instead capitalistic in nature and should be thought of as part of the larger story of capitalism, instead of as the prelude. To me, the most convincing and relevant sections had to do with treating the slaves themselves as real people. Normally, the line of logic goes that since slaves are slaves, they are not proletarians who, definitionally are free labor who are in conflict with capital. McNally goes to great lengths to show that slaves were not “dead labor” or “fixed cost” that didn’t need to be negotiated with on an ongoing basis. He illuminates a long history of not only major slave rebellions in the Atlantic world, but also work slow-downs, the tactic of running away but coming back when a demand is met and other tactics of resistance that have equivalence in the “free” labor world. He shows how many slaves actually did make money, they could rent their skills (usually blacksmithing or carpentry) to others for money that they could use to better their lot or, ideally, buy their freedom. Many of the major leaders of slave rebellions, from Denmark Vesey to Gabriel Prossner, belonged to this class. Likewise, he takes on that old chestnut that slavery retards industrialization by showing that the slave South was one of the most industrialized areas in both the USA and the world at large at the time. While the north was more industrialized, the South was building railroads and using steam powered engines in major projects throughout this time, and, if it was considered its own country, the South would have been one of the most industrialized counties in the world at the time of the Civil war. He finally shows how involved Marx himself was in the anti-slavery struggle and how he saw these struggles as connected. The Eric Williams book of the same (tho, reversed) title is more thorough and puts forward a better case for why slavery formed the material basis for capitalism and how these modes fed into each other. This book does a good job correcting some of the common misconceptions about this relationship; the part about treating slaves as full people and political/economic actors was much needed and the best part of the book. It says, “a new Marxist history” on the cover but, besides long sections about Marx the person and his campaign against slavery (which was quite interesting) there isn’t too much marxist analysis. Overall, I don’t think I’d recommend this book to someone new to the idea, since it doesn’t go “big” enough, but I would recommend it to someone who has thought about these issues and wants to deepen their understanding.

SOLDIER OF ARETE - GENE WOLFE

Polishing off the last couple of books for the year and taking a bite out of another Wolfe series. I’ve now read two out of three of the “Latro” books, though the third was written much later and there seems to be some discussion about how included it should be. I’ll read it one day and weigh in, but for now, this book is very much an extension of the last one. The story is the same, there is a soldier in ancient Greece named “Latro,” which actually isn’t his name. He doesn’t know his name, or much of anything because he angered a god and now is cursed to not remember anything longer than a day. On his quest to recover his memory and figure out who he is, he encounters all sorts of people across Greco-Persian war ravaged landscape. He also meets gods and mythical creatures. His injury/curse also allows him to see and speak with the gods whose own plans and rivalries and personalities make up the hidden section of the book. I say hidden section because, as is the fashion with Wolfe, there is the story you are actually reading, and then there is a hidden plot, that you have to figure out through the clues. The conceit of the book is that you are reading a scroll that Latro is writing on to help him remember what happens, he frequently rereads it and asks people around him what certain events he reads about meant. So you have to read what Latro writes down, and then put it in the context of what we know happened before, though he doesn’t, then add another layer where another character will later fill us in on something, or explain what happened in a gap. And, of course, you have to decided if you think these characters are telling the truth. Then there is the added dimension that Latro doesn't write in the journal everyday, and he doesn’t know how long it is between entries so we have to figure out where the gaps are and what happened during them through clues. It’s a really crazy game Wolfe is playing, and it’s all to say that it’s very silly to try to review it after one read. I’ll be honest, there was an entire and very intricate plotline with the gods and their battles and alliances which is clearly the deeper “point” of the book which was often quite subtle and between the lines. I would have to read it again much closer to “get” a lot of what happened, I suspect. You only find out late in the book, for instance, that one character was a centaur. It was cool to find out that the character known only to us as “the black man” in the previous book, he’s Latro’s oldest friend, is actually named Seven Lions. The quasi-love story with Io is one of the strangest and most unique relationships I’ve read in a while. Certainly something that I need to read again, tho, honestly, I feel like in terms of potential return on a reread, the Solar Cycle books are so far ahead of these two that it’s not even worth considering. But these were quite fun. My understanding is that the third book in this series was written much later and, in a typical Wolfe puzzle, might not actually be about the same person, so I might hold off on that one for a while. But does appear to be about Egypt instead of Greece so my interest is piqued.

