WRONG NORMA - ANNE CARSON

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

OLIO - TYEHIMBA JESS

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

ASK THE DUST - JOHN FANTE

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

AUTHORITY - ANDRE LONG CHU

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

BUTTER - ASAKO YUZUKI (trans. POLLY BARTON)

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

THE MAN-NOT - TOMMY J. CURRY

A dense read to work through while feeding my baby. I can’t really read a physical book when the baby is sleeping on me, and it seems bad for my brain to just look at my phone so I try to read off my Kindle. I’ve wanted to read this book for a while, it has a fearsome reputation, so I decided to give it a go. Because of how I read it, it took a while to get through, despite not being too long, but it did deliver the deep thoughts I was looking for. Curry gets treated like he’s some insane hotep, some non-serious grifter and buffoon like Dr. Umar (who is funny and mostly harmless, his YT equivalents get very little of the pushback he gets but still, he is not a deep thinker with serious stuff to stay), some misogynist hiding behind pan-Africanism. Not so. Curry is a very serious scholar and writer who is making a really nuanced and precise point of critique against the prevailing intersectional reading of Black men. Namely, that since they occupy a position as “men” in the gender category, this privileges them in some ways and it means they seek to obtain more power through patriarchy, as a sort of junior partner to YT men. The problem is that statistics about life-outcomes don’t really support this. More Black women are college-educated than Black men, they live longer, they are not incarcerated at the same rates nor face the same mortality from the police and crime generally, by numerous socio-economic factors, they are doing worse, and culturally, they seem less considered and thought about than practically any (non-NDN) group. Curry seeks to show how Black men aren’t just discriminated against because they are Black, but they face particular gendered discrimination by being male. The sections about sexual violence against Black men was prehaps the most provactive part. Curry traces the rapes Black men endured by both men and women during slavery to the sexually focused violence that they endure at the hands of police and prisions guards today. You can read tons of accounts, from the Attica riots to the rape of Abner Louima to see the particular focus the police give Black men’s gentiles when assaulting them, this isn’t a one-off thing. Now, while I think that this is true, though there is no way it is anywhere close the the amount of rape that Black women have endured, he is right that because Black men are seen as sexual aggressors and horny manics, this dynamic is swept under the rug. He does a close reading of some of Eldgridge Cleaver's work, which was interesting since Cleaver writes some of the most provocative stuff available from the Black Power movement and it’s nice to see someone taking it seriously. The idea that hit me hardest in this book, besides the much-needed rebuke to simple intersectionality, has to do with the ways we assume that Masculinity is synonymous with patriarchy. I’d like to see some writing that pushes this idea further.

CITIZEN: AN AMERICAN LYRIC - CLAUDIA RANKINE

It’s always interesting when art becomes the victim of its own success and the things that made it original and worthwhile are so digested and redone by the world at large that when you finally encounter it, it’s no longer original. I can remember hearing people doing parodies and impressions and homages to John Wayne’s distinct voice and mannerism years before I saw a John Wayne film and how this pre-exposure really made it impossible to really encounter his movies. Or if you watch dozens of sports movies before seeing Rocky or grow up listening to rap and then going back and checking out Rakim. It’s hard to appreciate the originality when you live in the world that these pieces created. This book is like that, but with Microaggressions. Elsewhere on this site, as well in person, if you know me, you can see feelings about microaggressions and the man who invented the concept (Chester Pierce, a man who help arch-demon Jolly West kill an elephant with LSD), but this book came out in 2014 at a time before the concept was in the broader culture. Rankine weaves personal microaggression that she experienced, from within her life as an ivy league professor, with high-profile incidents like those that Serena Williams experienced, with macro/hyper violent aggressions that are in the news, like the killing of Trayvon Martin. It’s so interesting to see how the concerns and ideas that animated this period, the Ferguson, BLM v.1 era, came back in 2020 but much stronger since there wasn’t a Black president to run interference. We feel beyond this now, the book succeeded in its goal of introducing these ideas into the mainstream. Unfortunately, this understanding didn’t actually move the material realities all that much, the sort of microagression-focused, White Fragility, we-all-need-to-do-the-work style approach is a dead-end because it’s focused on individuals and doesn’t really posit a solution beyond, “you need to be aware of and unpack this.” But back to the book. It is an interesting form, it calls itself poetry, and who am I to disagree, but it includes the text from videos, lots of pictures, things that read closer to essay (at least to me). I appreciated the hybridity of the form, though I think it does itself a disservice calling itself poetry since the language never really grabbed me. The ideas are interesting, if cliche’d now, but the writing is pretty straightforward. I really think this would have hit much harder in 2014, now it feels like old news. 

