A MAZE OF DEATH - PHILIP K DICK

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

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MODERN SONG - BOB DYLAN

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

THE STORY OF A NEW NAME - ELENA FERRANTE

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

HELGOLAND: MAKING SENSE OF THE QUANTUM REVOLUTION – CARLO ROVELLI

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

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

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

THE STREET OF CROCODILES - BRUNO SCHULZ

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

1999 - ROSS BENES

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

DESERTER - JUNJI ITO

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

MALE FANTASIES vol 2 - KLAUS THEWELEIT

Got the other one in. This set runs about 800 pages total and the second volume is very much in line with the first. This one, the second volume, might include more reproductions of cartoons and posters and photos, which was always welcomed. I’m not a germanophile so I was totally unfamiliar with most of the media he discusses. It’s very much written for a German audience, at one point he talks about “all of our fathers” in reference to the Nazis. The aim is the same, Theweleit looks at the novels and memoirs of Freikorps members and then spins out into a broader, psychological discussion of fascism's manufacture, workings and appeal. There was some very interesting discussion about how fascists always want to talk about a rebirth or new beginning since they can never be content with now. How the aim of large-scale anti-fascism has to involve creating people who cannot become fascist subjects. He spends a lot of time in the minds of these soldier-males, as he likes to call them, right before, during, and after events of gleeful violence. All stuff becoming more and more relevant by the day. Good tools to really consider our modern day cops, special forces guys, male-podcasters and all other such forms of fascist and proto-fascist life. I do think these two volumes could be boiled down to one 400 page volume, though it is good to see someone really going for it and chasing down all the leads. I’m glad I got this from the library so I was on a time crunch that made me read both of these pretty quick, back-to-back, though they do have some very interesting photos/cartoons/illustrations so it would be also nice to own this thing.

TRIPPED: NAZI GERMANY, THE CIA, AND THE DAWN OF THE PSYCHEDELIC AGE - NORMAN OHLER

Typically, I do not review books I don’t like, because I don’t finish reading them. I’m under no pressure to read stuff that is stupid, there is only so much time in the day and there is a long, long list of things I’d like to read. If you go back on this blog, you’ll notice that the only negative book reviews I’ve given are for things I’m reading for a specific purpose (I’m discussing it with someone, etc.). That being said, it’s the end of the year, I wanted to squeeze in one more book (this thing is short) and I found it at my parent’s house. I read it over two nights and, boy, is it not good. This book covers very familiar ground for me, it’s about the history of LSD, which, by necessity, involves a lot of CIA/deep state shenanigans. Ohler gives the paints a very misleading picture of what went on with acid. The machinations of the so-called deep state or CIA fuckery are becoming more popular and well-known. Regular people know about MKULTRA now, or at least they know the name, and they have a specific idea of what went on.The mainstream idea, that this book pushes, is that the CIA made some wacky mistakes in the heat of the cold war. They tried some silly stuff and none of it worked and they feel bad about it. This narrative usually contains the Midnight Climax stuff (where unsuspecting Johns were given acid in San Francisco and recorded, no curiosity as to where else the idea of drugging and recording sex acts might lead to or how it might connect to, say, Epstein), the Olson Stuff (tho, not the part about who was the bellhop at the hotel, typically this telling leaves the idea that he killed himself as a possibility), and a narrative about how it got “out of the CIA’s control and into the counterculture.” This is a harmful narrative that leaves the really bad stuff out. For example, Jolly West isn’t even in this book at all. This book pushes the idea that these experiments aren’t “who we really are.” The beginning of the book tries to suggest that America’s racist drug laws were borrowed from Nazi Germany. Anyone with a brain would understand it went the other way. We were using drugs as a way to suppress dissent and long, long before the Nazis got into power, they learned it from us. In the epilogue of the book, he writes, “In doing so [suppressing drugs], the democratic countries of the West especially, whose appeal and prosperity is based on the freedom of the individual, do themselves a disservice.” which is an insane and, frankly, evil, understanding of history. The prosperity of the West is based on organizations like the CIA being able to do endless holocausts on the so-called third world. That’s what history since the end of WWII is actually about. That’s the context you have to understand MKULTRA within. It’s not a sad aberration, a failure to live up to our highest ideals, it’s business as usual. My worry is that books like this are supposed to act as limited hangouts or soft-disclosures to keep people from really understanding what went on. The book to read on this subject is Acid Dreams. This is garbage.

