CAPITAL vol. 1 - KARL MARX (trans. Ben Fowkes)

I set a goal this year to read Capital, all three parts, and I fear I might be a bit behind schedule to get it all down, especially given everything else I’ve got going on. Even with this first one, I read about half on a Kindle about 6 months ago, then bought a physical copy to finish up. But enough preamble, this book is predictably great. Communism and Marxism is so deeply buried under almost 200 years of propaganda and bullshit that it’s hard to remember that this guy actually wrote a book where he lays his ideas out and you can read this book instead of the endless braindead commentary that has accrued. Sadly, since he also wrote the short, polemical Communist Manifesto, people mostly just read that and claim they’ve “read Marx” (Jordan Peterson has made a whole career this way) but there isn’t really a substitute for Capital itself. And while it is massive and through it’s also insanely well written and captivating. Remember that peasants all over the world have read this thing and changed their lives and history. Now, there is the issue that this book is so through that parts of it, especially when he gets in his bag w/r/t the tables of specific economic data or goes on and on about British working conditions, it can be boring. He’s better to read on the more abstract issues and concepts than he is on the specifics of the world he lived in, but you can’t help but admire the level of work and detail that goes into these passages. This is the best book ever written about capitalism and how it works (even if you disagree with his prescriptions and predictions) and it’s foolish to think you can understand how the economy and politics works without it. It’s unbelievable that one guy wrote this over decades in exile, mostly in a library reading room in London, at the beginning of industrial capitalism. It’s so erudite and complex, full of quotes in half a dozen languages, biblical and literary references, smart and cool turns of phrase and passages, tables of economic data that he analyzes and a billion new ideas and concepts. We’re on the other end of the process he saw coming, the West and especially America, has largely de-industrialized and the international situation, economically, is several orders of magnitude more complex than it was when he came up with all of this. Yet, it is still quite relevant. The concepts he fleshes out, like the commodity or productive labor or surplus-value, all still make total sense and are invaluable if you’re trying to figure out what’s going on in the world. This is not to say he’s god or saw everything, you still need updates and different views on this stuff to make it all cohere. He was writing as a man in Europe during the middle/late 1800s, there’s a lot of stuff he missed, but even these critiques are building and fleshing out what he saw. In the USA communism is a Bête noire and not discussed or taken seriously at all, for obvious reasons, though since this next century belongs to China, a country that very much does take this stuff seriously, I can only imagine that his work is going to become more relevant. I’m excited for the other two volumes.


“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in the mines of the indigenous populations of that continent,the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of capitalist production.”


“It was the “strange god” who perched himself side by side with the old divinities of Europe on the altar, and one fine day threw them all overboard with a shove and a kick. It proclaimed the making of profits as the ultimate and sole purpose of mankind.”

THE FORT BRAGG CARTEL - SETH HARP

I have been waiting for this one for a while. I remember the article that Harp wrote a few years ago about the weird deaths at Fort Bragg and saw that he kept documenting them on Twitter over the span of a few years and then learned he was going to write a whole book about the situation and, given that it touches upon quite a few personal interests of mine, I was psyched. But even before that, I’m someone who grew up in North Carolina, I’ve long known and heard legends about the dark vortex that is Ft. Bragg and Fayettnam, as it was even called when I was a kid in the 90’s and early 2000’s. I’ve been there. It’s an insanely evil place, you can feel it in the air, the vibe is completely fucked. There is a constant parade of bizarre and sinister shit that bubbles up in the region. I’m glad someone finally put all of it in one place. In some sense the book bites off more than it can chew. Or, more charitably, it suggests a half dozen lines of inquiry to report out, and, if we lived in a real country with a real press, people would look into these things. But we don’t so I doubt we’ll ever get to the bottom of any of the more juicy stuff. And I do mean juicy. The most fascinating level that this book operates on is the GWOT hyper-cartel stuff. For twenty years Afghanistan was the largest narco-state in human history. They produced and moved more dope than any entity that has ever existed. We, the USA, were in power during this period, choosing to rule through a series of pedophile warlords (not even a little bit of an exaggeration) that were so hated by the population that they couldn’t last even a few months after we left. It seems beyond obvious to me that the US took an active role in this dope dealing. The official explanation, which is also the one they tried with the Contra affair, is that, yes, there was drug dealing by our allies or renegade Americans, and we either didn’t know or looked the other way and we all feel bad that it happened. Like in Central America, this seems like bullshit. I believe that we did actively facilitate this, I don’t think it was just a few rogue psychos in the special forces who tried to traffic drugs back. I think that the fact that Iran and Russia had enormous floods of cheap heroin was the result of policy and was made to happen. Russia has claimed that they have footage of dope being moved on American military planes, no one in our useless press will follow up on this (as an aside, you’ve got to wonder if the last couple of years worth of Russia “disinfo” hysteria is, at least partially, to inoculate ourselves against exactly this sort of stuff) and, sadly, this book does not fully pursue this angle, and instead looks at the layer below. Likewise, the book also suggests that Dubai might be where all of this money went (imagine how much money was made on all this dealing, now look at Afganistan, where did that money go?) but he never gets anything beyond speculation on this front. That’s the really big picture stuff that remains just out of view, what this book focuses more directly on is the layer below this, where our special forces guys operate. The special forces model is interesting and I’m glad it’s getting more attention. I’d frame it thus: starting after WWII, warfare changed in a profound way, no longer were most wars army vs. army, instead it was an asymmetrical fighting and counter-insurgency. And, as is brought up many time in this book, the model, for the US, was the Phoenix Program, the vietnam war era assassination program. The twist seems to be that after Vietnam and then the beginning of the Iraq war, the casualty numbers were too high. Americans could stomach dishing out death by the millions, but wouldn’t tolerate hundreds of our boys getting killed. So we settled on a strategy of just death squads. We could train these operators well enough that when they were travelling to some of the poorest places in the world, storming people's homes in the dead of night, with the full technical support of Earth’s largest war machine, and killing everyone there, they rarely were killed themselves. The number of American deaths was kept low enough that this program could run for decades. Just hundreds thousands of people killed, all over the world, by a legion of high-skilled hitmen. But, like the Nazis before us, we’ve come to learn that there are problems associated with keeping this many death squads around. Here the book reminded me of Masters of Death, a book about the Einsatzgruppen, the SS who carried out the death-by-shooting segment of the holocaust, which was much larger than the more famous shower-gassing technique. Turns out that this process makes the people carrying it out insane. This book follows a Delta Force guy who descends into drug-taking and crack-addiction and kills his best friend, in front of both of their children, at the tail-end of a monumental binge while on a trip to Disney World. He goes on to deal drugs and gets murdered on-base along with a friend of his. It’s an unbelievable story. I’m not as interested in this tale, as salacious and amazing as it is, as I am in the larger network thing I discussed earlier, and I’m always a bit wary/tired of stories that center our troops, but it was engaging and well written. Towards the end he just kinda throws in other bizarre crimes that occurred in the Ft. Bragg orbit. The acid dealer (can you imagine taking acid on Ft. Bragg?) who ended up decapitated on a camping trip was particularly gripping, I remember that story and this is the best write up I’ve seen. But all that stuff was not quite as intriguing as the larger-scale stuff. I really hope people continue to look into those broader angels: how the Afghan narcostate worked, where did the money go and what did it fund, and how did the US government manage it.

