YOU CAN’T WIN - JACK BLACK

I got this book because I found myself reading about it, specifically how much Burroughs liked the book, and happened to look up that the library where I was at the time, noticed it was on the shelf, grabbed it and read it over a few nights. It’s a great right-before-bed book. The story is pretty straight forward, it’s a memoir of a guy named Jack Black who lived as a hobo and thief (or “yegg,” in the very-evocative slang of the time) for most of his adult life. The book chronicles his life from sometime in the late 1880s up through 1910 or so. 30 years of train-hopping, burglary, opium-smoking, mugging, drinking, safe cracking and general hobo life. He spends maybe half of this time in jail so there is also lots of interesting stuff about prison life, things like the “straight-jacket punishment” and the effects of solitary and lashes. In a way, this is very similar to the Iceberg Slim books, though it chronicles a different (about 1 generation earlier) era and racial milieu (though there are Black, Native and Chinese Characters) of criminal life. As such, there is a veritable menagerie of amazing underworld names, listed below. And also, like Slim, there seems to be a looseness in how “literal” some of this stuff is. It purports to be totally truthful and features definitely real-life characters like Bat Masterson and Soapy Smith, but it also features things like hobos planning a robbery that they cover for by purposefully getting arrested, breaking out of jail, doing the robbery, hiding the money, returning the the jail and waiting out the sentence to go retrieve the loot. Not sure I believe this literally happened but it’s a good story. There’s so much good color and character about what low-life life was like at the turn of the century, a maze of opium-dens, railyard jungles, jail cells and all the rest. If you’re interested in that stuff it’s a great book, it reads quick, it stays exciting, doesn’t overstay it’s welcomed and (mostly) isn’t too preachy during the obligatory all-that-is-in-my-past-and-I-really-regret-it section.

Smiler

The Sanctimonious Kid (Sanc)

Soldier Johnnie

Salt Chunk Mary

Rebel George

Shorty

Soapy Smith

Bat Masterson

Gold Tooth

Foot-and-a-half George

Hinky Dink

Bathhouse John

Mush-Mouth Johnson

California Jack

Irish Amie

Jim Ham

St. Louis Frank

Hannible

Rochester Red

Cocky McAllister

Swede Pete

Spokane

Dirty Dick

Shorty

Chi Jimmy

THE NINETIES - CHUCK KLOSTERMAN

Truly insane that Klosterman has not written this book already. The man’s whole oeuvre, from his celebrity interview work to his debut about taking hair metal more seriously, is so deeply soaked in Gen X perspective and considerations that it seems impossible that he hasn’t directly confronted this topic. Well, he finally did it, and I saw it at the library so I picked it up to see what a writer I like can do on their favorite subject. The book, for better or worse, does exactly what it promises, it gives a pretty total overview of the 90’s in America from the mainstream perspective. And by mainstream, of course, he means YT and male. Part of the story of the 90’s was the destruction of the hegemony of the monoculture, as I’ve argued elsewhere on this site, the X-ers were the last all YT generation. Jay-Z and Kurt Cobain were born less than 2 years apart. Cobain is seen as completely totemic of Gen X, the ur X-er while Jay-Z typically isn’t thought of as Gen X at all. However, sitting in 2024 it is beyond obvious that Jay is a much more influential and important artist. The whole children of the 60’s radicals growing up around mass incarceration, gangs and crack, the broad-brush story for many gen X black folks, is skipped over. In fact, the golden era hip-hop of the 90’s is perhaps the biggest 90’s phenomena not discussed at all in the book. Which is maybe for the best, do I want Klosterman writing about Liquid Swords? Probably not. Gotta give the man credit for knowing his lane, I suppose. And his lane is ample. As always, there is sports stuff that I read with slightly more interest than I expect. This book includes some interesting political writing which is a bit new for Chuck. He lays out a strong (and I think indisputable) case that the US engaged in some pretty heavy manipulation of the 1996 Russian presidential election; he claims that there are now major conspiracies about the OKC bombing (to which I’d simply tell him to look into Wendy Painting) so he is at least taking big swings even when I don’t agree. Where does Klosterman go from here? This decade and the prevailing world-view and ethos of the time is so deeply enshrined in Chuck this feels like a pretty total statement. 

ELITE CAPTURE - Olúfhemi O. Táíwò

This is a buzzy little book I’ve been meaning to check out for a while now, especially since the 2020 protests where I got to see up close exactly the dynamic that Táíwò is describing in his book. This book, as the title suggests, documents the ways in which the elite are able to capture and then steer the discourse around justice and racial equality in such a way that their power is never truly questioned or diminished. So instead of, “why does the US operate a global empire of terror and domination?” it transforms into, “there should be more Black folxs on the board of Raytheon.” Capturing and co-opting the conversation around questions like “racial capitalism” to steer it away from capitalism writ large into a list of demands that they can negotiate with without breaking up or fundamentally changing the whole system. In some ways, this book is a victim of its own success. I kept reading about it and hearing references to it, alongside synopsis, and generally agreed with the idea and wanted to see what the full idea looked like, all fleshed out. Unfortunately, the book is quite short and punchy, which is good in the sense that more people will read it and consider the idea, but bad for those of us who already understand and accept the idea and want more of an in-depth and critically rigorous treatment. For example, there is actually a really interesting historical analogue to this, back in the 60’s the Amerikan establishment backed groups like R. Karenga’s US, who were Black nationalists and culturally oriented, against groups like the Panthers, who had a deeper critique and were Maoist. This book is too short to get into that or the numerous other examples in American history of this sort of dynamic being weaponized. Additionally, I was a bit disappointed that he never names Communism or Marxism and seems to go out of his way to avoid these topics. He quotes Cabral, Freire and talks at length about the PAIGC (a revolutionary group in Cape Verde/Guinea-Bissau) all of whom are pretty explicitly Communist/Marxist and are quite explicitly using this lens to avoid the exact elite capture he was talking about. You don’t have to say that Communism/Marxism is the only way to avoid elite capture, and you can certainly criticize a class-fundamental worldview but to avoid the question completely, seems weak. Overall, good and important idea and line of thinking, but I wanted much more. This is more of a long magazine article or primer than it is a serious take on a real problem.

