THE LAST SAMURAI - HELEN DEWITT

I’d heard about this book for a while, it’s sort of a darkhorse best-book-of-the-21st-century candidate that you occasionally hear about, but the fact that DeWitt got back in the news for refusing an award that would have required her to go on some podcasts made me feel like I should tap-in and check out this novel. I don’t think it’s on the level of 2666 or the Neopolitan novels, but it’s really fucking good. The plot is pretty simple but the structure and pace of the book is masterful and the book, despite being almost 500 pages, flies by. Basically the novel follows a boy-genius named Ludo who is being raised by his mother Sibylla in London. Ludo doesn’t know who his father is and, as he grows older he becomes more obsessed with finding out the truth. By the second half of the book, he finds out who is father is and, disappointed, he then seeks out other genius men (though, they tend to be geniuses about different things, i.e. one is an engineer, one is a linguistic genius, one is a painter, etc.) as sort of father figures. The book takes its time going through the lives of these men. Pretty simple, but what the book is amazing at is the slow revelation about the exact dynamic between mother and son. At first, the book follows Sibylla, we learn about her background, genius runs in her family, and we see how she mothers Ludo. Basically, she teaches his languages like Japanese and Greek, then lets him read anything he wants and constantly watches The Seven Samurai (which was the original title of the book). Sibylla is a genius, but this genius is actually crippling and she can’t really function in the world, she has no money and her job is typing up copies of boring slop. As the book goes on, DeWitt does a great job of turing what is at first funny, Sibylla comes off as eccentric in the first half, before slowly transition to something really tragic and depressing (Sibylla is suicidal and not being able to function in the world really hurts). The genius men that Ludo encounters are more materially successful, they manage to turn their genius into prestige and/or financial freedom but they are also still beset with problems. You can’t be smart enough to wiggle out of life’s problems. You might have different issues as a genius, but you’re never really free. Likewise, this book does a great job of dealing with the classic issue of writing about the genius, i.e. how to portray a genius if you yourself are not one. Well, DeWitt might be a genius, who knows, she does a really good job of showing what Ludo knows and how he makes connections between things, and, most crucially, what sort of stuff he doesn’t know (like capitals) since he’s not in regular school. Overall, I found the book really fun and interesting to read, every time it would settle into a rhythm DeWitt would do something to break it up and keep things fresh. Every character was really well drawn and the slow dawning of pathos over the course of the novel was remarkably well done. In that sense it was sort of like one of my favorite books of all time, A Confederacy of Dunces, in which a hypersmart main character is shown trying to interact with a world he’s smarter than as the tone of the book shifts from something farcical and silly (tho CoD is much sillier than this book) to something tragic.

ANGLE OF YAW - BEN LERER

I have had a bit of a phobia or fear of Napoleon Dynamite Syndrome w/r/t Lerner because I only really know him from his autofiction. And I only know about it because people love it and you read/hear about it often. Since what I gathered from this conversation left me with the impression that he was a wunderkind poet who is from Kansas and lived in Spain and who writes small books that are technically fiction but about his life, and that sounded not for me. Pass. But at some point I had read one of his poems and wondered if his poetry was actually good and saw that this collection seemed like the favorite and that my library carries it. Anyway, it is good. There are 3 sections here, the first and the last are more formally poetry, with clear lines and whatnot. The middle section consists of short prose-poems that were my favorite part of the book. There are some real bars. I enjoyed, “"Even in death, the old debate between / depth and surface: some poets attach weights to their ankles, others just / float facedown.” and “If you have to buy a ticket, it’s modern. If you are already inside and have to pay to get out of it, it’s more modern. If you can be inside of it without paying, it’s a trap.” There’s lots of great stuff about the vertical and the horizontal, including a great image of a marching band forming a shape that can only be seen from above, but being filmed and placed on a screen so the audience can see, “The displacement of the God-term by the masses” which also plays into his investigation about how reading a book makes you assume a position of shame with your head down. Which seems a bit undercut by our phones and how they change our posture, but it’s an interesting line of thinking either way. I’m not sure I’m going to pick up any of his novels, they still seem like something that I wouldn’t really like, but I was pretty impressed by some of these poem. 