SPEND - ALISON BECHDEL

A return to form. I went to college in Asheville North Carolina, so I’m familiar with both the comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For (pretty common bookshelf find in student houses/punk houses/communes) as well as the general milieu that the comic is parodying. And if Bechdel had just kept making that comic, and it ran for 25 years, it would be an impressive and laudable achievement. But, as we all know, Bechdel ended up making a couple of longer form autobiographical comics, starting with Fun Home, which broke containment from the lefty lesbian space and into mainstream culture. The book was a legitimate hit, it ended up being a broadway musical. Her other books in this vein, Are You My Mother? and, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, are also more straightforwardly autobiographical. This one goes back the DtWOF formula (and shows us some now late middle age DtWOF cast members), where the characters and situation are lightly fictionalized even though it takes place in our social and political world. In the world of Spend, Bechdel’s book about her father, who is a taxidermist in this version, not a funeral home director as he was in real life and in Fun Home, likewise becomes very popular and is the basis for a TV show that makes Bechdel uncomfortable since it’s corny and increasingly insane. The book is ostensibly about money and the pressures that come along with it. Like her previous 3 books, this one seems like it is going to play with a lot of material from older books, the way that Are You My Mother? weaves in all the Don Winnicott material, for instance. She teases that this time it’s going to be Das Kapital by Marx, and shows her character starting the book. Likewise, all of the chapter titles are Kapital chapter titles, though, sadly, the connection sort of ends there. She doesn’t go in depth on Kapital or Marx or really anything else, this story is much more self-contained. Unlike her previous volumes, this one doesn’t feel like the definitive excavation of a certain part of her life, it feels like an episode of a good TV show. She could crank one of these out every few years for the rest of her life and I’d be happy. She’s an amazing cartoonist, her drawings are never show-off-y but they’re super legible and very stylistically consistent. Plus, I love the colors. Likewise, she’s still got a great sense of pacing and story. It never gets super melodramatic, and it never gets too boring. It’s satirical but it’s light. DtWOF always had this sense of dread in the background, the main characters are mostly politically attuned activists who have a sense of where the country is headed, starting in the Reagan era. Now that some of their worst fears are being confirmed, basically daily, Bechdel nails the way that this dread just sort of becomes normal and background. Obviously, I wish there was more Marx but overall a very strong addition to the Bechdel cannon.