THE AMERICAN RELIGION - HAROLD BLOOM

Always good to get some new insights from uncle Harold. I don’t agree with Bloom on much, but there is no denying that he’s a great writer who knows more poems than anyone who’s ever lived and he loves to take a big swing. What other critic is going to just call all slam poetry “the death of art” or complain early in the run, at the height of its cultural ubiquity, that Harry Potter was bad and stupid? This volume looked promising, Bloom tries to engage in some “religious criticism” which is when he treats a religion like a book and critiques and explains it, and tries to outline the American religion. This book seeks to be a total overview of American religion, he hops from Mormonism, to Fundamentalism, to Jehovah's Witness, Christian Science, New age and beyond. He’s at his strongest when he’s talking about Mormons and Baptists, as well as American religion as a whole. On this count, he is, uncharacteristically, too soft. He like to call American religion gnostic and orphic and enthusiastic, all of which is sort of true, though the main thing that characterizes American religion (or, to split hairs, American iterations and expressions of older traditions) is the individualized nature and the aggrandizement. It’s about you, alone with God; forgiven, and thus, righteous (regardless of your actual actions, those can always be forgiven and don’t really speak to the “true you”) and the ways and which relationships will make you prosperous. Bloom clocks these features but fails to call them what they actually are, which is Satanic. Are you worshiping the self and money/power/success? Call that whatever you want, but know that it is, ultimately, Satanic. If you’ve spent any time around American Christians, this conclusion is inevitable. There was some really interesting stuff about the Christan Scientists and Jehova’s witnesses (who Bloom has an almost RXKNephew-level disdain for) which are groups I was pretty unfamiliar with. The book was written in ‘91 so there are some interesting predictions. One being that Bush/Reagan are so tapped into the American Religion (he uses the phrase “Bushian Gnosticism” at one point) that there will never be another democratic president, which was technically wrong, though correct in the sense that every president since 1980 has been Reagan-in-spirit. He also thought that by 2020, 10% or more of the US would be Mormon, whereas the actual number now is around 1% and has been dropping in recent years. All interesting stuff, though the saddest bit of the book is what he misses. He has a chapter on New Age stuff and a chapter on the Black religious tradition, but both of these topics deserved a lot more. The New Age stuff is basically passed over because he hates the source material and he feels inadequate to talk at length about the Black religions of the US but, man, have these strains really proved to be important. New Age is basically everyone at this point, it shares Mormonism’s belief that one can spiritually improve one’s self to the point of godhood (also the basic premise of Scientology, which Bloom also dismisses in a sentence or two)  and Obama’s relationship with his black pastor was a major scandal for him. Plus, I would have loved him to go deeper on the Black Muslims and get into the Nations of Gods and Earth stuff so he could analyze Ghostface lyrics. Either way, very interesting and fun to read. It got me thinking about stuff I had not before and, being Bloom, it was quite well written and audacious. Wish he’d done more in this vein.

MY BRILLIANT FRIEND - ELENA FERRANTE

I’d heard about and wanted to read this book for years, basically since it and its sequels were translated into English. Recently, the NYT published a list of the best books of this millennium and this topped it, beating out my personal choice, 2666, a placement that rocketed it to the top of my personal to-read list. First and foremost, this book is no 2666. It’s amazing and brilliant and magical, one of the best I’ve read in a year or so, but it’s not on the 2666 level. Few books are as tapped-in and perfect as Bolano’s masterpiece, so that is no knock. Anyway, with all that aside, I loved this thing. It turned out to be quite appropriate to read this thing in the middle of Brat summer, an album that is also about female friendships and relationships and the ambivalence and rivalries, disappointments and love therein. Instead of investigating and interrogating the life of a mid-level pop-star/club girl, MBF follows a pair of girls in mid-century Napels who grow up in poverty and seek to escape their circumstances. The book follows the girls from birth until 16, when one of them marries. The girls are both quite smart and precocious, they both excel in school and are something of little geniuses. One of the more heartbreaking and poignant parts of the book occurs when the title is spoken and who is referring to whom as their “brilliant friend” is revealed. Because of the poverty and misogyny of their circumstances, only one of the girls, our narrator, is allowed to pursue schooling beyond the elementary level, the other main character is forced to drop out and has to navigate life without an education. There are two levels where I think this book really shines. First, it does a great job painting the world that we were in, but through the lens of the two girls. The misogyny of the time and place of the book means that these girls are cut out of the “real world” or deeper world. We hear about the political situation, the communists and fascists who populate post-war Italy, the organized crime and corruption that infect every aspect of their lives, but only through the eyes of these girls who never sit the reader or a reader surrogate down to “explain” what is going on and how these things work. We see them both struggle to live an ethical and moral life under these conditions and how impossible that proves to be. Secondly, the nature of their friendship is so incredibly drawn. The rivalry, jealously, affection, care, ambivalence, of a real friendship is not only there, it’s all there, all at once. It’s not “we’re friends but now we’re fighting and now we’ve made up,” instead its, “I”m not sure what you meant by that or how I feel about you right now,” all the time. The book has a pretty great and devastating ending, a real twist in the last sentences of the book, which ends with a wedding at age 16. I know this is the first in a series of 4 that follow these people throughout their lives, I intend to work my way through the whole thing. 