MOAN - JUNJI ITO

I’m glad we’re getting more and more Ito in English. When I lived in Japan, I got to see a museum retrospective on his work. It was amazing to see the original pages, to see the pencil outlines he made before inking, the crazy detail he puts into the big, horrific splash-pages. I don’t bring that up just to brag, but to point out that several of the stories in this collection seem to have been written from the splash panel backwards. As in, he had a gnarly, disgusting, fucked-up idea for a drawing, and then built a story with that imagine in mind. Which is why some of these stories end really abruptly and the pacing can seem weird. But, these critiques aside, this volume is amazing. Some of the best short stories he’s written are contained in this volume, especially the first 3 stories. There’s some classic Ito freakiness in here, especially Blood Orb Grove, which might be my favorite short story of his ever, and certainly contains one of the greatest images he’s ever drawn. I’m always impressed by the ways that Ito weaves Japanese cultural concerns into his work, there’s stuff that touches on the importance that Japanese folks place on keeping a clean home, there is a story that seems to reference the Shugendō practice of meditating under a waterfall and also includes a kaiju-like creature. And when he riffs on a more Western trope, like the vampire, he gives us such a strange, bizarre version, it’s clear it could have only come from him. I wonder how much more Ito needs to be translated into English. I don’t really read Manga, so I am in no position to evaluate him against his peers, but I will say, from my perspective, he’s a total original, a nasty freak, and someone who’s always worth reading. I would say this volume would be a good starting point if you didn’t want to read one of the classic, longer-form pieces. 

THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING - ANONYMOUS (translated by Carmen Acevedo Butcher)

It was nice to read something a little shorter. Not only is the book itself pretty short, around 100 pages, but the whole thing is broken into 75 short chapters, which can be read as quick little bites. The whole thing is, or purports to be, a collection of letters from an anonymous 14th century monk writing to a younger monk and giving his advice about spiritual life. While it can be a bit hard to tell who a book is really “for” this one is unique in the sense that the author is very clear that I'm not supposed to be reading it. Since he divides the world into “actives” or regular folks living regular lives, and “contemplatives” or monks living in monasteries who have devoted themselves to the study and contemplation of God, and this book is for the contemplatives.“I don’t want habitual gossips, brownnosers, faultfinders, complainers, whispers and all kinds of character assassinators reading this book. I hope they never see it. I never intended to write anything for them. I don’t even want them hearing about it. That also goes for those who are just inquisitive, both educated and not. Yes, I mean even if they are good people living active lives. It’s not for the merely curious.”  The advice he gives the younger monk ranges from the practical, he has specific instructions on how to pray, to broader theological points like the titular “cloud of unknowing” which is his metaphor for the chasm that will always separate the human from truly grasping God’s infinite nature. The prayer thing is actually quite interesting since the advice, at least to me reading in the 21st century, sounds very close to mediation in the Eastern religious sense. He suggests taking a single word with one syllable, like “god” or “sin” and repeating it in the mind, like a mantra, until one is able to enter a higher spiritual state. I’m not sure why this modality didn’t catch on in the West. It does help explain why this book is popular with perennial philosophy types. There is a bit of talk about Mary and some Christian saints, but largely it’s spiritual in a broader sense. Non-Christians could get a lot out of this too, it’s like Rumi or Conference of Birds or Chuang Tzŭ.  It is hard to imagine a world where becoming a monk and living in a monastery was a normal-ish thing to do. I would need to look more into how this worked practically, I’m not sure how normal it was for a lower class, peasant person to be able to sort of drop out of the world and be supported while they spent life in quiet contemplation. While there are still monks, there seem to be many many fewer than before and, inarguably, they don’t really take up a lot of social space. Is that partly why folks seem so insane? There’s no relief valve, a way to sort of leave the world without just becoming homeless. On the religious front, the most baffling part of this book for me had to do with his advice to attempt to hide your love of god from good, as a sort of child’s game, as a way to tap into god’s playful side. Very strange advice, I have no idea what he means. Likewise, there is a strange passage about how when the devil appears as a man, you can tell it’s him since in this form he only has one nostril through which you could see his brain, which, in this telling, is an image of hell that would drive you insane if you saw it. He talks about how the septum is a symbol of being able to tell right from wrong, which makes the recent trend of septum piercing interesting. Strange stuff. This book did not make me want to become a monk, but it did make me feel like I should get back to meditating daily. 