YOU DREAMED OF EMPIRES - ÁLVARO ENRIGUE (trans. NATASHA WIMMER)

This is the first super timely book I’ve read in a while. It just came out in English last year, translated by the god, Natash Wimmer. When I heard about it, I knew I had to check it out. The book is a fictional retelling of what I consider the most insane episode in human history, Cortés’ visit to pre-conquest Tenoxtitlan (Enrigue has a short little letter at the beginning of the book about his idiosyncratic spellings of some Nahuatl words, I found his explanation pretty convincing and will be spelling the ancient name for my beloved Mexico City like that, with the “x,” from now on) and his meeting with Moctezuma. Has there been a stranger meeting, across a deeper divide with larger implications than that one? Nothing is even that close. Anyway, the book follows the various characters involved in this meeting, it takes place only in the city, after the Spanish arrive and the Aztecs have to decided what to do with them. We get the perspective of Cortés, La Malinche, Gerónimo de Aguilar, Montezuma, and his wife. Any of these characters would be worth their own much longer books, they all lived insane lives, but Enrigue gives us a just a little bit of each of them. He really sticks to the few days they are in the capital. If the book is missing anything to me, it would be the perspective of the Tlaxacans or other indigenous group that joined up with the Spanish to defeat the Mexica, which of course leads to their enslavement and destruction as well. The rendering of Montezuma is perhaps the most interesting part. He’s seen as very devoted to the gods, cruel, strange, aloof and confusing. He’s very high off mushrooms for the whole book, despite the high stakes involved, which allows for a bit of hallucination play (Montezuma hears a T-Rex song that the author is playing at one point) that helps to underscore how surreal and bizarre this meeting is. I thought Enrigue did a good job depicting both Montezuma and Cortes as insane, blood-soaked maniacs, which is how they both deserve to be remembered, without sinking to old stereotypes or moralizing either way. These are two cruel, wicked men who’s meeting had more to do with the shape of the modern world, especially here in the Americas, than anything else that ever happened. There is a strange rewriting of history right at the end, spoiler alert: Cortés is killed by the Aztecs on a trip right at the very end, leaving us with that ultimate “what if.” I would recommend this book in conjunction with THE FIFTH SUN which is an English language straight forward telling of this same history that helps round this thing out. Either way, Enrigue is one to watch. Wimmer doesn’t miss. 

CAPITALISM AND SLAVERY - ERIC WILLIAMS

Yet another book I should have been asked to read in college. A stone cold classic from 1944, written by a guy who’d go on to be the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobego, that still would be seen as cutting edge and provocative in the modern world. This is the stronger version of the 1619 project, or it would be if it focused more on America. As he points out in the conclusion, the better title for this book would be “British Capitalism and Slavery” since the book really focuses on the Caribbean and the British involvement there. Not so much about Amerika or Haiti (there is lots of Haiti stuff as it relates to the British but not Haiti stuff by itself). The first part of the book gives a great, short rundown of the ways that slavery built racism, despite the fact that the story is told backwards in popular myth. Typically, we’re led to believe that YT Europeans were racist and monstrous, and they built the system of transatlantic slavery as an outgrowth of these beliefs. Williams shows how they built the system slowly over decades, first trying enslaved Native labor, then YT labor in quasi-slavery arrangements (indentured servitude, punishment for crimes), before landing on the idea of African slaves, who couldn’t convert to Christianity or do anything else to manumit, folks whose status was passed on to their children. This particular history and dynamic is covered deeper in other places, I'm pretty fond of Robin Blackburn’s The Making of New World Slavery, but Williams gives a great and useful summary. There’s interesting stuff I’d never considered about how Australia is unique among the Euro settler-colonies in that it never sought to import slave labor and how this history played out, there’s a whole book there I’d love to read. Williams’ real insight is how slavery both builds capitalism and then is destroyed by it. As he puts it, the stage of mercantilism, which preceded capitalism and provided the basis (primitive accumulation in Marxism) from which capitalism grew, and, when conditions were right for true, free-trade capitalism, mercantilism and slavery were discarded. “The rise and fall of mercantilism is the rise and fall of slavery,” as he puts it. Which puts the British push for abolition in a less flattering light, it was less a moral reckoning, more of an economic realilty and a tool to fuck with rivals like Spain and France. Williams quotes the abolitionist James Cropper who points out that, “the efforts of benevolent men have been most successful when cooperating with natural causes.” This is such a useful little book to help show how social forms like slavery are transformed by economic conditions so if you want to study or think about them, it makes sense to ground your analysis in economics. I’d recommend it to anyone who’s interested in capitalism or slavery or even history. I’m going to have to look more into Williams himself, I don’t know anything about his rule of Trindad and Tobago, it seems amazing that someone could write something like this and then be president. W.E.B. DuBois was never up for the job here, if you know what I mean. 