HYPERION - DAN SIMMONS

I picked this up at a book exchange event here in Tokyo, after having heard about it for a few years. I would say this series has a fairly exalted status in SciFi world. I’m not deep into SciFi but I know about it, which would maybe place it in the tier below something like the Foundation series or Dune or the Solar Cycle. Plus, it has a cool-ass cover. Anyway, I’m glad I picked it up, it’s a quick fun read. The structure is also quite good, it’s more of a collection of short stories set in the same world than a novel as such. The set-up is quite similar to the Canterbury Tales, where a number of folks from different walks of life share stories during a religious journey. Through the stories we get a fairly good and interesting picture of the world. The pilgrimage here is to the Time Tombs on a far-out world called Hyperion where they will attempt to meet up with the mysterious monster known as The Shrike, about whom we know almost nothing, except that he’s given to impaling folks on his “Tree of Pain” and, like the Tombs themselves, he has some strange relationship with time. He might be from a distant future and moving backwards, though this was never made totally clear. All the pilgrims’ stories are fascinating and solid short stories in their own right, they each illustrate something weird and cool about the world of the book. There is a human, interstellar society that can transport between worlds, another group of former humans who have adapted to live in space, an AI race and various populations on hundreds of planets. There are weird parasites and space militaries. There are several space religions and governmental structures. All very cool and engaging. Simmons really paints a cool world. The only drawback is that this book, being part one of a series, has very little happen in it. We get everyone’s story but that’s basically it, the book ends as they finish the journey. It’s basically all set up for the later volumes. That being said, the world he evokes is quite interesting and he leaves enough tantalizing threads open that I’m really interested to see where it goes. Can he fulfill the promise of this book? Did he shoot his load, so to speak, and will the subsequent volumes lack the originality and coherence of this one? Time will tell.

SUPER IMPERIALISM: THE ORIGINS AND FUNDAMENTALS OF U.S. WORLD DOMINATION - MICHAEL HUDSON

Very interesting stuff. I’ve had this one on the docket for a minute, it’s a book I’ve heard a lot about on a subject, American fiscal policy, that I care about and would like to know more about so I finally dove in. Hudson is someone who I like to hear speak on podcasts and Youtube and whatnot, he always seems adroit and insightful, plus I know that Graeber cites him frequently in DEBT so I figured it was time to read his rather dense 400 page signature work. I will say that it is frequently very dry and hard to parse. It gets pretty stuck in the weeds and focuses a lot on older history, especially pre WWII stuff that is important but I feel could have been summed up more succinctly and that space given more over to what is happening now. That being said, this book is a masterpiece and when you really understand what he’s saying, it’s amazing. Basically (please keep in mind that I am stupid and probably misunderstood some/all of this, read it yourself), the United States managed to create the first empire in human history that is not a creditor, but a debtor nation. Starting after WWI the US made moves to put itself in the position to be the most powerful and important nation in the world. Nothing new here, lots of nations have imperial ambitions. After WWII, the new status quo in the West, economically, was ironed out at the Bretton Wood conference, which, among other things, created the World Bank and IMF. These institutions greatly favored the US and American ambitions, Hudson really goes in on the ways the US out negotiated everyone else to set up these conditions, but it’s what came next that was truly novel. While Bretton Woods set the dollar as the prime currency in the world, the dollar itself was tied to gold and the US had about 75% of the world’s gold at this point. But, empires are expensive and the Korean and S.E. Asian wars of the 50’s/60’s/70’s weren’t cheap and gold-convertibility became a burden. So the US did something incredible and delinked the dollar from gold while managing to keep it as the most important currency in the world. This allowed them to make a truly remarkable move where the debts of the US, which are largely to finance wars, are held by foreign nations. Dollars flood into foreign nations, those nations spend that money on Treasury department bonds and securities, which is a way to externalize the debt accrued from maintaining the empire that assures dollar superiority. Pretty amazing trick, right? At least as I understand it. This edition was the 2002 edition so I’d love for Hudson to really go in on what is happening now. We can see nations like China, Russia and others seeking to de-dollarize their economies and find another way. When the world relies on dollars things like sanctions and embargoes can be devastating and a powerful tool that only the US wields. I don't think this status quo will survive the next decade. I think we’re seeing the end of the world that Hudson is describing (Inshallah) but I’ve never seen it so well described.

THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE: THE NATURE OF RELIGION- MIRCEA ELIADE

Picked this thing up at a book swap here in Tokyo, it’s quite famous but I managed to make it out of college without reading it and now seemed like a good time to dive in. Before we get too into it, it’s important to note, as always, that Eliade was a fascist and supporter of the genocidal Iron Guard movement in his native Romania. Like so many in the field of mythology, especially popular mythologists, Campbell, Evola, Peterson, etc. Elidade is far-right, and/or anti semitic and certainly fascistic. Something about the field is attracting these sorts. But either way, this book was fairly interesting, if not a bit out of time. The whole idea of a “science of religion” is very stupid, which isn’t to say that you can’t engage in comparative studies amongst the religions and/or point out where they overlap, harmonize, disagree or contradict, but rather that this isn’t a science. It’s speculative, by nature incomplete, and much closer to poetry than chemistry. Eliade has some smart things to say about how religions work. I like his ideas around “sacred time” as eternal and thus when one undertakes a religious ceremony and enters into this time-space, one is not commemorating a hierophany, but rather engaging in it oneself. There is some interesting structuralist stuff about how a religious man’s house represents his theory of the universe. There is some good stuff about eternal return and the like. There is a common mid-century failing of anthropology and social sciences generally. Namely, this idea that some societies are at an earlier stage of development, and that they have a “primitive” understanding of religion. The idea that we can understand our past by looking at these people, typical bullshit that is slowly going out of fashion, though folks like Pinker are doing their best to keep around. They will lose. Likewise, you get the common thing where he talks about “african religion” or “American Indian religion” in a way that makes it clear he read one ethnography by some (usually French) asshole who spent 6 weeks with one group and has decided that he’s an expert, then using this “insight” to both make generalizations about the people’s of whole continents and, through that, religion as a whole. Lots of this seemed pretty obvious/religion101 but I suppose that isn’t Eliade’s fault that his work has been absorbed into the realm of “common sense,” I’d recommend this to a high school student.