THE FALL OF HYPERION - DAN SIMMONS

I wasn’t in a rush to read this other volume in the Hyperion tetralogy, despite feeling warmly about the first one. But, my brother had a copy and I decided to take it down as my last novel before I start school again and have less time to read. This one is a direct sequel to Hyperion and takes place exactly where the last one left off. While the last book had a sort of fun Canterbury Tales style structure, where pilgrims shared their stories with one another to pass the time, this one is more straightforward. It does jump between focuses and there is one POV character but it’s all basically telling the same story. To recap, the the future, there are 3 main groups, humans who live on worlds connected by teleportation portals called farcasters all of whom live under a government and system called the Hegemony of Man, sentient AIs who are known as the TechnoCore, and former humans who have chosen to live in space and have mutated, known as the Ousters. These groups are in conflict and enter into a sort of apocalyptic battle with one another, while a smaller group travels to the planet Hyperion where these strange structures known as the Time Tombs and a strange creature known as the Shrike are based. As one might guess, the Shrike and Time Tombs have a lot of relevance to the larger war. The background world-building stuff remains really good in this book. I like that there are new religions in this future world, the largest being Zen Gnosticism, which seems to be popular since it has no real requirements and no notion of sin (basically a space version of the California ideology), as well as a tree based religion called Muirism which goes on to play a big role in the story. I like that they have an affinity for the Shrike since the latter has an enormous, stainless steel “tree of pain” upon which he impales his undying victims. I like the idea that the farcasters allow for houses and streets and rivers that spans dozens of worlds, as well as differences between people based on the amount of gravity that each world has. The book does a good job paying off the premise, the twists towards the end as well as the resolution were satisfying. I’m not sure I fully understand what “moves backwards in time” means and the Shrike himself remains pretty mysterious. Additionally, it still doesn’t make sense why one of the half-robot cybrid characters was John Keats besides the fact that Keats wrote a poem called Hyperion and Simmons seems to be really into him. That part didn’t pay off for me. Overall, I’d say it pretty imaginative and fun. It reads fast and has lots of cool sections and ideas. It feels like part two and, along with Hyperion, seems to basically be one long book. I’m not sure I’ll rush out to read the other two in this series, the story seems told and over, but I’m glad a finished the two

OLD GODS NEW ENIGMAS - MIKE DAVIS

Always good to tap in with uncle Mike Davis. After his death, a year or so ago, I was pretty bummed. Davis was the rare sort of author who was a total fucking genius, seemed to have had some real life experiences and was almost always on the right side of important political questions. City of Quartz is probably the best book written about any city, full stop, and his other work, on slums and famines and 60’s history all knock insanely hard. This one is a bit different than the others I’ve read. It’s less historical and more theoretical. It is a collection of 4 essays, one of which is book-length by itself, about more abstract themes. Two of them are about climate change and the history of science w/r/t climate change. Did you know Kropotkin, of “bread book” fame, discovered the ice age? Weird stuff. He talks about how climate change has been thought of historically, and what we can all expect going forward. Spoiler alert, it’s bad, and we’ll need a truly unprecedented level of planetary solidarity to avoid the worst. Davis has long banged the drum of climate catastrophism, and here, in one of his last books, I think he lays the problem out clearly and suggests a beautiful vision of urban, environmentally balanced living (the man loves the city as an idea like almost no other) but it’s hard, sitting here in Babylon in 2025, to see this coming to pass. Otherwise, there is an essay about Nationalism and the long piece, the heart of the book, that seeks to trace out how the working class came to think of itself as such, and how class consciousness came to be. Historically, these are fascinating. He does a great job linking various struggles across the world and shows how they draw from and build on one another. Theoretically, Davis is less rigorous. Maybe since I’m reading Capital at the same time, the level of academic rigor I’ve grown accustomed to has been raised artificially high. But he’ll do things like conflate the working class and proletariat or talk about labor as a whole and productive labor in the same way that doesn’t feel as sharp to me. He takes some shots at Stalin and the Soviet system that I wish he’d investigate further. Now, part of this is my fault. I feel like one comes to David for the history and quality writing, and that is here, but he presents this book as one about theory and Marxism (it’s in the subtitle) and when I see those words together, I expect the book to get very granular and specific. This level of clear-headedness is one of the many virtues of marxism as a leftist tradition against something more vibes-based and less rigorous like anarchist writing. All that being said, Davis rocks, I’ll continue to read anything he wrote.