POSTCOLONIAL LOVE POEM - NATALIE DIAZ

Now we’re talking. I got myself back into that place where I’ve started too many books at one time so they all are going slower than I like. Paradoxically, this is when I tend to read the most poetry because it’s short and I can get the feeling of finishing something. That’s why the last two books here have been contemporary poetry. This one was much stronger. Diaz is a Mojave poet who writes sharp poems about her family. Due to her tribe’s desert location, she writes often and beautifully about water and rivers. The longer poem, “exhibits from The American WAter Museum” is perhaps the standout, it circles back and back to images of water and rivers and flowing and the well never runs dry. There are also several poems and allusion to her brother, which I also found very moving. She captures the sadness and scariness of a loved one in psychosis perhaps better than anyone I’ve ever read. The more political poems hit for me. The line, “Race is a funny word. / Race implies someone will win, / implies, I have as good a chance of winning” sound like Gil-Scot Heron, as does, “...I am doing my best to not become a /

Museum / of myself.” The line, “If you are where you are, then where/are those who are not here? Not here.” is such a chilling and poetically beautiful distillation of the native holocaust. I’m not as good at reviewing poetry, all I can really say is that lots of these poems had real bars, lines I’ll turn over in my head for a while. I gotta make sure I check out more Diaz. 

TIME IS A MOTHER - OCEAN VUONG

Always got to make sure there is time for some poetry. I remember liking Vuong’s novel, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous and figured I’d grab this, a book of poems, when I spied it at the library. Perhaps because the other poems I am reading at this point are basically the same Hart Crane joints again and again, this collection did not hit very hard for me. I feel like if it’s poetry, I need more verbal pyrotechnics. Astonishing phrases, mind-bending metaphors and sticky utterances. Real bars. There is some of that here, I liked:

“enough to live

            & die alone

with music on”

And 

“Maybe i can build a boy/out of the sileces inside maybe/we can cease without dying fuck/without tears falling/into the truckstop urinal”

Even, “Do you know how many hours I’ve wasted watching straight/boys play video games?” is funny, and does speak to how erotic and sexual Vuong often is, an aspect of his I feel is strangely not talked about. And while I appreciate a Lil’ Peep reference, mostly these poems just didn't’ really take off for me. Much of it is about the death of his mother but even those poems didn’t really arrest me. They all sort of slid off. I would certainly read another novel from Vuong but I don’t think his poetry is something I need to keep up with. 

