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.

AN ORESTEIA - trans. ANNE CARSON

Now this book presents an interesting question for this project. Typically, I do like the credit the translator, since their work is often overlooked, but as a secondary author. With this book, I’m crediting Anne Carson as the primary author even though this is actually a collection of translated plays. Typically, Oresteia refers to the three play cycle written by Aeschylus that tells of what happens to the Atreus family after the Trojan war. Carson switches it up and tells the same story but through 3 authors. She presents her translations of Agamemnon by Aiskhylos, Electra by Sophokles and Orestes by Euripides, which is the same story but from three different perspectives. Each play gets an intro from Carson that doesn’t help illuminate the historical context as much as give Carson's bizarre and brilliant thoughts, such as declaring that a messenger is, “a sort of hysterical Trojan version of Venus Xtravaganza” or writing that, “Sometimes I wonder if Euripides saw the very texture of reality as ironic.” The last play in her cycle, Orestes by Euripides was my favorite this time. It's so unhinged and fast moving that you can really imagine it staged in your mind. It wrestles with the bigger questions of these series of plays, namely, where is the line between legitimate and illegitimate when it comes to vengeance? Who gets to seek vengeance? Agamenom is helping his brother seek vengeance for having his wife taken which starts the Trojan war, he kills his own daughter in order to get the winds moving correctly (which asks a lot about the Greek relationship to human sacrifice, something that also comes up in the Iliad). His wife kills him when he returns, is that justice? What about when her son kills her for killing his father? What about vengeance for starting a war that killed thousands of Greeks? Like I said, I feel that the last play, Orestes, takes these questions on most directly, especially the question of whether it was okay for Klytaimestra to kill Agamenon, as revenge for him killing their daughter. Or maybe she did it mostly because she fell in love with a new person and just wanted him dead. The typically hyper-misogonist Greeks are given a bit more nuance w/r/t women here. It’s also interesting to think of all of this as a continuation of the Trojan war story line, just like the Odyssey, this is what happens afterwards and this is what happened why the men were away at war. There are some beautiful/strange Carson translations here like, “The curses are working./ Under the ground / dead men are alive / with their black lips moving, / black mouths sucking / on the soles of killer’s feet.” and I like her use of compound words like Godruined. Overall, if you dig Carson’s thing, or if you’re familiar with these stories and like ancient Greek shit, this is a good pickup. I’d love to see this staged. 

SOLDIER OF THE MIST - GENE WOLFE

Wolfe truly is the puzzlemaster. If you’re not familiar, Wolfe wrote the greatest and most complicated Fantasy (here I’m including Sci-Fi as a subgenre of fantasy) epic of all time, the 12 volume Solar Cycle, which is so baroque, tightly plotted and full of insane detail and mindbenders that it’s hard to believe a single person wrote it, let alone the man who invented the machine that makes Pringles. Wolfe loves a diegetic manuscript, where the thing we are reading is created within the story we’re being told under specific conditions that we should consider when we’re trying to figure out what’s really going on. He also loves an insane twist on this technique. In BotNS, the concept is that Severian is writing the “novels” as they exist to us, and he also has a perfect memory (you have to figure out what he’s lying about). The wonderful novella Seven American Nights, features a text that is a journal that might have pages missing and that the author was drugged for part of (you have to guess what part he’s drugged for and what’s missing). This one is no different but the concept this time is that a man wakes up with no ability to form memories beyond a day, so he writes down everything he remembers on a papyrus and rereads it. This papyrus is the novel. Ideally, he’d read the whole thing and write new stuff down everyday, but life gets busy and there are large breaks where we have to guess what has happened in the gap, or listen to what another character says to Latro, the man writing. Latro spends the book trying to remember where he was from and thus get reunited with his formal life. That could have been enough, but this is Wolfe so Latro also has the ability to see the Gods and when he touches them, everyone else can see them too. Actually, not even that is enough, Latro is a not Greek, we come to guess that he’s actually from Rome, though this is never stated outright (hardly anything ever is in Wolfe) so he records the names of towns and people as he hears them, so places like Sparta become Rope, because the Greek word  spartē means rope. There are a million examples of this in the book, which adds a whole other layer on top. But back to the story, we come to understand that he’s a mercenary soldier who was fighting for Xerxes during his attempted conquest of ancient Greece. We come to understand that he was probably cursed by Demeter and needs to travel to her temple to be healed. There is very interesting stuff about the various moon-associated goddesses and the triple goddess of Persophone, Hecate, and Demeter. There is lots about the Great Mother and whether or not the different names across different cultures, such as Demeter and Gaea who have very similar attributes, are the same characters. And, while it is all very confusing, it’s also a lot of fun, especially if you’re into ancient Greek shit. There’s a great scene where a necromancer drunkenly boasts he can raise the dead at a party, people bet that he can’t and everyone walks to a graveyard to see what’s up. There’s another soldier with Latro for most of the book who’s African and can’t speak Greek but he can understand it, which is a situation I’ve found myself in half a dozen times and is rendered quite well. One last thought, at the end of the book, like the last few pages, *spoiler alert* we find out that there is a werewolf. Latro, of course, has forgotten who he’s looking at when the wolf changes back to a man, but we are lead to believe that it’s a character that we’ve already met. I’m not going to speculate as to who that character is here, but I will point out something about werewolves this made me notice. Werewolves are, as far as I can tell, always men. Unlike the Vampire or the Zombie, which have both male and female depictions, or the Siren, which is always a woman, the Werewolf is a male-monster. This seems strange because they’re so associated with the moon, which is traditionally thought of as female. In this book the relationship between the various moon goddesses is deeply explored and explains why there is a werewolf. What gives? Irregardless, I’m excited to read the other two in the series. 

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.