EYE OF THE CHICKENHAWK - SIMON DOVEY

This is the book that PROGRAMMED TO KILL wants to be. While PTK is interesting and the thesis itself is quite intriguing, that book, as I noted in my review from a few years ago, just throws all sorts of shit on the wall and makes pretty wild leaps and insinuations (along with its habit of mentioning anytime something falls on a “pagan holiday” like Walpurgisnacht). EOTCH is much more grounded in reality and, at least, equally dark. Dovey attempts to map a network that stretches across decades and continents and centers around child-sex trafficking but also branches into blackmail, hardcore porno, snuff videos, and murder. He literally maps the network in the sense that the cover itself resembles one of those conspiracy string boards with names of people and organizations connected in a vast web. The book is basically an explanation of how and why he drew the various connections. As you might imagine, this thing is as bleak as it gets, so there’s obviously a content warning for the rest of this review. It starts with the more “basic” stuff, the John Wayne Gacy/Dean Corll connection through John David Norman, who is something of a Forrest Gump figure in the child-porn world. The book stretches out from these two networks to groups involved in similar activities in places as far apart as Michigan and New Orleans. Again and again, Dovey shows a pattern where a part of these networks, which traffic young boys, create child porn and shade into extreme S&M and murder (as in the aforementioned Gacy/Corll cases) are uncovered but then the police don’t pursue the connections or the suggestions that others were involved (some of the Gacy crimes were committed when Gacy was out of town and he always maintained he had accomplices, some of the Corll victims were found in the porn JDN produced and he also claimed to be part of a network ). For example, Norman kept copious records of who was ordering his porn and boys in a rolodex that was sent to the State Department ostensibly to check for any employees who would be quite vulnerable to blackmail. They, the State Department, claimed that this didn’t concern them but then destroyed the cards and that angle of the investigation was never pursued. It backs up the central thesis of the book, that these child-sex networks exist and are protected since they involve high-level people who are able to keep these things quiet and, in the case that they are discovered, keep investigations/prosecutions at the lowest level possible. This book really goes crazy in the final couple parts when Dovey traces the network over to Europe and explores the networks around the Dutroux affair. I’ve always wanted to know more about this particular case, it’s a sort of even darker (given the many murders) version of the Epstein thing that is pretty unknown in the USA and this was the best explanation I’ve ever seen. I did not know that Wikileaks published the whole police dossier which includes the full victim statements which get pretty insane and baroque. Real DeSade shit. I’ve always felt the Belgians punch above their weight, in terms of evil, and this book confirms that. Overall, a deeply troubling and upsetting book, a pretty good retort to people who think this sort of speculation is total fantasy, satanic-panic nonsense.

FINNEGANS WAKE - JAMES JOYCE

Well,at least I’ll never need to call another book “difficult” again. Usually when someone calls a book difficult they mean some combination of, it’s long, the plot is confusing, the vocabulary is obscure, it’s hard to tell what it’s “about,” but this novel is on another level and is confusing on a word-to-word basis. Joyce really went nuts and fully indulge his propensity for puns and wordplay. There are almost no standard words or spellings to be found. Here are four words in a row from a page picked at random, “Digteter! Grundtsagar! Swop beef!” to give you a little hint of the flavor and tenor. If the writing of others, like Hemmingway or some such, gets referred to as lean, and stripped down, this language is explosive expansive and almost fermented, every word is a 9 level-pun, in several languages that you can sit and think about by itself for a few minutes. It’s insane he thought of 600 pages worth of these words and strung them together. It’s the most stoned book I’ve ever read, reading it gives you that wonderful, deeply stoned feeling where you’re noticing strange connections and punning and thinking about how weird certain words or ideas are. It seems a very good book to get obsessed over and to continue to reread, there is, in fact, ample secondary literature and online theories and whatnot about the book. I didn’t read any of that stuff yet, I wanted to go in as “pure” as possible to see what I could get out of it on my own. I’m very interested to dive into some of these secondary materials and see what other people think of it. I know I missed an enormous portion of it by not knowing enough about Irish history/language/culture, as well as things about Dublin, specifically. It’s very, very Irish and some of it clearly is meant to be read in or to replicate an Irish accent. The plot, as far as I could discern it, flickered in and out, with major, major portions of the book being totally obscure to me on story or plot level. I’m interested to see what other people have made of it. But, at the end of the day, the whole thing is so strange and wonderful, you can just open it and read any passage and marvel at how one person was able to do this. Not since reading the Solar Cycle books have I had such a clear feeling that this was a work I’m going to keep thinking about and rereading and chipping away at for the rest of my life. 