500 YEARS OF INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE COMIC BOOK - GORD HILL

Another random pick-up and the first comic of the year. I actually read another comic earlier this summer but I haven’t reviewed it yet. Lazy, I know. Anyway, this volume caught my attention because it’s oversized and very colorful. Which, thankfully continues throughout. The panels are very clear and legible, the lines are strong and the colors are bright. Even though this book covers a lot of battles and war, the action never gets crazy, as far as the art goes. There is depiction of the aftermath of a mass beheading as well as a panel depicting Aztec sacrifice. There is only one splash panel in the whole thing. I did like that Hill chose to often show looks of anger and defiance, rather than sorrow and resignation, on his native characters during the numerous defeats and atrocities they suffered. All that being said, the book is much more a project of information rather than a showcase for art. Like a beautifully illustrated zine. While it would have been quite different and interesting to say, had each episode illustrated by someone different, perhaps a current artist from the tribe being discussed, I appreciated that the art took a back seat to the information. And speaking of information, this book was incredibly informative. There were stories I knew pretty well, the Jamestown saga, Central Mexico, Columbus, the Inca, Santa Fe Pueblo revolt, as well as half-a-dozen or so that I only halfway remembered or had never heard of. It really does a great job spanning across the Americas. From Chile to Northern Canada, New York to Seattle. It does a good job despelling the idea that the Natives just sort of died off from disease and just not being equipped for the modern world, and that the YT man may have done some bad stuff but these things happen. Instead we see a centuries long, calculated genocide, with the actors changing but the ultimate goal exactly the same as it was in 1492. There was an interesting fact about the first ranger units, who of course are the precursors to our various Special Forces Operators, being formed out of a response to a devastating loss to the battle of Mononagaela and the need to learn native tactics. The author is Canadian so the book does seem to put more of an emphasis, especially in the modern era, of Canadian actions. This was great for me, I certainly do not know enough about indigenous resistance in Canada. This would be a great gift and is a wonderful resource, it’s so handy to have all these dates, from all these struggles all in the same place. You can get this information in books about discrete areas or time-frames but to put all the “big hits” in one easy to read volume is a great service. Obviously, each episode deserves several books explaining the entire context, but as an overview, this is really needed.

INVITATION TO A BEHEADING - VLADIMIR NABOKOV (trans. DMITRI NABOKOV)

I’m not sure why I haven’t read more Nabokov. I’ve done Lolita and Pale Fire and loved them both but I haven’t ventured further than that. The library here has a bunch of them, and I grabbed Invitation at quasi-random. All I knew was that it was one of the Russian novels and that it has a reputation as being really Kafka-esque. That turned out to be wrong. It shares The Trail’s basic premise, namely that someone is caught in a vast legal system they don’t understand, but otherwise the tone is quite different. Kafka is sad and absurd, this book is absurd but it’s much funnier and zanier. The book begins with the main character, Cincinnatus C., being condemned to death and ends with his beheading. The 200 or so pages in between chronicles his time between these two events. He sits in his cell and contemplates what will happen to him. He tries to figure out what he is even being charged with. He talks with his jailers and cell-mates. The family visits him but they bring all their own furniture. There are lots of funny absurd details like a spider in the cell that the jailer keeps feeding and a photo album that, in a sort of anticipation of AI videos, shows the imagined future of a child he knows. The writing is unbelievable. Every page includes a wonderful turn of phrase, like, “an evil drowsiness” or image, like finding out the spider we’ve followed the whole book is a toy. I have to believe that Vlad himself had a lot to do with this translation, though he claims in the forward that his son did almost all of it. I really admired the pacing of the book. He sets a pretty closed world for himself, a man in a jail cell, but each chapter, which all are almost exactly equal in length at ~10 pages (the ideal length for reading two before bed), features a short little, almost self-contained episode. And it doesn’t overstay its welcome, the book says what it has to say, moves forward constantly and ends at a climax. On that note, spoilers alert, I’d like to complain briefly about the packaging of this book. This Vintage International edition contains a description on the back that includes some major spoilers. It tells us what happens at the execution, which is the climax. It was so jarring to see this that I assumed the execution happened early in the book and the rest of the book was about the aftermath, but no, the book just spoils it (along with a number of other episodes, this book isn’t a thriller nor does it have major twists, but the back still tells us a small handful of things that it would have been more fun to discover myself). Also, the book jacket is wrong about what happens. The book claims that Cincinnatus, “simply wills his executioners out of existence; they disappear, along with the world they inhabit.” that is not what it seemed like to me, it seems instead that the last passage of the book, where Cincinnatus gets up from the execution block and wonders into the crowd as the world dissolves around him as he makes his way towards,”beings akin to him” is an image of him dying and his soul leaving his body. Either way, great little book, I will certainly be checking out more Nabokov. 

