CALYPSO - DAVID SEDARIS

I found this one at the library and was able to read it in about 48 hours, during the “night” part of my job. This was aided by the fact that, like the Klosterman book, I’d already read a few of these essays in the New Yorker, since I’m an asshole. Perhaps these brief forays into “pop” essay collection are slowing down the more serious reading but it’s hard to deny how much fun a Sedaris story is. Holy shit this guy is good. I think I’ve read maybe 80% of the Sedaris that exists (David, I guess I should say, I haven’t read any of Amy’s books about hospitality) and I’ve been a fan of his since I heard the Santaland Diary on T.A.L. when I was a teen. I read his books back the and loved them but always wondered what would happen when he “ran out” of stories. Back then his stories were retellings of events from his life, reconstructed from his journal and drenched in his considerable wit. Sedaris had lived a kinda low-rent, crazy, bohemian life that I admired as a teen. He was a gay man in the South and a drug addicted art school student and an aimless apple picker and a furniture mover and an elf and he’d conjured a sort of perfect short story for each. It’s also probably important to say that he also is from where I’m from and it was always exciting to see the names of places I actually knew in the pages of real magazines as a kid. Either way, Sedaris got famous and I found out about him later in life so he had a lot of memorable experiences to draw from and craft into stories, along with a large colorful family. I always wondered back then how he could keep going. What would happen after he’d highlighted all the crazy things that had happened to him when he tried to learn french or discover his homosexuality. When an author’s subject is themselves, surely life’s finitude makes the boundaries very real. Sedaris sidesteps this by elevating his writing to a level that allows him to play with the structure and tone of the essays and create the sorts of things that don’t require a strong central hook. Earlier Sedaris essays revolve around central story that he elaborates and stretches and polishes to a point that makes them sort of the platonic ideal of a great party story. When someone tells you they used to be a Macy’s elf, you pray they can tell you about it as well as Sedaris can. The essays in Calypso don’t follow this pattern. Instead of following a narrative through line they swirl and shift around. They compress several beach trips to the same part of North Carolina over decades. Instead of highlighting single, reveling moments between people, he’s able to artfully chart how relationships ebb and flow over whole lives. It’s really sad. There’s lots of stuff about his sister’s estrangement and suicide and the lacuna his mother’s death has left. The way the essays pivot and toggle and flow is really stunning though, it can be hard to tell what they’re about at certain points and in an instant they’ll clarify and snap into place with an almost audible crack. 8 beach houses.  

HOUSE OF SLEEPING BEAUTIES AND OTHER STORIES - YASUNARI KAWABATA

I’m not sure where I heard about this book. Kawabata also wrote a very famous novel about Go that I haven’t read but would like to and muscle-fascist Yukio Mishma recommends this collection highly enough to write the intro, so perhaps through one of those avenues. I heard the basic outline of the plot, there’s a “brothel” where you pay money to (literally) sleep next to young drugged girls, years ago and it’s perversity always stuck with me. Turns out that that summary misses the main thrust of the novella, which centers around aging and possession. The narrator is an old man and the titular House of Sleeping Beauties is explicitly for old men. The book is mainly composed of a series of visits to the house and all the weird, sad, obsessive thoughts the narrator has before taking pills and falling asleep himself. He occasionally talks with the madam and pushes the limit in terms of what he’s allowed to do to the girls (of course he does and of course the book has a deeply unsettling rape-y fantasy feel) but the centerpieces are the long trains of thoughts that connect the narrator’s life and loves with feelings of decline and decay and an obsession with virginity (one of the weirdest tangents to be sure). It’s reminded me of Eyes Wide Shut. I also didn’t realize that The House of Sleeping Beauties is short and the also short book has 2 more stories. The second one is about a man borrowing and conversing with a woman’s arm. The other is about a misanthrope who has a large collection of animals. All the stories are eerie and dreamy and all are about how an obsession with possessing people (and animals) twists and distorts and ruins you. 8 sleeping beauties. 