THE EIGHTH DWARF - ROSS THOMAS

Another short little number in between larger works that I’m trudging through. Actually, it’s been a bit harder to read and find the time to really sit down and engage with a book. These things come in cycles, hopefully we’ll be on an upswing soon. That being said, this was a great little book to tear through. I don’t normally read a lot of what I would call airport-fiction. Thrillers, mysteries, spy stuff, that sort of thing. Nothing majorly against it but I’m not deeply into the genre. However, I do like Ross Thomas, who writes in a sort of spy/mystery mode that I find really interesting. His books are snappy and fun and full of unique color, and also sit adjacent to CIA/noided stuff that is my real bread and butter. This one is no different. It’s about the immediate aftermath of WWII between the end of the OSS and the start of the CIA (which is sort of the deep setting and theme of the novel, not unlike Gravity’s Rainbow) and features a colorful cast of character, including the titular dwarf, who are trying to find a Jewish assassin who is killing Nazi war criminals who have snuck back into society. Various forces are worried or are trying to get him to Mandatory Palestine to assist Jewish terrorist groups like the Stern Gang in order to hasten the creation of Israel. I found the plot really snappy and fun, it moves fast, there are lots of different characters with all sorts of different angles. The dwarf of the title is a Romanian con-man who is always one step ahead of everyone and who’s teamed up with a former OSS officer who’s out of his depth. They were a great pair, I could read a dozen books that feature their dynamic. At one [point he calls the OSS a “collection of savants, con men, playboys, freebooters, patriots, socialists, fools, geniuses, college boys and adventures'' which was a fun description (now, I feel like the list would be much shorter and consist of “dipshits and demons”).  The only problem I had with the book was the ending. Thomas does such a great job balancing all these competing interests and stories and keeps hinting that people are going to betray each other and backstab but when the time comes to confront the person that everyone is looking for (spoiler alert), the assassin just goes insane and is useless. The major betrayal that we were coming to expect is anticlimactic and brushed over quickly. It just didn’t stick the landing for me. All that being said, the world was fun, the writing was snappy. 

BONDS OF BLOOD: GENDER, LIFESTYLE, AND SACRIFICE IN AZTEC CULTURE - KENNETH LOPARO

One of the better Aztec books I’ve read. Typically, when you’re dealing with books about the Aztecs (not the correct term, too long and pedantic to get into here) they typically only tell the story of the Spanish conquest and then throw in some really lurid stuff about human sacrifice. This book does a good job of investigating the sources (and does a good job of explaining exactly where these sources are from and when they were written) to paint a picture of what life, on the day to day and the birth-to-death scales, actually looked like. This ends up being really fascinating. I learned about the school system of the Aztec world, along with their ideas about childbirth and coming of age. There was stuff in there about aging and death (both the regular and sacrificial kind) and stuff about the organization of neighborhoods. I learned that slaves could sell themselves into debt with money they got to spend before they were enslaved. Families could rotate who was enslaved to make money and give people a rest. Manumissions were common and slaves were free if they could escape the market and make it to the temple, only the master or his sons were allowed to chase. The most fascinating parts might have been the section about Aztec sexuality and gender. Precolombian genders are always a bit tricky to study. The societies that housed them are gone and transformed and the Western sources are filtered through a lens of Western bias and bigotry. This isn’t to endorse the popular-in-certain-lefty-corners idea that there was no bigotry or homophobia or gender essentialism in non-Western spaces, that’s ahistorical, noble-savage nonsense. The reality is, of course, quite complex. Loparo locates a handful of Nauha words and types of people that one could graft onto male homosexual, female homosexual, hermaphrodite, transgender, gender nonconforming, intersex or a handful of other modern terms. Very interesting to see how non christian, non western societies dealt with the obvious reality of these people. I would have liked to know a bit more about the economics and political structure of the Aztec world, though this is obviously beyond the purview of this book. I’d maybe not suggest this as a first book about the Aztecs to read but it’s very good.

-Note on the human sacrifice thing. Obviously this was widespread, gruesome and brutal. There’s a reason that it’s the one thing everyone knows about the Aztecs. The image of thousands of people getting their hearts torn out of their chests on the tops of stepped pyramids is a very compelling and memorable image. And, despite it being Spanish propaganda to emphasize this, to make them seem brutal and barbaric, it was a very important part of mesoamerican life. And while I don’t agree with the idea of killing for the gods, I would like to offer this angle to look at this practice with. The Aztecs had an empire, and empires, from Rome to England to us now here in the 21st Century USA, are built on blood. Right now there are half a dozen active (or very recent) wars and/or genocides, from the Congo to Yemen to Sudan to Gaza and beyond all carried out by the US or its proxies. This isn’t incidental or a tragic oversight, it’s the system working as designed. And you can hide this fact, like we do in America, where you don’t see the coffins from our troops come home, let alone the mangled and burned bodies of our victims, or you can foreground it and remind everyone exactly what type of society they lived in. On a similar note, the need for captives actually makes war less brutal and all-encompassing since only brave warriors make suitable sacrifices, there is no benefit in burning down towns and killing women and children. Fewer Mai Lais. So while it certainly makes sense to balk at the brutality of these acts, please don’t for a second think you don’t also live in an empire, one much, much vaster than that of the Aztecs, and, likewise don’t also worship (even if you don’t realize it) at the altar of a god dripping with blood. The difference is aesthetic, not of kind.

THE SANDMAN (BOOK 4) - NEIL GAIMAN, et. al.