THE GILDED AUCTION BLOCK - SHANE MCCRAE

Another poetry book. I grabbed this one because I heard about McCrae’s more recent collection that features poems about hell, which sounded intriguing. Honestly, I wish the library had that one, the best poem in this collection is the “hell poem” which takes up the majority of this small volume and is far and away the best thing in this book. It is quite literal, the poem is about being in hell and being shown around hell by a sort of robot bird Virgil. Very cool, far out stuff. The other sections of the book try to take on the current moment more directly. Many begin with a quote from Donald Trump. Many address “America” directly and remind me of Ginsberg. However, like Ginsberg, that makes much of these seem outdated already. I’m not really sure what we get by saying something like “if Joe Arpaio was black, he wouldn’t have gotten a pardon” which is what the poem “Black Joe Arpaio” is about. Who is that for? What does that mean to tell me about the US? I liked “Guns will be guns” specifically the lines, “Try to control them boy and watch out the guns / themselves will start / killing / America they’re very sensitive" The second section of the book revolves more around personal poems that explore his memories and childhood in which he deploys this really cool looping, meandering style that does feel like someone trying to explain their memories to you without having smoothed out what they want to say first. There’s lots of strange spacing between words that act as quasi-linebreaks and lend a unique style that seems like real remembering. I think this book doesn’t work for me when it’s trying to engage very specific, real world issues, I just don’t need poetry for that. It’s at its best when it’s at its strangest and most removed from the “real world” Hopefully I can get my hands on the more complete hell poem in the near future.

THE INVISIBILITY CLOAK - GE FEI (trans. CANAAN MORSE)

I do not actually remember when I came across this, I must have been thinking about how to read more Chinese novels. I then somehow found out that this one is highly-regarded and available at my local library so I basically picked it up on a whim. Glad I did, this very short novel, practically a novella, hit a very fascinating tone. The back cover describes it as “comic” and things I’ve looked up about Ge on the internet suggest he is considered a premier “avant-garde” writer in China though both of these things don’t seem quite right, judging on just this book. The book definitely isn’t funny ha-ha, it sort of has an absurd quality, but a realistic absurdity. The main character, Cui, lives in modern Beijing and builds sound systems for the nouveau riche who blather on and on as he puts in the systems and who don’t really know or care about music, nor can they really tell the difference in the quality of the sound systems, they just know that these items are status symbols and therefore they want one. Cui’s life is falling apart, he needs to make one last big sale to allow himself to buy an apartment and move out of his sister’s house. His friend sets him up with a mysterious rich man who is willing to buy the “greatest stereo system of all time” for a lot of money. From there the book does get a little bizarre and fantastical, essentially in the last 2 or 3 chapters we veer off into what almost seems like a different book, much stranger than the more realistic first 80% of the book. That first half plays like social commentary, it speaks to the ways in which the rapid and amazing development of China and especially Beijing has changed life for its residents over the past 20 or so years. It’s very interesting to read this stuff as a non-Chinese person who admires and envies China’s development and the way they run their society. Obviously, I’m looking in from the outside and so there’s a lot of rose-tinted glasses sort of thinking going on, but man, if he thinks they are getting alienated from one another and valuing money over arts, he wouldn’t be able to kill himself fast enough if he spent time in the USA. Also, there’s some digressions about classical music, since that’s what these audio nuts want to listen to and a nice little section about Eric Satie, a personal favorite of mine. In contrast, the final part of the book gets further out and suggests Murakami or Márquez. Less truly supernatural than these two but more of a sort of dream-like vibe. The pace picks up substantially, we gloss over months and years in a sentence while the earlier sections were more slow going and slow burn. This is his only English book so far, I really enjoyed it and hope they translate more of his stuff. 


ZEROZEROZERO - ROBERT SAVIANO

I’ve kept on my Italy shit but this time I figured I’d read some non-fiction. Plus, I like that movie, Gomarrah, which is based on Saviano’s more famous book about Naples and the Camorrah. This is supposed to be a broader book about cocaine and the cocaine business, with an emphasis on European (especially Italian) criminal organizations. Sadly, this book is not good. For someone who is obsessed with shadowy underworlds and subterranean machinations, Saviano stops short every time of actually getting to the bottom of things. For example, at the very beginning of the book, he recounts the murder of DEA officer Kiki Camarena, who was tortured and murdered by the Guadalajara cartel in 1984 for leading an operation that busted up an enormous (perhaps the largest of all time) marijuana farm. The cartel was a major supplier of cocaine into the US at the time and Saviano as a springboard to talk about how this even both shows the power of the cartel and how the subsequent crackdown on the cartel lead to a splintering whose ripples are still being felt. The problem is that he leaves out the fact that the CIA had Camarena killed and CIA agent Félix Rodríguez was present at the torture to see what Camarena knew about this angle. This is why some but not all of the tapes made of this torture were recovered. The CIA was doing business with the cartel because they were using the cocaine money to surreptitiously fund anti-communists terrorists and fascist mercenaries in El Salvador and beyond. This is an established fact, Saviano could mount a case that this isn’t true (it is) but he ignores this part of the story, the part where crime and drugs intersect with real power, and instead paints it as a story of powerful cartels who are trying simply to make money. That’s one level short of what’s actually going on. As another example, he mentions that Bolivian cartels have stamped swastikas onto bricks of coke as a sort of fun-fact, not mentioning that actual Nazi Klaus Barbie ran that nation and cartel for decades, again, supported and guided by the USA in furtherance of broader Cold War strategy. It is as if you spoke about the opium trade in Afghanistan without mentioning the fact that the biggest dealers were protected by Amerika for exactly the same reasons. There is a level above the cartel bosses. The book goes into the fact that our banking system is deeply compromised by the drug money and other illegally laundered cash, he correcly points out that illegal money was the only money moving during the 2008 financial crisis and keep dozens of major banks, and thus our economy writ large, afloat. But he never really dives into what this actually means and perpetuates that idea that there is a line between the under and overworlds. Otherwise, the book is a bit all over the place. There’s this strange thing where some of the chapters are short prose-poems about cocaine. There are long bios about crime figures like Semion Mogilevich (who isn’t really a big drug guy and whose lawyer is the former FBI director, which he doesn’t mention) or Grisleda Blanco. There’s stuff about the Guatemalan special forces unit/death squad, the Kaibiles. There is interesting and new-to-me information about the ‘Ndrangheta. Very all over the place and ultimately disappointing. If you want to understand how international crime and drugs really works, you need to go a level deeper than what is available here. 