THOSE WHO LEAVE AND THOSE WHO STAY - ELENA FERRANTE

Goddamn, she really is pulling it off. Every volume of this 4 part series has gotten much better. When writing 1,000+ pages on the same story, obviously, there is the advantage of your readers knowing so much more about the characters and their backgrounds and motives and thus having more buy-in. However, it’s also easy to lose readers by being boring or repetitive. Ferrante found a way to deliver on a plot level and to greatly deepen the themes and relevance on the world-level. In terms of plot, despite this being a realistic story about a set of pretty “normal” people and their normal lives, she’s able to keep things happening. People cheat on each other, they fight with their boss, they worry about jobs and children, they start families and break-up. The rhythm of events feels both natural and engaging enough to keep you wanting to come back and figure out what happens next. But where, to me, this volume really hits another gear is where it engages with the political realities of post-war Italy. The politics and state violence was always a sort of background hum, present but no foregrounded in the other two volumes. Here, because the main characters are older, this stuff moves from subtext to text. All of the characters have to wrestle with the meaning of the violence that typified the Italian years of lead (As an aside, if you’re unfamiliar with this period, you might want to look into it and the idea of a “strategy of tension.” Remember that the US is behind a lot of this stuff, the book specifically mentions the Piazza Fontana bombing, a terrorist act that the US knew about ahead of time and was committed by US funded fascists but pinned on communists. They ran a very similar play in Jamaica, for what it’s worth). Many of the characters we’ve followed from childhood are now militant communists or violent fascists. There is an amazing dynamic between the middle class leftist that Elena marries into and the working class leftist that she knows from the old neighborhood. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this portrayed so well. There is amazing stuff about the nature of work and the nature of money, including these two quotes: 

“The only one who behaved from the start as if the need to work didn't go hand in hand with the need to be humiliated.”

“I wondered what difference there was between their bourgeois wealth and that of the Solaras. I thought of how many hidden turns money takes before becoming high salaries and lavish fees.”

As always the friendship between the two girls (now women) is the heart of the story, even if they spend less and less time together and their lives grow apart. They still manage to circle, call-out, help-out and challenge each other. I will be amazed if Ferrante tops this volume in the last one. Will it follow these women to their deaths? We shall see. 

A MAZE OF DEATH - PHILIP K DICK

Not sure why I’d never read this one. I went through, as many folks do, my heaviest PKD phase in college, where I read maybe half a dozen or so of his novels, mostly the commonly agreed upon “good ones,” Three Stigmata, Ubik, VALIS, and a bunch of others. I never really got the energy up to really dive in and complete that bibliography. Given his amphetamine-fueled life, there is no shortage of PKD books and they always have acted, to me, as a sort of oasis, a familiar spot I could sit down whenever I need a quickie, freaky, mindbender of a book. I saw that the library here had the Library of Congress edition of his last four novels. The final 3 are the VALIS trilogy, which I love, but I’d never read A Maze of Death, his 4th to last book. I also knew nothing about it, which, as in much sci-fi, worked out great since I didn’t at all anticipate the twist that is revealed in the last two chapters. I’ll spare you the spoilers here but rest assured, at least for me, the whole thing pays off. We’ve got the familiar Dickian concerns: space gods, imperfect creators, I-Ching like cryptic phases, gnostic flavoring. We also get the less beloved Dickian tics, the poorly written female characters, the serviceable not not amazing writing, etc. But this thing delivers. It’s one the bleakest PKD I’ve read, especially towards the end. The gnostic stuff is on full boil here, before it truly erupts in VALIS, the next book he wrote. In that since this is the last real scifi book he wrote, before the final three that are really more in the tradition of visionary-outsider religious tracts. This would be a good one to read first actually, if you’re just getting into Dick. I’m a big fan of the Walker-on-Earth (WoE) , a great alien god and good nickname. I’m glad there is still a large stash of Dick for me to make my way through over the years and it seems I haven’t sifted out all the gems yet. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MODERN SONG - BOB DYLAN

My most boomer-coded trait is my love for Bob Dylan. What can you do? I’ll have to stand before god and explain it one day, but, until then, it was exciting to find out that the local library had this one. It’s basically a playlist or a program for a radio show, 66 songs with short essays after each one. I was able to pretty easily make a playlist and listen along to the songs before reading the sections. I found some really good stuff I’d not heard, or not heard in a long time, like “Midnight Rider” or “A Certain Girl.” Dylan isn’t writing about only songs he likes, in the funniest section, on “The Whiffenpoof Song” he calls the song a “grinning skull” and talks about how profoundly evil the sort of old money Yale milieu that Whiffenpoofs represent is. But he certainly endorses most of the songs here and thinks they’re good or at least interesting. There’s no crazy left-field picks, there’s no dance music or hip-hop or very much after the early 90s. And fair enough, if Bob Dylan doesn't think he has anything to say about King Von or whatever, I’m inclined to trust him. As you might imagine, most of the writing is on the lyrics. He spends part of each essay thinking about the protagonist of the song and really investigates and extrapolates on the relationships and situations being sung about. There is much less about the music itself, not a lot of talk of key changes or instrument choice or melodic theories. I did find it intriguing that he at one point argues that lyrics aren’t really the same as written words and can’t truly be separated from music, which is interesting coming from a man who just won a nobel prize for literature based on the strength of his lyrics. I’d say this is a must for real Dylan-heads. It does seem like he could do this forever. His love and knowledge of popular songs is impressive and it seems like if he felt like it he could produce these indefinitely. 