And so it ends. The Sandman series deserves its place of reverence in the “graphic novel” world. Alongside Spiegelman and Moore and a handful of others who worked regular, pulp/trash comic books into “serious” literature in the 80s and 90s the Sandman is an important link in this chain. I remember when I was getting into comics beyond the superhero stuff, in the late 90s and early 2000s, the intimidating and unfriendly nerds at dusty, dingy, dark comic stores (before their more upbeat and welcoming hipster rebrand) would recommend The Sandman series as vital. As I’ve written in the previous reviews, I read them as maybe a 13-15 year old and haven’t revisited them sense. Since my wife had never read them, she picked them up (they’re now packaged as these enormous volumes, putting the whole series in 4 books instead of the 10 smaller books I originally read them as) and I relived my youth by reading after her. And, sadly, now we are done. This reread does confirm a feeling I had carried over from my original read but had lost the specifics of, namely that the series starts better than it ends. Not to say that the ending is bad or that it totally peters out, but rather that the idea and the world that Gaiman sets up is much richer than the stories he is weaving by the end. The first volume is the best, where Dream/Morpheus is trapped by occultists for 80 years before he breaks free and has to take care of unfinished business. That story is interesting and cool and everything in the world is new at that point. As the story progresses the premise becomes the major stumbling block. Namely, there is a bit of a Superman problem, where Dream is so powerful and omnipotent, he is part of an undying and superpowered group called the Endless, that it’s hard for the story to have any stakes. Even the main arc of this volume (spoilers), where the furies are attacking Dream for mercy killing his own son, which leads to Dream “dying” only to immediately being replaced since he can’t really die, doesn’t really have any tension. He can “die” all he wants since he’s endless. Now, this doesn’t prevent Gaimen from finding interesting stories and ideas, it just doesn’t work when he tries to fit traditional narrative ideas, like a fear of death, into stories that don’t really support them. The ongoing story about the immortal Englishman Hobbs is brought to a really beautiful conclusion. It’s always cool to see the rest of the Endless family, and get tantalizing hints about things like there having been an earlier Despair. I wish we’d wrapped up the Destruction storyline better, it’s sort of left hanging and I wish he didn’t feel the end to have some sort of capstone storyline, I wish it just sort of ended, like a dream. As always the art was beautiful and varied. The book deserves its praise, it is a great example of a story that could only really be told as a comic.

THE POWER OF RITUAL IN PREHISTORY: SECRET SOCIETIES AND THE ORIGINS OF SOCIAL COMPLEXITY - BRIAN HAYDEN

This was a pretty fascinating book with a pretty dark view of human history and nature. Unlike most anthropology books, this one does not focus on a particular society or time or place, instead it seeks to establish a trend visible across almost all societies and in all times and places. Obviously, this a very tall order and out of necessity, Hayden cannot be an expert on every one of the cultures he is citing. Therefore, the bulk of the book is made up of literature overviews, mostly by continent, but also by time, where he seeks to summarize the various ethnographic research on secret societies in places as disparate as the Northwest coast of America to central Africa. This part was pretty fascinating, especially if you already know something about these areas and have always wanted to know more. The parts about the Native Californians as well as the various groups in West Africa were particularly interesting to me. This book was already quite long, over 500 pages, so we don’t get too much discussion about how the various ethnographers, some of whom are writing under conditions of direct colonization, came to know the facts they are presenting about groups that are, by definition, secret. For instance, much is made of the Poro society’s human sacrifice, which is certainly true on some level, such sacrifices play into Liberian politics in the late 20th century, but their ubiquity and commonness as reported in the 30’s and 40’s has a bit of a “thugee” mythology too me. It seems like something the British would play up to justify their occupation and the barbarity of their victims. More engagement with those questions would have been interesting, as well as more direct ties into modern western society. The idea that elites in various societies gather together to reinforce their power through terror and trickery, well, that seems pretty salient to me. As Hayden puts it in the concluding chapter, “Secret societies make the most sense as surplus-based strategies created by ambitions aggrandizers to concentrate resources and power in their own hands” and it’s hard to not see this same dynamic at play in our world. Sadly, our elites don’t seem to have the beautiful masks and elaborate quasi-public rituals (unless one believes Eyes Wide Shut, I suppose) that seem common among these sorts of sodalities. This book is a good reference book, it would be helpful to dip back into it when reading about some other aspect of the cultures surveyed to remind oneself of the secret society elements, it’s a bit repetitive read back to back. I could have done with more theory and speculation and less surveys of anthropological data, or, better yet, have these two elements split into two books. However, overall, it’s a pretty compelling and interesting way to think about the ways these sorts of groups influence society and just how common they are.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER - ROBERT WEIDE

A fascinating little book about race at large as well as Los Angeles street gangs in particular. Weide is an academic who’s interested in the ways that race is weaponized as a tool to, as the title says, divide and conquer. The first few sections of the book, where he takes a sort of larger, trans-historical view, were my favorite parts. Weide is cutting and incisive about the weaponization of race and identity and how these concepts are used to break movements up into smaller, more controllable groups. As he puts it, “Identity is the consolation prize offered by capital to those for whom the capitalist economy cannot provide material circumstances or meaningful existence.” If you’ve ever been active in leftist spaces or movements, you’ve certainly seen this in action. Often it’s really bougie, college/elite POC “leaders” who seem to speak for identity groups without being connected in any real way to the most marginalized (they themselves are always quite privileged, economically and prestige-wise) members of the groups they claim to speak for. This is classic wrecker behavior and it really got weaponized during the 2020 uprisings with the “White Fragility” crowd. Basically, people who want to talk identity and not solidarity and real change. He traces this back, in my favorite section, to the US/Black Panther split, showing how one group, the Panthers, were focused on larger issues and real solutions and building across identity groups, while the US organization was focused on the dead-end of cultural nationalism. The US was, famously, deployed by the FBI to kill some prominent Panthers. Their legacy lives on in Melina Abdullah, the almost cartoonishly corrupt leader of BLM-LA who counts Karenga as a mentor. The book then gets into LA street gangs and talks about the ways in which the Latino (tho, he really only discusses Mexican gangs, don’t remember reading about MS-13 in this, thought they are quite active in LA) and Black gangs of Los Angeles interact are used by the police, both on the street and in prison, as a tool to prevent larger pan-proletariat unity. There are lots of interviews and surveys on gang member attitudes, which was pretty interesting. It was striking to me that the Mexican gangs seemed much more rigid and racist (for instance most of them reported that they could not date Black women and would hurt fellow members of their gang that did so) than the Black gangs. He also points out that only Mexicans have been charged with hate-crime enhancements for targeting Blacks for retaliation, despite both groups engaging in such activities. There is some weird, off-base stuff around the idea of trans-racial, a term he uses for racial outsiders in these gangs (like YT crips). He even coins (to my knowledge) the term cis-racial and talks about Caitlyn Jenner vs Rachel Dolezol. This is the wrong way to look at it, a YT crip is not Black, no one thinks they are, they don’t think they are, they’re just in a racially coded gang. The gender race thing is interesting but much more nuanced than he’s getting into here and honestly, the book was fine without this point. I wish there was more of the history stuff, I’d love more about the way the racial gangs were formed in prison and the role the admin in these places played in that.