THE STORY OF THE LOST CHILD - ELANA FERRANTE

She fucking did it. This, the final volume of the ~1,600 page Neapolitan Novels quartet, sticks the landing. In fact, I’d argue that due to the accrued weight of the previous volumes, since every action in this book is seen in the light of the previous 3, this is the best of the series. A capstone that shows us how much can be done when an author takes the time to slowly set up and reveal an entire human life and the lives of an entire neighborhood. It’s frankly insane that the first volume of these books is the one that’s on all the best of lists. I actually think it’s because that is the least political of the 4 books and reviewers, especially American reviewers, are unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the political content of the later books. It is true that the book is about the friendship between two women, but it’s equally true that the book is about the history of Italy since WWII and especially the Years of Lead era and the political violence that NATO brought to that country. You have to know something about the Red Brigade and Propaganda Due in order to get everything that’s going on in the novel, since this aspect of the book isn’t foregrounded. A more conventional book would have centered the characters who are more directly involved in this struggle, but that isn’t the reality of most people’s lives and Ferrante is too good of a writer to do something conventional. As a result, I think lots of Amerikan reviewers miss this stuff or gloss over it or don’t really understand it (not to say that I’m an expert of Italian politics and history, but I do know what Gladio was and is) and focus on the non-political aspects of the novels. But, the book takes on a whole new resonance when you take these things into account, the connections between drugs and organized crime and anti-communist terrorism is at the heart of this volume now characters react to it, tells us so much about them and calls into question how we are living our lives now. Now, looking back at everyone’s life, who made the right choices? The militants? Those who tried to take on the gangsters more obliquely? Those who tried to work inside of the system? Those who tried to stay out of the fray? Where were mistakes made? Because in the end, the hope for a freer and fairer Italy is crushed. Some people’s lives improve, some don’t, but the gangsters who control the country at the beginning of the books are in charge at the end. Silvio Berlusconi is Prime Minister when the book closes. This volume also really dives into motherhood in a way I’ve never seen done so well before. The characters we’ve been following for so long have daughters and sons at this point and we’re shown how they handle this and the mistakes they make and the ambivalence some of them have, which, from where I sit, is a real taboo. Motherhood isn’t redemptive here, maybe it’s even a mistake. The portrait of what losing a child does to someone in this book is almost too painful (now that I actually have a kid) to dwell on. Like all the other books in the series, the writing is really tight and moves quickly, it’s so readable and the pacing settles into a wonderful groove. I’d say the last 50-100 pages compresses more time than any other section of the book, which could feel jarring in lesser hands but Ferrante manages to make it work and seem earned and natural. However, now I’ll get a little spoiler-y: The natural ending, where the narrator betrays their friendship by publishing a book similar to the one that we are reading and causes Lila to never speak with her again is wonderful to me and hits the exact right note. The book we are reading destroyed the friendship we are reading about. The epilogue, where Lenu discovers the dolls of their childhood, returned to her mysteriously, presumably by Lila, is a bit trite to me, seems a little too pat. But these are quibbles, the books are perfect. They sit comfortably right below 2666 as the greatest novels of the 21st century.

MORNINGSIDE - ARAN SHETTERLY

As a North Carolinian I’ve been interested in the 1979 Greensboro Massacre since I’ve known about it. Which, come to think of it, I’m not even sure when that was. Like the Wilmington coup, I was not taught about it in school despite how important it remains. This is now the second book I’ve read on the topic, which I believe is 100% of the books solely dedicated to this topic. This book has the same problem as the last one, namely, that he author refuses to put the pieces together and really say what is obvious. Namely, that Cone Mills and the GPD, FBI, and ATF worked together to assassinate a group of communist who were attempting to unionize and radicalize mill workers in the town. While they used Klan members and Nazis to carry this mission out, it was a government operation. The book hems and haws about what did the police actually know and was it simply a series of terrible mistakes and oversights that were made rather than taking the more obvious line that they planned and carried out this attack. They gave the Klan the parade route and times, even when the actual staging area, where the shooting happened was different than what was on the fliers announcing the march. “Informants” encouraged the action, made sure everyone was on time and convinced the racists to carry guns. The police made sure they weren’t in the area, told a cop who was in the area for another reason to leave before the shooting, and didn’t follow the Klan afterwards. What is one supposed to make of these facts? This was no different than the killings of Fred Hampton or Dr. King or Malcom X or Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter. Sometimes the government uses other groups or individuals to do these killings, sometimes the police do it themselves. This book is really bent on telling a redemptive narrative, about a city that redeems itself. But the facts don’t support this. The Klan got everything it wanted. The communist group split up, no one was ever held responsible, the police behind it went on to finish their careers with no problem and forces that committed these murders are very much in charge in both Greensboro and the rest of the US. He engages in some insane false equivalences, like when he writes, “but he and his comrades had done the same thing [used dehumanizing language] especially to the klansmen and Naize but also to the police and politicians.” Not to say the book isn’t worth reading. There are lots of good facts about NC and the 60’s and 70’s. There’s a good discussion of the struggle at A&T university and the use of undercovers by the FBI (tho this doesn’t go far enough and connect these incidents to the OKC bombing, which is the most extreme outcome of the FBI’s "infiltration" of right wing groups). I just wish he had the courage to write a book that wasn’t trying to shoe-horn in a “redemptive” narrative. We can’t make things better if we don’t acknowledge how bad things are.