THE STORY OF A NEW NAME - ELENA FERRANTE

I am so glad I decided to go back to this quadrilogy of Neapolitan novels from Ferrante. I liked but didn’t love the first one and I was a bit wishy-washy on whether or not to finish the series. But, boy, did this one deliver. It’s the same set-up. Lenù writes from late middle age about growing up in a poor part of Naples and her life-long friendship with Lila. They’re older so we now follow them from the time Lila is married, at 16, to when Lenù is graduating from college. The first book, since it is about them as children, is more about painting this complex world of post-war Italy, filled with Camorristas, communists, the rich and poor, hierarchies of language and dialect, life-destroying misogyny and all the rest, through a child’s eyes, so these forces are only hinted it. In this book, the characters join the adult world so this is all much more explicit. The main characters are still poor women from a poor region, so they still are not in the mainstream of political and cultural life, but they are much more aware of it, how they fit into it, and strategies for finding their place in it. The relationship between these two women is so rich and deep it’s hard to wrap your head all the way around. They love each other, they’re bitter rivals, they admire each other, they hate and resent each other, often all at once and never with either one of them understanding the whole dynamic. This time we get lots of other characters chiming in and giving us their take on the two. The central issue of their relationship, that they are both very smart (tho, the difference between very hard-working and natural genius are also explored) but they’re poor and women. Against these odds, Lenù figures out a way out. She and Lila both are identified towards the end of the last book as having tremendous promise, and Lenù’s parents give her a modicum of support while Lila’s do not. Lenù moves on and Lila doesn’t. This book also introduces the idea that Lenù has access to diaries that Lila wrote at the time and so we get lots of scenes that Lenù wasn’t there for as well as some of Lila’s thoughts. There is the added dimension about how their love lives now intersect which pays off quite well and an interesting angle about Lila being perhaps smarter but much less willing to play the game. This book was very nice to sink into and read in chunks every day. There is always something interesting happening and the cumulative effect gets greater each page. I wonder about the translation, there are many times when it’s remarked upon that someone is speaking in dialect and I wonder if, in the Italian original, this is actually in Neapolitan, would the average modern Italian understand whatever slur they’re using? Anyway, I’m glad there are two more of these.

HELGOLAND: MAKING SENSE OF THE QUANTUM REVOLUTION – CARLO ROVELLI

Usually, I steer clear of the “quantum physics” stuff. There’s too much of it, it requires too much of a dumbing down/trusting the author for my tastes, it’s use to justify all sorts of strange conclusions, the list goes on. I am interested in Time, though, so I have read another one of his books. Someone gave me this one and it’s a great before-bed read. Rovelli does a good job of explaining some of the more far-out physics stuff for a very lay audience. As is necessary in such cases, there are many times in the book where he has to write something like, “and someone used insane levels of math to prove this” or, “you might think this other thing, but it’s actually impossible based on math we can’t really get into.” I have no doubt that Rovelli understands this stuff, from my outsider’s perspective, he seems legit and intelligent on these subjects but ultimately, this stuff is fiction to me. All that aside I like the ideas he’s peddling. Rovelli seeks to solve some of the weirder or spookier quantum actions and aspects by reframing the world as not a series of objects that interact sometimes but rather as interactions, the nodes of which we think of as objects. So it’s the relationships themselves that supersedes the substance. Do I fully understand why this solves the problems that Rovelli says it does? Of course not, I’m very dumb. But I do like it as an idea. He brings up Nāgārjuna as a sort of philosophical prerunner to these ideas. He spends a little too much time on his personal life, I don’t really care about what brought him to physics, nor do I really care about the likes of Bohr or Heisenberg were up to. Also, there is some Lenin shit-talking that seems to come somewhat out of nowhere. But overall, very interesting and engaging ideas being thrown out. Much to consider, as they say.