WHORES FOR GLORIA - WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN

AVAILABLE: Two short books in a row about a sad man’s obsession with sex workers. I’m not sure this is really a theme worth pursuing further, both books end in ruin for the man. A quick story: when I was 20 I spent the summer in San Francisco and one of my roommates, was a man named Phil who was a Vollmann fanatic. Phil was a pretty interesting guy overall, he knew a lot about growing weed and chemistry and talked about seeing prostitutes (though he always insisted he went to the Mission District, not the Tenderloin, where this book takes place). He claimed he once met Vollmann on the street one night, both of them on the prowl. He always used to insist that you had to ask the women you approached on the street to show you their breast before you engage in negotiations, to make sure you aren’t speaking to a cop. I didn’t know about Vollmann before I met Phil, but like I said, Phil was a fanatic and a booster and he convinced me to read a few of his books. This one is probably the closer to the Vollmann stuff that Phil likes. Vollmann is all over the place. I like RURD though I’ve only read the condensed version and the section on Madagascar in the full volume. I like his non-fiction better generally, his book about hopping trains was good and his book about his “alter-ego” Dolores is bonkers and interesting. I’ve never made an attempt to take on any of the huge fiction books about the European conquest of the New World. I am intrigued about his book about a bug uprising. WHORES FOR GLORIA is short and precise. It’s basically just vignettes and long (as in pages long) sentences that artfully describe the desperate milieu these sex-workers/customers inhabit in 80’s Tenderloin. It isn’t much interested in plot, it’s basically about man named Jimmy trying to find this ideal prostitute named Gloria, rather it wants to show you how these people, drunks and drug addicts and prostitutes and pimps, are living. We’re definitely suppose to consider this some sort of very artful journalism, Vollmann includes an appendix where he quotes real prostitutes he interviewed and who’s real stories he claims he’s, lightly, fictionalized, for the book. He includes a table showing how much he paid for various sex acts, including how much it cost to be told the stories the comprise the book. This subject clearly fascinates Vollmann. I also own, but haven’t yet read, THE ROYAL FAMILY, which is a 900 page book that also takes places in the Tenderloin hellscape milieu and feature a man trying to find a quasi-mythical prostitute. After reading this one I’m not sure I’m super eager to tackle this subject that much longer. I agree with Vollmann that the fact that prostitution is carried out in this criminal ambience is the major contributor (alongside more general societal misogyny) to the danger these women face. He paints this world in lyrical detail, he’s a hell of a writer, but this seemed like enough. 6 whores. 

EVERY MAN A MENACE - PATRICK HOFFMAN

I’m always interested in the more globalized and connected aspect in the drug trade and ecstasy (or MDMA or “molly” as they call it in this book) has always been particularly interesting since you have to extract the precursor chemicals from a tree that grows in Southeast Asia and is being forested into extinction. The bizarre web it traces across the planet as it’s refined and sold and resold (and who it’s being sold and resold by) is fascinating to conceptualize (especially on molly) and I was told this was the best book on the subject. I was disappointed when it began. The book, at first follows a man, Raymond Gaspar, recently released from prison who is being asked to look into a huge shipment of MDMA to San Francisco by is still-incarcerated boss. At first I think that Gaspar is going to be the main character and the book will be a battle between the various parties involved in the deal, each trying to rip each other off. This plot seemed boring and predictable. However, the antagonist during this section is a maniac criminal named Shadrock who’s a very transfixing character. He forces people to take LSD and says all sorts of out there shit and threatens and oozes violence and chaos. He reminded me of the pedo-LSD-Satanist-meth-swamp-nazi guys from the first season of True Detective. So I’d resigned myself to a quick read (I read this whole thing on a flight to Amsterdam) of a cliche book with a slightly original villain. Then it explodes out. The book follow the shipment of MDMA across the globe zeroing in on milieus in Southeast Asia and Miami and explains to us why this shipment is particularly large and how these drugs get moved and what sorts of people move them. It’s pretty amazing how he manages to show how what seems random or chaotic is the consequence of a choices made by people you’ll never meet, a world away. I’m convinced you could read the book backward and get the same feeling since the sections (the San Francisco part, the Miami part, the SE Asia part) work both on their own but then gains another layer when you’ve read the other parts of the book and can understand the network everyone is trapped in as a whole. Excellent, especially for plane rides. 9 grams of crystalline MDMA