THE SHADOW OF SIRIUS - W. S. MERWIN

Alright, another crack at trying to review a poetry book, something that I find significantly harder than reviewing any other type of book. Mostly because, in basically every case, I liked some of the poems, others sort of washed over me and were forgotten immediately. I picked this one up because it has a reputation as one of the better Merwin collections and because Merwin wrote one of my favorite poems ever, “For A Coming Extinction.” This one did feel more like a collection of poetry in the sense of unified themes and ideas, rather than all the poems a poet wrote in a discrete timeframe. These poems clearly are coming late in Merwin’s life, they are about the feeling of eternity, of going about your everyday life or engaging with nature and suddenly thinking about or feeling the reality of death. These poems are about memory and regret and loss, there's a lot of thinking back on those who are gone and epiphanies that such human losses are peddling. “and here we are / with our names for the days / the vast days that do not listen to us” is a typical example that also shows the sort of coolness that pervades these poems. He’s contemplative but never worked up. He’s sad but not devastated, like he’s looking at his situation with a sense of clear-eyed detachment. The end of my favorite poem in the collection reads: 

“...and it seems that I cherish

only now a joy I was not aware of

when it was here although it remains

out of reach and will not be caught or named

or called back and if I could make it stay

as I want to it would turn to pain.”

HIghlights how he’s aware of both joy and pain but manages to navigate between the two without really feeling either fully. It’s an impressive feat to summon this very specific mood. As a quick final aside, there is a lot of seasonal imagery in this book, lots of invocations of spring and summers turning into fall, to the point where I was sure he lived in upstate NY or New England or somewhere with really defined seasons and tough winters. But no, he apparently lived in Hawaii for many decades? Is he just remembering seasons? Does any part of Hawaii have a “winter” in the sense that most people mean? I suppose it is all metaphor but I found it a strange final twist, when I read the author bio at the end of the book. 


THE DESCENT OF ALETTE - ALICE NOTLEY

I had only heard of Notley but not looked deep into her stuff until I heard that she had passed earlier this year. Since I’ve been in my poetry bag, I decided to pick up her most famous work, The Descent of Alette. Not too often does one hear about modern epics. Book lengths poems that tell discrete, heroic stories, rich in metaphor and wide in scope. Notley did it though, this thing rocks and is a great example of a real avant-garde, something that is actually original and strange but not weird-for-the-sake-of-being-weird. The format of this thing is, as far as I know, totally unique. Instead of classic line breaks (which I had always thought of as the most basic unit of poetry) she places the rhythmic feet or unit in quotation marks. As she puts it in a note, “The quotation marks make the reader slow down and silently articulate - not slur over mentally - the phrases at the pace, and stresses, I intended.” And it really worked. Sometimes I read the shorter ones to the cadence of “Who We Be” but it did make me slow down and think about each small phrase. This choice really does give this thing a vibe I’ve never encountered before. Here’s a taste:


“So money” “became invisible” “Invisible money” “began to

Change hands” “Paid” “in invisible” “Things paid for”

“By invisible….” “Everyone knows” “everyone knows”


“If you have it or not” “if you have enough or not” All is

Exactly as” “before” “when there was money” “except”

“It isn’t printed” “isn’t seen” “But it is money”

“Just the same”


 As for the story, it’s likewise bizarre. Alette lives underground in an endless maze of subway tunnels. She comes to realize this world is ruled by the Tyrant, who she sets out to find and kill. Very classic epic poetry style set-up. In that vein she travels to all sorts of strange locations and meets all sorts of strange beings. Mermaids, giant snakes, strange caverns, and powerful owls populate the world.  She is dissolved and eaten, she meets the mother of all mothers and encounters a river of blood, all sorts of bizarre strange images and scenes abound. The pace is slow, dreamlike and very deliberate.  Utterly unique, I can’t wait to come back to this thing for years.

HOW CHINA WORKS - XIAOHUAN LAN (trans. GARY TOPP)

You ever feel like you’ve willed a book into existence? Or that something conspired to bring you an object you encountered in a dream? I have, for many decades since visiting, been quite interested in China. The culture for sure, but also the economics. The culture is actually relatively easier to engage with and encounter. Sure, there are still lots of Chinese novels that remains untranslated, especially relative to other languages of that size, but you can get a lot. Economics on the other hand is another story. The layers of propaganda in the English speaking world is so thick as to make the whole idea seem impossible. The two major strands of this propaganda are that a) it’s a communist hell hole that killed untold millions in famines and seeks to destroy us or b) it’s actually capitalist, they reformed after Mao and now they’re basically capitalists (with less freedoms) and any success they have is actually proof that capitalism works. Nonsense in either direction, but it’s been hard to figure out where to get real information. Then we get this book. It is basically an economics textbook that gives an overview of China’s economy currently, the methods and techniques they developed to get the country where it’s at, informed speculation as to its future and a pretty clear-eyed, fair discussion of the pro and cons of various decisions. I’d love to own a physical copy so I could refer to it when I see future news stories, but, alas, the thing is like $80 so I read it on my Kindle. I’ll do my best to summarize some of it but please keep in mind that, despite (or perhaps, indicative of) literally teaching economics at one point (lol) I am quite dumb. He locates a lot of the change with the 1994 tax overhaul which allowed for more central financial control and allowed the central government to direct development by sending money to the provinces and tasking these local governments with development.He also spends lots of time discussing the ways in which the local governments can leverage leasing the land, since, in China, only the government “owns” urban land but it can be leased and mortgaged for decades and these rights can be bought or sold. The local governments can also use and create entities called State-Controlled enterprises (SCE) and State-Owned enterprises (SOE) to directly invest in projects that seem important to development. For me the most shocking part was how the stated goal of the government was to improve people’s lives and increase development. And they really think about these problems and orient their efforts to achieve it and bureaucrats and politicians are measured by their ability to improve the lives of the people they represent. Imagine if Amerika's state politicians were judged on how well the developed and material improved the lives of the people in their state. No one even pretends to talk this way anymore, we only get culture-war bullshit and the most braindead proved-wrong-40-years-ago economics. It’s just so interesting to see a country even larger than the US orient itself around real results and tangible, good outcomes, rather than bizarre fidelity to the idea of a “free-market.” But this is why China is rising and the US is falling apart. As far as the future stuff goes, Lan points out that the large-scale trend of  local government using  real estate to spur development has done a great job in creating the conditions to encourage urbanization and a manufacturing boom, but this dynamic leaves contemporary China with the problem of needing to transition to a balanced consumer economy. Especially with heightened pressure from an increasing erratic and belligerent US. I hope they pull it off. There are many critiques one could make of China, their support of the Zionist Entity comes to mind, but one would be hard pressed to not envy their economic system and their governments commitment to doing what is necessary to raise everyone’s standard of living.