IN TUNE: CHARLEY PATTON JIMMIE RODGERS AND THE ROOTS OF AMERICAN MUSIC - BEN WYNNE

My father, as a male YT boomer, has entered the age where he’s super into the blues. Thankfully not blues-rock, but actual pre-war Delta blues. There is something of a Ken Burns lurking within all of us I suppose. Does this mean I’ll be into records from the 50’s when I’m his age? Time will tell. Anyway, this book is about the time in American history right after recording was invented when we start being able to hear what sorts of music folks were making and, just as importantly, these folks were able to listen to each other. Wynne tells this story by focusing on two founders of what went on to be called the Blues and Country music, Charley Patton and Jimmie Rodgers. There’s lots of fascinating biographical stuff, Rodgers really was railway worker for years, Patton really did play on plantations in, as the book describes the Delta, The Most Southern Place On Earth. The stuff about Dockery Plantation, the site where Patton played often and where the version of the Blues we have was basically invented, was fascinating. However, the deeper thesis of the book was even more interesting to me. Wynne essentially argues that Rodgers was a blues singer, that he came up, a generation later, in a milieu that was not very different from Patton’s. Both were very poor, tapped in dead-end circumstances and Southern at a time when the pre-civil war powers had consolidated their rule and operated (putting this in the past tense might be wishful thinking) a sort of racist feudalism. This apartheid was supposed to keep Blacks and Whites apart and a certain small segment on top, in perpetuity, but at the lowest rungs, where Patton and Rodgers lived, there was much more crossover than was supposed to be allowed. And the music that came out of it, either Blues or Country (though these genres were called “Race records” and “Hillbilly records” at the time of their creation) grew out of the same soil. It's a tragic historical reality that this musical affinity didn’t translate into enough tangible solidarity between poor YTs and Black residents of the south. But if you’re interested in American music, the deep south or either of the artist this is a great book. Certainly got me to listen to more JImmie Rodgers.

THE STREET OF CROCODILES - BRUNO SCHULZ

Short little number I picked up a the local bookstore really cheap. I’d heard of this book before, Schulz is supposed to be something of Kafka, but I’d never picked it up. Schulz ended up with one of the worst bits of birth-luck possible, being born in early 20th century Poland, and he did not survive WWII. This book is certainly Kafka-esq in some sense, it is bizarre and full of strange, inscrutable characters however, I did not feel the dread and despair that I associate with Kafka’s depictions of modern life. Instead, I got more Márquez, where strangeness and fantasy bloom out of a regular world. Not necessarily positive or negative strangeness, but more like metaphors that you can’t quite work all the way out. The book focuses on a Polish (tho, I think the town that this book is based on is now in Ukraine) family with an insane father. While the family seeks to lead a normal life as merchants, the father is spiraling off collecting rare eggs, and then rare-birds, talking about how mannequins are real, quasi-transforming into a cockroach. There is a nice balance to this book, which could easily just be a collection of weird things the father did, which is achieved by having the adolescent male narrator be drowning in desire and horniness. A very beautifully written, florid book with all sorts of wonderful images and scenes. Obviously it’s a bit of an understatement to resent the Nazi for depriving us of his future work but damn, the man nailed down a vibe and who knows what he could have done if he’d had the time to really flesh it out. 

