ZEROZEROZERO - ROBERT SAVIANO

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

THE STORY OF THE LOST CHILD - ELANA FERRANTE

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

MORNINGSIDE - ARAN SHETTERLY

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

THE SHADOW OF SIRIUS - W. S. MERWIN

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

“...and it seems that I cherish

only now a joy I was not aware of

when it was here although it remains

out of reach and will not be caught or named

or called back and if I could make it stay

as I want to it would turn to pain.”

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

THE DESCENT OF ALETTE - ALICE NOTLEY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Just the same”

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

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

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

WRONG NORMA - ANNE CARSON

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

OLIO - TYEHIMBA JESS

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

ASK THE DUST - JOHN FANTE

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

AUTHORITY - ANDRE LONG CHU

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

BUTTER - ASAKO YUZUKI (trans. POLLY BARTON)

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

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.