WRONG NORMA - ANNE CARSON

The poetry jag continues and has reached its zenith. I had tried to read this book early this year and couldn’t pay it the attention it needed. Now that I’m in a more poetry-centered space, I picked it up and can now easily declare it the best book of poems I’ve read this year. Carson is a fascinating figure to me. I’ve read a bunch of her stuff and I think it’s all excellent. I like her translations, I like her original work, I wish I could find a way to see her performances and whatnot that she does with her husband. Or, most of all, I wish I could have taken the “egocircus” class she used to teach at NYU. Anyway, this collection is a series of apparently unconnected short pieces. Some of which are clearly poems, some of which seem to be essays and others are basically short stories. She’s all over the place in this one. One section is narrated from the point of view of the sky. Another is an almost detective/noir story starring a blood-spatter expert. As a classist she remains fixated on words and etymology, especially when it bumps up against her deepest love, ancient Greek and the world of its speakers. She often touches on grief and memory. She always seems so alien and aloof. Her tone is so unique and specific, it is as if an ancient Greek, maybe Sappho, is writing about the modern world. It was interesting to see her flex her muscles and try some different stuff. Normally, or at least in the stuff I’ve read, she’s translating or retelling a myth. In both instances, she’s almost always really pushing these concepts to the limit, the “translations” are not at all literal or “correct” in the sense that we’d typically think about a translation. But this doesn’t arise from her being bad a translating, quite the opposite in fact, she’s pushing it beyond our expectations because her command of the Greek is so strong that the texts brings something out of her and it is that something she is trying to communicate, not the “meaning” in the text itself. Earlier this year, the other most famous woman Classicist, Emily Wilson, reviewed this book and took issue with Carson’s philological due diligence. To me this misses the point, she’s not really a translator, even when she says she is, she’s a poet who knows a lot of Greek and uses the Greek as a sort of door to get to where she wants to go. I’d recommend this for folks starting out with Carson. The pieces are strong and short, you can decided it it’s for you or not. 

OLIO - TYEHIMBA JESS

Now this is what I’m looking for in poetry. Jess’ book got a lot of attention when it came out a few years ago, but I didn’t get around to reading it until just now. The book is poetry in the broadest sense, though, to be sure, it does include some straight-forward poetry; it is an exploration of Black music in the generation that straddles emancipation, it includes the aforementioned poems as well as fictional interviews, a running litany of attacks on Black churches in America, short biographies of real figures like the conjoined McKoy twins, Blind Tom Wiggins, Henry “Box” Brown and half a dozen others, fold-out sections, drawings, and a new poetic form (or, at least, new to me) which Jess calls a syncopated sonnet which involves two voices speaking at once, their individual lines are side by side, which can be read one then the other, or alternating back and forth or any number of even more creative ways. Olio, after all, is the name for the “medley” section of minstrel shows that eventually evolved into vaudeville. Jess does a great job of invoking this sense of lots of things going on a once that can cohere in all sorts of different configurations, the whole things sort of writhes. One of the central stories involves a Black, disfigured WWI veteran who travels around the country as part of his railroad job and tries to interview people about Scott Joplin, perhaps the best known of all the early musicians involved in this book. This is perhaps the deepest but hardly the only exploration of this generation of folks, people who had been born either right before or right after the end of the Civil War and what sort of art they were able to create. This is the explosion of creativity that will eventually yield Jazz, Country, Folk and Blues and through that basically all modern American music. It was so interesting to see this dynamic and era explored in poetry. The poetry itself doesn’t sacrifice erudition or get in the way of the real history he is talking about, nor does it prize poetic excellence over real facts. Jess does both. Imma keep an eye on him.