INDIGENOUS CONTINENT - PEKKA HÄMÄLÄINEN

Instant classic. I’d had this book on the radar for a while but only recently noticed it was in my father-in-law’s library so I scooped it up. Incredibly glad that I did. This book is in the class of books like People’s History which after you read allow you to really look at whole sections of history completely differently. The premise is pretty simple: the normal story about the interaction between natives and europeans in the Americas (tho the book heavily focuses on the area that is now the USA with long segments in modern Canada and Mexico) is grossly wrong and oversimplified and another paradigm is needed to really get what was going on. The normal story runs something like this, YTs arrive, starting with Columbus, and proceed to find a basically empty continent and backwards natives who put up some sort of fight, but are so demolished by disease and overmatched militarily that western civilizational forces are pretty much able to march from the Atlantic to the Pacific at will. Hämäläinen reframes this by reminding us that Natives were in control of most of the continent for most of the last 500 years, only since the late 1800’s did they not possess and rule over a huge portion of the land. So when were thinking about colonial America, the real powers are not Britain and France and the colonies, it’s the Iroquois and their allies and enemies who calling the shots and shaping the politics. This is a much needed correction, it’s threads the needle quite well between natives being total victims, noble-savage pacifists who died from the diseases and wars of the Europeans, and natives being actual savages who were fought and quickly defeated, due to their primitive ways. The truth, obviously, in in the middle. They built large empires to try to grow power and protect their land. The book makes the argument that the Iroquois, Sioux and Comanche all, at one point, constituted empires, which I would probably quibble with, but it’s a provocative take for sure. He credits these large powers with staving off the YTs long enough to allow some of the smaller groups to survive at all. The books certainly bites off more than it can chew. It’s really detailed in New England and Canada, but skimpy on regions like the PNW. Which is fine, the books is long and would need to be a dozen volumes to give subject the treatment it needs. There are some fascinating parts that try to understand this time period from an indigenous perspective and try to follow the logic of the choices they made. They continually underestimate the depravity of the YT man. They are constantly cut down by disease in a way that really makes you wish you could see the world where smallpox is just, say, 10% less deadly. There is a lot of good stuff about the political structures of the various groups and how these change in order to deal with the euros. There are detailed explanations of cultural institutions like a mourning war, which were incredible. Overall, it such a great and new way to frame this period of history, hopefully it catches on and this way of looking at this period is the standard.

WILL THERE EVER BE ANOTHER YOU - PATRICIA LOCKWOOD

After 3000 year old poems we’re jumping into the right now favorite. Not too often do I read something buzzy that just came out, but I really like Lockwood’s last book and I was excited to get my hands on this one. It took a second to reserve it from the library, this volume is proving popular. And I can see why. Lockwood’s last volume did about as well as anything I’ve personally come across in rendering in prose the feeling of thinking online. The way that Virginia Wolfe, James Joyce and others at the turn of the last century were able to get down on paper something that really reads the way thinking feels, Lockwood is able to do that but updated for our modern era where everyone is online constantly. She’s able to render what being very online feels like, not knowing where the internet ends and your thinking begins. Lockwood takes that up a notch in this book, where she adds in what the lockdown and then long COVID. And the “vibe” for lack of a better word, is much more vital than the actual narrative. She uses the term, “poetic logic” instead of vibe but the book sums itself up nicely when she writes, “The line of poetic logic, I explained to the students, is as easy to disrupt as the narrative; is the narrative, where none appears to exist.” In fact, the narrative itself seems to be pretty autobiographical or memorish. My understanding is that Lockwood does have long COVID and her sister had a baby who died. The book, when it’s “about” anything, is mostly about these events. But it rambles and goes off in strange places, there’s a long digression about Anna Karenina, for instance, but it always seems to circle back to what the lockdown and grief and covid did to our brains. It’s very personal, there’s not a lot of big, cultural effects charted. The sort of strange tone it uses, one that really seems closer to poetry than prose, had me thinking of Anne Carson, who Lockwood actually mentions at length in the book.  She doesn’t have Carson’s deep understanding of etymology and Greek mythology, though, at one point she even writes, “Could I have learned Greek?” But she’s a worthy heir. And much more modern, in the sense that she is actually trying to say something about the right-now present, which I appreciate. I do wish she’d gone a little bigger on the COVID stuff, I feel like we’ve really memory-holed it as a society and I do wonder how long it will take for artists to try to tackle this period (so far we basically only have Eddington, which I love). Maybe the kids who lived through Lockdown school need to grow up, we’ll see. But overall, she’s such a good and unique writer, I’m interested in whatever she’s writing. 