MY PINUP: A PAEAN TO PRINCE - HILTON ALS

I went back and forth as to whether this counts as a whole book for the EVERY BOOK REVIEWED project. I suppose I have included novellas and other short forms before. This book can be read in an hour or so, it’s something of a long magazine article, and in some ways ghost of a book that could have been. I’m a huge fan of Als, he’s an amazing writer and I still think about his last book, a collection of essays that merge the personal and cultural, smothinger both in extremely sharp and original language, White Girls. As someone who writes so astutely about race and desire and popular culture it’s hard to imagine a better subject for him than Prince, a genius who is also obsessed with these topics. Als mets Prince in this book, to do an interview for a magazine piece and Prince is also struck by him. He thinks Als would be the perfect person to write a book with and offers him the chance to move to Paisley Park and work on a book. Als demures and delays and then Prince is dead. He died before we even got his full autobiography, which I’ve also reviewed on this site. A full Als/Prince books is the Jorodowsky’s Dune of pop culture books. Even what we have here gives one so much to think about. He writes amazingly about the way Prince’s sexuality is both threatening and liberating. He talks about what Prince means to Black, Queer men. As always, Als weaves in his own life and loves and writes about these with an elliptical beauty. I just wanted 300 pages of Als really taking apart the Prince discography and diving into each part of his career.

BLIND JOE DEATH’S AMERICA - GEORGE HENDERSON

A light little book after some heavier fair. I’m typically not a huge fan of guitar-centric music, though I make an exception for John Fahey. I’m not sure where I first heard of Fahey, he’s a bit obscure, and can be a bit of an acquired taste. He’s a guitar player who plays these long, solo, instrumental pieces that interpolate classic folk/blues tunes and twist and expand them into these hypnotic, sprawling, shimmering wonders. It’s really good chill-out, vibe-out, pondering music. He’s also a pretty serious blues scholar, he rediscovered several important players and records and wrote a well-received phd thesis on Charley Patton, who was deeply involved in the 60’s explosion of YT interest in the genre, tho he has a pretty antagonistic relationship with the scene. Actually, a lot of the book is about exactly this tension. As someone who loves hip-hop and listens to it all the time, I’m also constantly considering and made uncomfortable by both my own, as well as YTfolx in general’s, love and obsession with the genre. There are similar issues relating to the ways that Black pain is transmogrified into authenticity which is can itself become a source of money (often not for the artist themselves). There’s a ghoulishness, a sort of Black-death-spectacle (to quote Parker Bright) involved in both fandoms. A quote from the book reads, “they wanted access to the emotionally sincere, masculine, rebellious, darkly erotic world of the 1920’s Delta” that could easy be written today about YT fans obsessed with any number of rappers who now come complete with youtube documentaries speculating on the exact number of murders they’ve committed. Fahey is a good cypher for these issues, he wrote deeply about them. I actually didn’t know before reading this, since I’ve only listened to him online and I’ve never owned a physical record of his, that his albums are famous for their long liner notes that touch on all these issues, often satirically. Sometime he makes a point that strikes me as insane, like when he suggests there are no “political” Delta blues songs, since the music is inherently apolitical, and doesn’t consider the idea that maybe these Black men in interwar Mississippi might have maybe thought twice before committing any song like that to wax. One of the reasons the Blues is so interesting is because it is coming towards the beginning of widespread recorded music, as such, there must be so much that only existed live and that we’ll never hear. That being said, I wish there was more in this book about the actual music itself, like what themes from what songs are in which Fahey compositions, how he settled on his style, how it changed over time, which recording are the best (he has a huge discography). The book makes it clear that there are other books on these subjects more specifically, so I’m asking for something that does exist, it just isn’t this.