MALE FANTASIES vol 1 - KLAUS THEWELEIT

I’ve been trying to get my hands on this thing for some time now, maybe a couple of years. For whatever reason, it’s never in any libraries or on any of the sites I steal books from. However, it has a pretty impressive reputation and I always check when I’m living somewhere new. Well, I finally found it through an inter-library loan here in the Midwest and got it from a Christian college in Iowa. For unclear reasons, they made me check out both volumes, each 400 pages, at the same time so I’m in a bit of a rush to finish them both before they’re due but I’ll do my best. Anyway, the reputation is deserved, this thing rocks. The nominal topic of this book is the literature of the Freikorps, their novels and memoirs. The Freikorps were paramilitary, irregular units that existed in Germany between the world wars. They were mostly made up of psychotically right-wing veterans of WWI who crushed the various communist uprisings in Germany and fought with the Red Army across Eastern Europe before Hitler took over and they were folded into the regular German Army. There are a lot of good candidates but “what if the communist revolution had worked in Germany before WWII?” is perhaps the biggest fork in the road of 20th century history, one that (now 100 years on) clearly placed us in the much worse universe. Anyway, this isn’t a history book, in fact, I don’t know a ton about this period (need to read more, as always), it’s more of a psychological study of fascism and how it functions throughout the art of these men. It has a deep resonance now, most especially when Theweleit shows how fascists play up the antagonism between the sexes and play down the class divisions and how hatred and fear of women is the prime driver behind the fascist worldview and violence. Listening to any manosphere podcast today will make this very, very clear. This book also includes one of the better explanations of Deluze and Guattari’s work that I’ve ever seen. Like Drug Cartels Do Not Exist, I kinda wanted less stuff about the actual work he’s critiquing, in this case the Friekorps novels/diaries/art (since I have literally read none of it and it seems pretty bad on it’s own terms), and more of his psycho-political musing. My man is really cooking here. I’m excited for the next volume.

THE MOON AND SERPENT BUMPER BOOK OF MAGIC - ALAN MOORE & STEVE MOORE

He finally did it. I think I’ve been waiting for this thing for over a decade. I was and am I real Alan Moore head. I think it would be fair to say I was more (pun intended?) of a fan as a younger man but I’ve read almost all of his comics work (I’ll get to the novels some day) many several times, consider a handful of them the best comics ever created, and he’s one of those people I’m always interested in hearing interviewed. He’s got a very distinctive vibe that he really leans into. Anyway, as any Moore-head can tell you, the man is obsessed with Magick (the occult type) and infuses it into all of his work, especially his later work. He’s mentioned for years and years that he’s been working on this, a big book that just lays out all of his magical theories and ideas plainly instead of suffusing it into his regular comics work. And he did it. This thing is beautiful. Lots of great illustrations from all sorts of amazing comics artists. Lots of good discussion on various esoteric concepts. There’s some really interesting stuff about the use of taboo in the occult, which piqued my interest and connects to some of the “Eye of the Chickenhawk” stuff that I might write about later. There’s lots about Glycon, the late Roman God that Moore worships. And while he is very focused on the Western Occult tradition, there is some good stuff about Voodoo that I found enlightening. It is a bit repetitive. If you’ve read Promethea, lots of this is the same and the book itself goes over some topics, like the Kabbalah, several times in different ways. However, as an object, it is amazingly beautiful and I’m glad I dropped the $50 to have it on my bookshelf forever. 