THE SHAMBHALA ANTHOLOGY OF CHINESE POETRY - J.P.SEATON (trans. & editor)

Back on my poetry shit. This was a great book to pick up when I had a few minutes for myself to get a quick blast of poetry. The task here is pretty monumental, Seaton tries to survey all of Chinese poetry, from poems that stretch back to the 11th century BCE, up until poems written in the Republic period of the early 20th century. He does not, suspiciously, include any poetry from after the communist revolution, which I would have been quite interested in, nor does he really explain why. Surely people are writing poems in China these days, what are those poems like? But despite this oversight, what is here is great. Seaton does a good job selecting and explaining without over explaining his selections and process. We’re not really exposed to any non-Western cultures here in Babylon, so he has a lot of information to fill us in on. He starts the book with an essay about translating Chinese more generally and the problems with this. As someone who knows a bit of Japanese (which is not actually very closely related to Chinese, linguistically, just fyi) I can attest to how tricky it is to move between languages that have such different structures and especially written structures. Chinese poems allow for a much more “stripped down” style than is possible in languages that are alphabetical. Seaton does a good job talking about this cogently and in an engaging manner but doesn’t go too deep. The star here is his translations. We could spend our whole lives thinking about how to translate Chinese. He breaks the poems up by dynasty, and each section has an intro essay that explains some of the political and historic background as well as some biographical information about the poets in each section. Each of these little essays could be a book and Seaton does a great job not getting too bogged down in this while still giving enough context to let the poems shine. And he did a great job selecting them. I’m not going to pretend that I know very much about Chinese poetry. I like Du Fu and Li Po which is basically like saying you like Shakespere, they’re pretty universally considered the greatest, liking them is a freezing cold take. But beyond them, I really enjoyed T’ao Ch’ien, Po Chu-i, Su Shih and Yuan Mei. Overall, was was struck by the frequency of a few themes. The first is wine drinking. I knew from Li Po that this was a major concern of golden age Chinese (Song dynasty) writing but it really is a through line over thousands of years. It’s interesting since I’ve been to China and drinking is not a big part of their culture anymore. Lots of smoking and gambling, vice-wise, but I didn’t see people really drinking like crazy, I would love to know why and how this fell off. Is it a communism thing? Secondly, there is a lot of poetry here, much of it quite beautiful and resonant with me, about just ignoring society and doing your own thing. Often this thing is drinking, but also just wandering the mountains or thinking about the clouds. There is a desire for detachment in so much of this I was wondering if it was a function of Seaton’s selection, or just a through line in Chinese art. This book really gave me what I wanted, which was a broad overview and some good leads on what poets to look up next. I’m planning on diving more into a handful of these writers. If only I was good at learning languages (I am, in fact, worse than average), Chinese would really be one to know. 

Flourishing and withering are fated

Stop coveting, stop plotting

Simply approach the thing in the cup”

- Kuan Yun-Shih

“Go find yourself a place to flop

And flop there” 

-Kuan Han-ch’ing

“To know things change is fine but

Not as good as 

Mornings, evenings,

Drinking wine” 