GLASS BEAD GAME - HERMANN HESSE

Been a while since I’ve read a novel like this, by which I mean, a classic, capital “N” Novel. The type about big ideas and clear allusion and metaphors without any postmodern trickery or playfulness. Something straightforward, a Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain is the book I kept thinking about when reading this, they’re incredibly similar) or Dostoevsky novel. I’ll get back to something weird soon but this was a nice little break. It’s a classic “college novel” but one I never read as a younger man. I’ve never read any Hesse actually. The book concerns a society sometime in the future where Europe has a province, called Castalia, which is focused on cultivating academic pursuits in a sort of monastic or classical university style. The people here don’t do any practical labor or engage in any real politics, they devote themselves to running boarding schools and training teachers and, especially, training players and teachers of the titular glass bead game. The game itself is never really spelled out, it seems to literally involve glass beads and to center around finding connections between different areas of study, say, between music and classical languages. So players have to be as erudite in as many fields as possible to be good at it. The novel follows one man (all the players are men, more on that later) as he grows up in the order and eventually becomes the magister ludi (game master). Since it’s a real “ideas novel” he has all these long conversations about the nature of learning and knowledge and whatnot with various people who represent different ideas. There are priests and guys really into Chinese philosophy, and outsiders who think the game is silly and other players and whatnot. The book has one of the funniest endings of any book I’ve read in a long time, which I will spoil here, in case you want to read the book for yourself. The main character slowly comes to believe that he must leave the ivory tower of his life as game master and engage with the real world to really give something back to humanity. He goes to be the tutor of the son of his friend who is not from the order and immediately drowns in a lake because he doesn’t really know anything about the real world. A very funny and abrupt ending for a book that took this character and idea of such a knowledge-priesthood very seriously. Definitely made me enjoy the book much more, before I was a bit turned off by the whole concept. I’m not huge on the idea of these peopel who seem kinda like parasites on society, they don’t really do or contribute anything and their game seems silly and inaccessible without dedicating your life to it. Characters occasionally brign this idea up but it usually gets glossed over, tho the ending acts as good commentary. Also, as I mentioned the book makes clear that only men are allowed in this order, and that the scholars are allowed to get pussy, but cannot marry, but this too is a bit of an aside. In reality, can you imagine how much boy-fucking would be going on in Castalia? A hierarchical, secretive, all-male society that takes young boys away from their families? It would make the catholic church blush. Anyway, a good, straight-forward story.

TRACES OF HISTORY: ELEMENTARY STRUCTURES OF RACE - PATRICK WOLFE

I got this after seeing that Wolfe is considered a prominent voice in and one of the creators of the academic discipline of Settler-Colonial studies, which is an interest of mine. Additionally, he’s an Australian academic and I don’t usually hear from our Aussie siblings, which is a shame since they clearly have a long history of genocidal settler-colonial activities that should be considered alongside the ones I’m more familiar with in the Americas and Europe. Also, I’m constantly being mistaken for Austrainl here in Japan so it’s really been on my mind recently. Wolfe makes a bunch of really interesting and useful points in the book. He looks at a different situation in each chapter and highlights the ways that race is used as a tool in settler-colonial regime. As he points out, again and again, race is a tool, it serves a purpose and is put to use, “race is colonialism speaking” as he so memorably puts it. For instance, he points out how in the USA there are two large colonized groups, Native Americans and Blacks. First, we can see that one name refers to their land and the other two their body, which is what the YT regime is looking to take from each. Indigenous people are assigned to vanish and an imported labor group is destined to work this newly freed up land. This also explains why blood quantum laws are used to take people out of the category of Native, i.e. it is possible to not be Native enough, to be diluted into YTness, while the one drop rule means any percentage of Black ancestry renders one, functionally and legally, Black. This is because they need a large and clearly defined Black labor force and they need the Indians gone. He then pivots to Brazil to show how the reality on the ground effects race, not vice-versa, since there there are dozens and hundreds of very nuanced racial categories, because the goal is not to unite a YT majority (like it was/is in the USA) but rather to fracture a non-YT majority into competing factions. The book was full of interesting insights like this. Like I mentioned, it was interesting to read about how all this played out in Australia, it was fascinating to see what this meant in Brazil and elsewhere. There was a whole chapter about Israel which was quite illuminating in light of current events. Sadly, he writes that “Since even Israel couldn’t continue to rely of Western support if it embarked on a full-scale campaign of direct physical annihilation…” which has been proven untrue. He brings up a theory I’d never heard before from Arthur Koestler and Shlomo Sand that the large part of Ashkenazi population is descended from Khazar conversations in the 8th Century CE, which would add all sorts of layers and ironies to their history that is a bit mind-bending to fully consider. I’ll have to look more into that. Overall, I’d highly recommend this, especially if you’re from a settler-colony of any sort. It’s one of the clearest-eyed and insightful things I’ve read on the subject.

SEVEN AMERICAN NIGHTS - GENE WOLFE

I went back and forth on whether or not to include this since it is technically a novella, at around 60 pages, and I don’t review things like long articles or short stories. But, it is a fully contained story, I read it twice back to back, and, ultimately, who cares? If your a Wolfe-head (in the Wolfe-pack?) you know the thing that makes his shit special is the puzzlebox quality of his stories. There is always the story itself, which is always wildly inventive and incredible, and then there is the mystery of “what is really going on.” One technique that he likes is embedding issues of authorship into the text itself (i.e. one of the characters in the story is “writing” the story you’re reading, though it’s often of question of who exactly as well as their motives and biases). This text does that, the story is the journal of an Iranian tourist who is visiting America in the far-future, when it is a mutant-plagued wasteland. But the journal admits that some of the pages have been removed, though it isn’t exactly clear where. There are only 6 nights described in the book, but the title tells us one must be missing. Additionally, the character buys and does some sort of drug during his time in the US, but he takes it Russian Roulette style so it’s not clear when he’s dosed and when he’s sober (he also might not ever take it? The book is a mind-fuck). Anyway, like all Wolf stuff, it causally and quickly hints at much deeper doings than what’s on the surface. There’s a fun game to play where you try to identify the locations in DC the character are at based on the ruins he describes. The Washington Monument being mostly pulled down and the scattered stones being used as tables in a large bizarre was a nice touch. There’s tons of gross deformities and (maybe?) werewolves. There’s Iranian moon bases and chemical warfare. There’s hints of a sinister plot to “make America great.” After reading it twice, I looked at some theories online and thought more about it; there really is a feeling of trying to piece together the “deeper” or “true” story that you only get from Wolf. If you’ve been interested in him but the 12 volume Solar Cycle seems like too much (and I’ve only read that once, and, given the “to read Wolfe is to re-read Wolfe” you could argue that I haven’t even read it for real) I’d say this a pretty good starting place.