NOW JAZZ NOW - BYRON COLEY, MATS GUSTAFSSON, THURSTON MOORE, NENEH CHERRY, JOE MCPHEE

This is a book I had to request that the library purchase. It’s big and glossy and expensive, and about a pretty obscure topic so I didn’t expect it to be around for long, I can see it being a real collectors item in a few years. How does one review a book of reviews? This book is just that, it’s a list of 100 Free Jazz records, arranged chronologically, with only one entry per bandleader (some people show up in multiple entries, as side players), that the authors think are the most important or interesting entries into the genre. I’m not sure I could be called a big Free Jazz guy, but I do love a couple of records in the genre and when you get that itch to listen to that type of music, nothing else will do. It’s fantastic energy music, it can be good driving music when you’re super locked in, it’s very good stoned with headphones music. However, it is difficult music to review, especially in short blurbs where you can’t get deep into the music theory stuff that’s going on with some of these records. That means the most of the “reviews” in this book are more about the personalities and biographies and/or are little scene reports than focused directly on the music. It’s hard to describe how this stuff sounds. Skronky, wild, frantic, noise-y, far-out, you can only use these words so often. Since you can imagine the type of record nerd who’s into this type of music (one of them is a guy from Sonic Youth) there are a lot of ultra obscure picks. Records that have like 5 copies that no one has ever heard. There’s lots of talk of alternate covers and defunct record labels. I do admire that they chose a lot of non-American records. There’s lots of Japanese stuff, and I can attest that this style of music is quite present in Japan, and lots of European stuff listed here. Sadly, they did not choose my personal favorite Free Jazz record, Interstellar Space, but went with a different Coletrane. Nor did they highlight The Creator Has a Masterplan, one of the great Free Jazz songs. But that being said, it’s super fun to read through this stuff and try to look up the records. Many of them are on streaming or Youtube, but a lot of them aren’t. I'll have to come across them honestly, by finding them in an old record store. This is a great book for giving one a list of records to look for.

MORNING GLORY MILKING FARM - C.M. NASCOSTA

When you hear a pitch like, a woman falls in love with a minotaur she’s medicinally jerking off, you think, where can I get a copy of this? MGMF was quasi-viral for its insane premise and they not only had it at the local library but there was a long line for it. Sadly, I needed to be more unhinged. The book takes place in a world where monsters of various sorts exist (pixies, orcs, mothmen, snakemen, etc.) and seem to live mostly besides humans, though they do seem to be quasi-segregated a la racial minorities in modern day America. The main character here talks about how she didn’t grow up around lots of monsters but by the end of the book, she’s moving to the monster neighborhood with her minotaur boyfriend. And, really, that’s the problem with this book in a nutshell, outside of the central concept, the book is really really heteronormative and millennial wish fulfillment fantasy. The narrator, Violet, reminds us constantly that she’s a millennial who’s overeducated, anxious and downwardly mobile. She takes the jerk-off job because she can’t get a job in her preferred field (urban design), she’s always stressed out and nervous. Then she meets and falls in love with Rourke, a minotaur who is perfect. He’s rich and recently divorced and nice and treats her perfectly. He doesn’t rush her into sex, he spoils her, he helps her get a job in her field and then moves into a nice house with her, and he fucks her better than anyone else ever has. But even here it’s pretty conventional, he talks about how much he loves eating pussy and he centers her pleasure and he takes a long time to make sure she’s ready for his huge bull cock. I guess I wanted something freakier and more bizarre. I get that romance is fantasy and the fantasy of a rich, hot guy coming into your life and fixing everything is appealing, it just isn’t that interesting. I guess I wanted him to fuck her in a labyrinth, or explain that mintaurs only do group sex, or something. Once you get over the minotaur milking aspect, it’s super norm-y. And that part is cool, it’s interesting that in this world we need minotaur semen to make Viagra-like drugs, that’s an interesting concept and idea. She really goes out of her way to describe the handjobs she gives at this place, and I’m here for all that. I just needed the rest of the book to live up to this part, after we meet Rourke, there’s basically no conflict left. They fall in love pretty much right away and never question it. He solves every problem in her life without much trouble and they live happily ever after. If I’m going to read smut, I’d really like it to be smuttier.

I DELIVER PACKAGES IN BEIJING - HU ANYAN

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

NECROPOLITICS - ACHILLE MBEMBE

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

DEVIL ON THE CROSS - NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O

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

THE REVISED BOY-SCOUT MANUAL - WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

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

ANSWER TO JOB - C. G. JUNG

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

BLOOD IN MY EYES - GEORGE JACKSON

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

COTTON COMES TO HARLEM - CHESTER HIMES

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

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

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

CUE THE SUN! - EMILY NUSSBAUM

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

SOMETHING TO DO WITH PAYING ATTENTION - DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

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

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

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

SLAVERY AND CAPITALISM: A NEW MARXIST HISTORY - DAVID MCNALLY

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

SOLDIER OF ARETE - GENE WOLFE

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

SPEND - ALISON BECHDEL

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