-Ch’en Ts’ao-an

SHADOW TICKET - THOMAS PYNCHON

If Pynchon writes it, I’m gonna read it. He’s one of the authors I’m a completist (except, to my shame, his short story collection, which I’ll get to soon) with and next year I hope to reread the three biggies in his oeuvre. He’s quite old, and there is a question, to which I will return, about whether or not this will be his final work. Honestly, it is tricky to read this book without that in mind. That being said, it’s classic Pynchon. It follows that basic Pynchon framework, it follows a mystery through a discrete period a time, branching off and digressing the total effect being something like glimpses of vast forces and dark conspiracies. It’s silly and funny, there are lots of song lyrics and some tonal playfulness (he almost always writes, “says” as “sez” for instance) and the general sense that the world’s smartest stoner is telling you a bizarre shaggy dog story. Like Inherent Vice, the book it’s most similar to, the plot follows a detective adjacent character, in this version, it’s a former strikebreaker turned private eye at a big private investigator company, who is trying to find a missing woman, in this version, the heiress to a cheese fortune. But, as in all Pynchon, the story is not really the story, it’s an excuse to flush out a world. In Shadow Ticket, we’re looking at the 30’s. Pynchon has now set novels in the immediate post war, the early 70’s, Colonial Amerika, the 50’s, the early 60’s, the turn of the millennium and the turn between the 19th and 20th centuries. Each time he really focuses on the forces and currents that shape the world and how dreams for better worlds are often thwarted by powerful, controlling forces who are better organized and better able to play the game than those who oppose them. This setting is particularly harrowing since we, the readers, know very much how this story ends. When we see fascists from across the world gathering and plotting we know it isn’t ideal chatter or only dumb bullshit. I know that certain big name reviews have suggested this novel doesn’t really have much to do with the present (and that this is a bad quality) but, man, hard to not see us as in a very similar place right now. Which isn’t to say that this book is a bummer. Like I said, it’s funny, whacky, quirky and really fun to read. Pynchon, as is his style, will whipsaw between Windingos and Thermines and Golems and Vampires and secret submarines and motorcycles, each time giving us quick, tasty little asides and short vignettes. His powers haven’t diminished at all, the man is firing on all cylinders, even in his late 80’s. One wonders how many of this size novel he could have written, if he’d stuck to only the Vinelands and Bleeding Edges and Inherent Vices, would he have written half a dozen more? One gets the sense that he could set one of these whenever he wanted, his knowledge of history and culture seems so vast and his viewpoint so unique that I’d read him in any period. Instead, he has peppered his life’s work with the aforementioned 3 massive novels that really show what he can do. I prefer those books, I think they’re really incredible and one-of-a-kind. There is a rumor that he has one more like that in him, hopefully mostly if not all finished about the period around the Civil War, one of the most pivotal points in Amerikan history he hasn’t directly addressed. I can only pray that a)this is real and b)we get to someday read this. If you’re looking to start the Pynchon journey, this would be a great entry point. Short (by his standards) propulsive, fun and the wellspring of many a quality ponder.

THE KING OF VIDEO POKER - PAOLO IACOVELLI

This was a true blind pick-up. I wanted a really short book I could read in a day or two while I wait for the new Pynchon, and I saw this at the library. The title struck me, because video poker did make me think about the 2017 Vegas shooting, and when I picked the book up, I realized that that was, in fact, the topic of this short book. Like many people, I find that particular mass shooting particularly dracular. There’s something up with it. Not only is the body count unreal, 60 killed, almost 500 shot, Paddock, the shooter, is such a black hole. He’s not young, like so many of these mass killers, he doesn’t have a history of violence, the way he made his living is so strange (video poker? How do you even excel at a totally mathematically closed game?), he left no manifesto or clear motive (the only notes they found in the room were calculations he made for the shooting), there was nothing physiologically wrong with his brain, he killed himself long before the police breached the door of his suite, meaning he could have killed more but choose to stop. The list truly goes on. Of course, this has meant a number of conspiracy theories, many involving an arms deal and the Saudis but none of which have ever made much sense to me, all seeking to make sense of the senseless. This novel does not address any of this, there is no hint that Paddock didn’t perpetuate the attack, but instead seeks to get into Paddock's head in the days and months before the Oct. 1st shooting. He comes off as a more pathetic Bret Easton Ellis character. While Ellis’ books are full of empty, sad men, many of whom are morally bankrupt, Patrick Bateman most famously, they are also very cool. They go to the right restaurants, and have girlfriends and boyfriends who are beautiful and desirable. They go to the best clubs and have cool apartments in hip neighborhoods. Paddock does not have any of this, he’s rich but rizz-less. He makes his money in the stupidest, least cool way possible, winning at videopoker. He gets to eat for free and stay for free at all these fancy hotels because he’s a high-roller, but he dresses like shit and no one respects him. His family thinks he’s a weirdo, he has no real friends, he catches feelings for the young hooker he hangs out with. None of the cool facade the Ellis show us, just the emptiness. But in other ways, it is a very Ellis novel, his characters also sort of float around aimlessly, from thing-that’s-supposed-to-make-them-feel-good to another thing-that’s-supposed-to-make-them-feel-good. He even includes a leitmotif of the character seeing and thinking about a billboard (“disappear here” in Less than Zero, “No Limits” here) which made this a bit too close to Ellis for me. But the Ellis critique does still work, there is a nihilistic, hedonistic hole at the center of Amerika, and certainly at the center of Vegas. The book doesn’t quite sell its theory, that Paddock was empty and felt that carrying off a huge mass shooting would be a real accomplishment that would make him famous, but that is the risk about writing a novel seeking to explain or elucidate something that is, ultimately, unknowable. It’s an engaging quick read, it was fun to devour in a day and a half, it’s well written and does a good job moving forward even when nothing much is happening. It really did a good job invoking the emptiness of driving and gambling and spending. But it doesn’t really have a good, original take on Paddock, he just comes off as another sad, empty guy, rich but otherwise a very well-known and common type of guy. So why did he do what he did? No real answers or theories here. I am interested in what the author writes next, this is his debut novel, but I am still on the lookout for good art or theory made in response to the Vegas shooting. 