THE ILIAD - HOMER (trans. EMILY WILSON)

Longtime readers, by which I mean no one, will remember that, a few years ago, I read Wilson’s translation of THE ODYSSEY and really loved it. It was the first translation of that poem into English by a woman and Wilson has now done the same for the other book in Homer’s oeuvre. I love these things. I’m a longtime Greek myths guy and have read the Iliad and Odyssey a couple of times each over the years. I still prefer the Odyssey, I think it’s more exciting and interesting and I like Odyssus as a character more than anyone in the Iliad but Wilson does quite a highlighting why this poem is so interesting. Her translation does not match line-for-line with the Greek like Smith and Miller’s but she does render it in iambic pentameter, which makes it move swiftly. I read large portions of it outloud to my daughter and it reads really well. There is so much strange stuff in here, trying to wrap one’s head around the Greek worldview. I was really caught by how confusing I found their talk of fate and destiny. Most characters know their fates, they know Troy will fall and many of them, especially Hector and Achilles, know they will die before the end. Even the outcome of every individual battle and one-on-one fight is controlled to some extent by the Gods who sometimes seem like they can do whatever they want and hand victory to whomever pleases them, and other times seem like they cannot change certain fates. There is much talk about wining glory from bravery and heroic deeds, but we also see, again and again, the gods themselves breath courage into men and to aid their hand in actions that bring men glory. Hard to center as a modern person. Wilson has great notes that help one understand some of the Greek subtleties and mythological background and the essay at the beginning, like the one she wrote for the Odyssey, is amazing and thorough and interesting. I would love to own a copy of both of these to read aloud again to my daughter when she’s old enough to understand.

LIFE AS NO ONE KNOWS IT - SARA IMARI WALKER

A mind fuck. Typically, I avoid pop-science stuff. It tends to dumb really, really complex things down to simple explanations, which makes people feel like they really understand what is being discussed, which then get used to make conclusions in other realms. Quantum physics is the most obvious example of this, there are no shortage of new age books that seek to explain the world or buttress their argument with “quantum physics” when their understanding of QP comes from pop-science books. But, I heard this book was good and mind-bending so I decided to pick it up. Walker is trying to do two things in this book, map out theory as to what constitutes life from a physics angle. This would help us recognize alien life that is very, very different than us. Secondly, and relatedly, she wants to explore how life here on earth began and if/how life could be created under other circumstances. The answer given in this book is pretty unique (at least to me), and it involves a new scientific theory called “Assembly Theory.” AT proposes that every object in the universe has two properties, an assembly index and a copy number, that can be combined to tell us an object’s assembly number, which in turn (if it’s over 15) can tell us whether or not something is evidence of life. Important to say that the assembly number does not say the object itself is alive, necessarily, but whether or not something alive was involved in its creation, since a lot of really complex objects means that something was selected for them and that something must be alive. Very interesting and heady stuffy, especially if you really consider what this means about very complicated hyper-objects, which Walker points out are quite large in “time” (another complex idea in the book is that an object’s size in time is a material property of the object, not merely a metaphor) in the sense that their assembly requires so many different points of selection. As she puts it in the book, “”matter,” “information,” “causation,” “computation,” “complexity,” and “life,” assembly theory is an attempt to see all of these as the same thing.” It’s something I think I’ll be thinking about for a while and try to apply to different areas of thought, much like the new age people I complained about at the top of this review. The book also includes parts about the history of this line of thinking as well as current experiment to try to build life from scratch here on earth. I found these parts less compelling. Likewise, I went to go look up a scientific paper that Walker had published in Nature that explains Assembly Theory in more technical terms and I found it really helpful. Sometimes the book is too light on the science and too interested in the color and background. Either way, a fascinating way to look at the world.

YOU CAN’T WIN - JACK BLACK

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

Smiler

The Sanctimonious Kid (Sanc)

Soldier Johnnie

Salt Chunk Mary

Rebel George

Shorty

Soapy Smith

Bat Masterson

Gold Tooth

Foot-and-a-half George

Hinky Dink

Bathhouse John

Mush-Mouth Johnson

California Jack

Irish Amie

Jim Ham

St. Louis Frank

Hannible

Rochester Red

Cocky McAllister

Swede Pete

Spokane

Dirty Dick

Shorty

Chi Jimmy

THE NINETIES - CHUCK KLOSTERMAN

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

ELITE CAPTURE - Olúfhemi O. Táíwò

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

THE AMERICAN RELIGION - HAROLD BLOOM

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

MY BRILLIANT FRIEND - ELENA FERRANTE

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

HYPERION - DAN SIMMONS

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