DIXIE BE DAMNED - NEAL SHIRLEY AND SARALEE STAFFORD

This was actually a bit of a reread, I’d made it about 80% through this book before but picked up back up and blasted through it because I told someone who still lives in the South that I’d mail it to him. It’s amazing. A sort of People’s History but focused only on the South. However, instead of talking a grand, over-arching, history 101 approach (which is still needed if anyone’s interested  in writing a book) to Southern radicalism, it focuses in on a handful of situations and instances. From these vignettes, which are riots and strikes and insurrections and battles, of our past, it’s possible to imagine another present. What if this movement hadn’t been coopted? What if that strike had held out? Sad stuff, but necessary if we want to move forward. My favorite sections is the one about the maroon slave colony is the Great Dismal Swamp. The Great Dismal Swamp, in addition to having the best swamp name, is a place I’ve been (I once planned a Boy Scout canoe trip there), grew up near, and totally had no idea about this peace of history. Escaped slaves, Native Americans and landless whites lived in the pre-revolutionary GDS, killed slave masters and freed slaves, stole, resisted detection and arrest, syncretized  their religious beliefs and lived for years. Outrageous that I didn’t know that. I need to return to NC and erect a plaque.

BARACOON: THE STORY OF THE LAST "BLACK CARGO" - ZORA NEALE HURSTON

Zora Neale Hurston is, obviously, incredible. I really like the books of gathered folk tales and I love the idea of her traveling around these places when she did, by herself, talking to people and writing down their stories. I’ve also read, THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD, and found it really good, much better than I thought it’d be. In this case, she found a story teller who’s personal story is so overwhelming and powerful, it deserves a book. Several books, probably, it’s a testament to the monstrous racism Hurston faced that this book, which includes one of the most insane first person accounts in history, wasn’t published until this year. The heart of the book, as it exists, is Hurston’s transcription of Kossola’s story. He is one of the last people to have been kidnapped and enslaved and transported across the Atlantic and his is one of the few accounts we have total of this process that totally shaped and birthed our world. As you can probably imagine, Kossola’s story is full of depthless tragedy. I was struck by the cruelty  he described receiving from American-born slaves and their decedents who by this time (he is taken to American in 1860) had not only constructed/had forced upon them a unique identity apart from and, apparently, opposed to, African-born Africans. The book also includes Hurston’s accounts of Kossola’s life in an Alabama Africa-Town after the war and what his life looked like in old age. Beyond the Hurston authored stuff there are essays from academics describing Hurston’s process and life around the time she wrote the book as well as additional scholarship that essential fact-checks or flushes out Kossola’s story (Hurston’s writing in that direction are also included and commented upon). The scope of what’s happening in this book is beyond the ability to take in really. Glimpsing it in the corners of Kossola’s life made this book tough to bear. Amazing and terrifying. 9 ships. 

SIMBI AND THE SATYR OF THE DARK JUNGLE - AMOS TUTUOLA

For whatever reason there were a few Tutuola jams in these bright patteren cover editions I’d never seen on the discount shelf of the bookstore near me. I should have copped them all, but I did pick up this one. Like the other Tutuola I’ve read this primarily concerns a journey, undertaken by Simbi a privileged girl who wants to know the meaning of suffering and misfortune, into a supernatural and terrifying and amazing milieu, which in this book is the Road of Death and the various towns and creatures that live nearby. Like in the other Tutuola books I’ve read this one unfolds as a series of encounters and interactions with strange creatures or situations (or, less often, a character will describe something strange or unusual that happened in the past). Sometimes these episodes come back or are important later, often they are not. Often times the main thrust of the quest if forgotten, which very much makes the book feel like being in a strange land where you don’t know the rules and you can’t really figure out what’s going on. It’s an amazing vibe, totally unique. More Amos. 8 journeys.