ASK THE DUST - JOHN FANTE

This one has been on the radar since I lived in LA and heard this one one of the essential LA books. It takes place in Bunker Hill, a no-longer existing neighborhood that is in countless noir films. I used to work, partially, in the area that Bunker Hill used to occupy so it was fun to map what I know about the area onto the events and places mentioned in the book. The book itself is quite good, and its goodness rests on the strength of the voice. Fante writes as Arturo Bandini, a struggling writer, who moved from Colorado to LA to make it big. He’s delusional, full of himself, racist and mean. He struggles in the slums, he wanders the streets and worries about money. He tries to get laid but ends up talking himself out of it every time and giving more money than he has to prostitutes that he can’t even bring himself to sleep with. He gets infatuated with a Mexican waitress who he treats terribly. He gets stuck in a real odi et amo situation with her, while she falls in love with another man, who is also a writer (though a worse one). Their relationship is the crux of the book, he loves her, but he’s mean to her. She doesn’t really love him but tolerates and is confused by his actions. She loves this other man deeply and he doesn’t care about her. While I had assumed that the book would chart his descent into abjection and failure, the book switches it up and Arturo is actually successful. He sells stories and later a novel and has money. He tries to rescue the bar-maid by throwing money at her but, surprise, it doesn’t work. She vanishes into the desert. There is a very interesting subplot about her being addicted to Marijuana and going to a den to smoke it, which was apparently a completely dark room with people smoking in silence. Also, there is a man with a wooden leg which has a door which contains a joint. Very cool. Anyway, the writing itself is really strong, the book was easy to read and Fante really balances Bandini’s delusions and cruelty with real pathos and pity. It would be easy for him to just be super unlikable and a total asshole. It would also be easy to have this clear author stand-in be so pathetic that you feel sorry for him. Fante threads the needle, does both and neither, threading the needle and creating a character that actually feels real.

AUTHORITY - ANDRE LONG CHU

I really liked her last book, Females. I thought it was one of the more provocative books around trans issues I’ve read, and I occasionally read an article of hers that comes up, so I was pleased to see the library here had this latest one. Unlike Females, this one is a collection of short pieces that have appeared in magazines before, mostly reviews of books and shows, but also personal essays and a longer piece about critical authority. That titular piece, about authority, is so clearly a labor of love, she quotes from all over (Kant, Coleridge, etc.) and has so clearly thought deeply about the question of where critical authority comes from. Sadly, she cares about this much more than I. I would answer that question with, who cares if they have any “authority” here, how is their writing? I would read something from an expert if I wanted authority. I'm reading a critic because I want their take on something, and for that take to be provocative and interesting, authority be damned. Luckily, her’s is razor sharp. Almost all of the reviews are negative, I only remember the one about the TV show Yellowjackets being positive, but man, can she write a takedown. Doesn’t matter if I like the thing she’s reviewing (like Tao Lin) or dislike it (like Bret Easton Ellis) or even if it’s something I’m not really familiar with at all, like Zadie Smith, Chu is really fun to read taking something apart. On a sentence to sentence level, she’s an amazing writer. I hope we get more book length stuff from her. Several of the essays, most notably her essay about Asian-American identity (something that I’m pretty interested in, for whatever reason), were insightful and felt like they could have gone on much longer and developed nicely. She recently reviewed Ocean Vuong, in a piece that is too recent to be in this book, and touched on some of these same issues in a way that made me really hope she tackles this subject at length at some point. Anyway, great writer, very excited to have her around for a while

BUTTER - ASAKO YUZUKI (trans. POLLY BARTON)

My mom, who reads more current fiction than me, recommended this book to me when I came back from Japan. I kept the crime novel written by a Japanese woman theme going and gave her back OUT. This one couldn’t really be further than that pretty hard-edged noir-y novel I read a year or so ago. While this book is about a murderer, the crime element is mostly played down and the stuff about how impossible it is to be a woman in Japan is played up. The novel has a structure similar to Silence of the Lambs, but instead of a young FBI agent, a young reporter, Rika, goes to interview an infamous and charismatic murderer, Kajii (tho, whether or not she actually can be blamed for the deaths she’s accused of is more in play in this novel than it was with the late, great Dr. Lecter) and gets seduced by what the killer is saying. Kajii is obsessed with food and living for pleasure and is accused of using her cooking and hospitality to lure sad old salaraymen into her life and then killing them. Rika scars down her sad meals as quickly as possible and doesn’t know how to cook. In order to get Kajii to open up to her, Rika lets Kajii guide her into the world of food, eating the dishes that Kajii recommends and reporting back to her in their jail visits. As this goes on, Rika also begins to look into Kajii’s background and also starts to question her own relationship with food and pleasure and caring for others. The novel is largely about the expectations of Japanese women to live for others in their lives, cooking, cleaning, hosting and staying thin. When Rika becomes interested in cooking for her own pleasure and gains weight, she gets pushback from every corner. I’m not a woman, but I have lived in Japan and I will say that the expectations of patriarchy did seem particularly high there, and there is an element of self-denial that was preserved but seemed to fall more on women (and as an Amerikan this was very alien, we certainly don’t have that particular issue, we have the opposite problem) and I found this exploration in the book really interesting. Also, the food descriptions are amazing, and really did make me miss Japanese food dearly. My main complaint with this book is that there is too much going on. There are dozens of sub-plots and most of them don’t really go anywhere, like Rika’s boyfriend’s obsession with a girl-group that keeps getting brought up. Additionally, part of the book is a mystery that is trying to figure out what Kajii’s past was like and whether or not she actually killed these men, and another part is about Rika’s personal journey, the Kajii stuff sort of fizzles out, but it makes you wonder why we spent so much time on it then. But overall, I really like the book, it was a fun nighttime read. The finale of the book involves Rika cooking a whole turkey, thanksgiving style, for all her friends. Turkey isn’t something that people eat in Japan and most people don’t even have an oven at home, yet Thanksgiving is such a part of the Amerikan pop culture that they consume they’re familiar with the concept. When I taught in Japan, I did have a co-teacher ask me if everyone really ate turkey for thanksgiving, and I told him, yeah, that’s basically true, it’s pretty much a requirement, even though we don’t really eat turkey, and especially don’t bake a whole turkey, the rest of the year since it is a) a lot of work, and, b) not really that good. I asked him if he’d ever had turkey and he looked at me sort of shocked and said, “no, of course not, that’s like a zoo animal.”