NIGHT TRAIN TO SUGAR HILL - ICEBERG SLIM

Now this is bittersweet. I’ve finally completed the Iceberg Slim oeuvre. 10 excellent books; one quite famous, Pimp, while the rest linger in a sort of forgotten purgatory. Which is a huge shame. While other genre writers and/or crime writers have seen this stock rise and are now considered literary or high art or worth studying (like PKD in sci-fi, or someone like Ellory or Leonard in crime) Slim hasn’t really gotten this treatment. Rest assured though, he is as worthy of a reappraisal and rediscovery and a Library of Congress addition of his work as anyone. His crime stories are insanely original, fun to read even when they’re new moon dark, propulsive in the style of the best genre writing and possess that rare quality where they occasionally “open up” and illuminate larger themes about the Black experience in Amerika or the nature of Capitalism. Which is not to say they’re perfect, they are parts in all the books where the dialogue is a bit pat or stilted and there are often flat characters, but no more so than the aforementioned PKD. It’s just so sad he got pigeon-holed the way he did as the writer of a book about pimping that most people haven’t read and assume is an endorsement of the profession. But all that aside, on to this novel. Like Doom Fox, the other “final” Slim novel that was written towards the end of his life and wasn’t published until after his death, Night Train, is about Los Angeles, South Central specifically, and the crack trade. Slim lived out the last of his years in the city of angels, he saw firsthand the devastation of the CIA sponsored crack epidemic and died during the 92 riots. All of his work is more political than he’s given credit for but the last few novels are particularly so. Which is not to say that this book is polemic or dry, it’s really a fun, grimey crime story. It’s about a clear Slim stand-in character who’s trying to mentor a younger man who’s got an evil YT wife. She’s also involved with a gang-connected cocaine dealer who is himself connected with a cartel member who supplies the cocaine. As you can imagine, the situation gets out of control as various characters try to cheat and fuck-over one another. It’s bleak, almost everyone is dead by the end, the cycle of vengeance is a big theme. There are multiple deaths from smoking cyanide-laced crack, which had me wondering if this is possible. There is a voodoo subplot this not handled with the most sensitivity (the room where the practitioner calls upon the loas is full of “skrunken heads”) but it another entry into the category of Slim books that feature the supernatural or occult, a mode of his I really like and wish he’d explored further. You get the sense that he could have written 50 of these things, if his publishers hadn’t been stealing his money and he could have spent the last few decades of his life cranking out these pulpy genre novels we would have gotten a handful of total gems. I’m sad there’s no more Slim for me to read, but, on the plus side, I now have a complete list (perhaps the only one of its kind) of the Iceberg Slim street names. Check the “words” section of this webpage for the whole list.