1999 - ROSS BENES

Second book I’ve read on the 90’s in the last 6 months. I think there are a few reasons for this renewed popular and scholarly interest in the time period in the last few years. First, it’s roughly 30 years in the past, which makes it a prime target for a nostalgic revival. Folks who are at the center of their professional lives remember the 90's as their childhood or early teen/young adult years, which is always a period of time that will hold interest. One need look no further than the amount of 60’s revival stuff that was going on the 90’s. Also, the 90’s were something of the last “real” decade. You could make a case that Y2K/early 00’s culture exists but beyond that the difference between decades is less about the style and more about the technology. So, while it is true that there are major technological differences between the 70’s and the 80’s, what we actually remember when we think about the 70’s vs. the 80’s has to do with how people dressed and what movies were popular and major trends in music, etc. If one were doing this same exercise using 2005, 2015 and 2025, I think you’d find that trends remained fairly stagnant, there isn’t really a 2015 “look” that would seem dated in 2025, you would just note how the technological trends visible in 2005 have gotten worse. Post 1990’s, at least in the US, we’re not looking at “change” so much as decline. That all being said, this book does a good job identifying some of these trends in their nascent stage. The book ID’s a number of events and trends from 1999 and shows how they represent an earlier form of something we’re dealing with now. Beanie Babies become bitcoin, the storytelling techniques of WWF become politics, porn spearheads all sorts of trends in internet culture. I particularly liked the way he discussed ICP and how the group is able to cultivate such an extreme fan-base and how these strategies were adopted by others. He doesn’t use the phrase but he is describing something I’ve called elsewhere on this site, vice-signalling. The opposite of virtue-signalling, vice-signalling is when you purposefully and in-full-view do something that you know the majority will find objectionable in order to broadcast both your disdain for mainstream values and to show your membership in some subgroup that has different values. ICP fans are famous for this, they revel in being seen as “outcasts,” “freaks” and “evil clowns” (it probably deserves its own essay but man, does Amerika have an insatiable lust for evil clowns). I liked this book much more than the Klosterman one, since that one is more focused on how the 90’s felt different than how it's being remembered. This book is finding trends that started in 1999 and showing where they are now. I appreciated how much the author talked about larger, structural, economic issues like deregulation on telecoms and writers’ strikes and how these played into the trends of the decades. Too often culture writers make it seem like culture and trends emerge fully formed. The classic base/superstructure misunderstanding. However, I feel that this books, and basically all media that remembers the 1990's, downplays the “end of the cold war” aspect. Amerika was oriented towards destroying communism from the end of WWII until 1991. It fought what we call the cold war but to people across the world (in, say, Vietnam or Indonesia or Angola or Cuba or Peru or Korea or really anywhere outside of the “first world”) this was really WWIII. But, we win, the war is over and there is a brief lull before 9/11 reauthorizes us to get the war machine rolling again. The 90’s, and especially the late 90’s were this bizarre aberration. I saw The Matrix in theaters in 1999 (I was 11) and when agent Smith tells Neo that the Matrix is based on the late 90’s since that was the peak of human civilization, people in the movie theater literally laughed out loud, but maybe he was on to something, at least for America. The empire was at its peak. We’d won the war, there was no alternative to liberal democracy, we hadn’t yet entered into the late empire death-spiral wars were still in now, over 20 years later. 1999 was the end as much as the beginning.

DESERTER - JUNJI ITO

I got lucky enough to see an exhibit of Junji Ito’s work when I lived in Tokyo. I don’t read a lot, or really any, Japanese comics. I find the whole realm very intimidating and strange. I’d love to get into more of it but it has the twin problems of every series being incredibly long and hard to start as well as the problem of terrible fans. Either way, I do love Junji Ito, I read most (all?) of his work that appears in English and I regard him as a total master. Uzumaki and Gyo are two of the greatest comics I’ve ever read and are so clearly from a specific, deeply-weird person that there really is no substitute. This collection gathers some of his early work, when he was doing the equivalent of short stories for anthology horror magazines in Japan. There is no introduction or notes of any kind. We don’t get to learn when these were published or how they were received in Japan or anything like that, we’re just dropped in. As you can imagine, this is an anthology so the quality varies. It seems pretty clear that Ito comes up with a spooky idea and then kinda works a bit of a story around it so he can show off this cool drawing idea he thought of. There are stories about evil hair, giant harpy-like monsters, a tape that makes you obsessed with dying, vampires, and bringing people back to life. I particularly enjoyed a story about a woman (demon?) who takes on the face of the person she spends the most time with, a story about a WWII deserter (the title story), and a story about an evil dream version of a person who is trying to force a character to literally be inside-out. There is also a story that features sokushinbutsu, the self-mummification process that I’m quite interested in. Some, maybe most, of the stories end sort of abruptly and are basically a vehicle for a couple of weird panels but man, are those panels weird and cool. No one draws gross, horrific original nightmares like Ito. Junji Ito is a true sicko.