DEVOTED TO DEATH: SANTA MUERTE, THE SKELETON SAINT - R. ANDREW CHESNUT

Still on the Santa Muerte kick. This one i had to buy used online since I guess it is out of print. While the last Santa Muerte book I read, SANATA MUERTE: THE HISTORY, RITUALS, AND MAGIC OF OUR LADY OF THE HOLY DEATH, was focused on “practicality” in terms of prayers and rituals and offerings to get the Bony Lady’s attention. As a quick side note, both books employ this great technique where they are constantly changing which sobriquet they use to describe her. She’s got some great ones, the Skinny Lady, Beautiful Girl, White Girl, The Godmother, Lord of the Night, the list goes on. This naming practice started in this book though, like lots of information in SANATA MUERTE: THE HISTORY, RITUALS, AND MAGIC OF OUR LADY OF THE HOLY DEATH, originated here. Either way, this book was incredibly helpful and interesting. He uses the 7 colored candle as a scheme to organize the book, each chapter corresponds to a color. This 7 colors (siete potencias) trope is actually borrowed from Afrro-syncretic religions like Vodun or Santeria. The religious studies/history aspect, what Chesnut dubs the “brown” sections, was full of facts like the one about the candle and was my favorite part. All of it was fascinating and he certainly knows way more about the topic than me but I’d like to point out some areas where I heard different things from people when I talked to them about Santa Muerte. The first and most easily explained (hint: it’s my gender bias) is how deeply I underestimated Santa Muerte appeal as a love magician. I definitely noticed the prevalence of red candles and I understood their connection to love and passion but Chesnut points out that they are the most popular candle, above even totemic, “satanic” black candle. The earliest prayers to her are about love, or, more specifically, returning cheating men. Because the more famous Mexico City shrines tend to be in dodgy areas and occasionally attract a less-than-savory bunch, the demographics of the devotees I would see skewed male, I was underestimating the sheer volume of personal home shrines and thus underrating Santa Muerte’s appeal to women. In fact, the very idea of the Grim Reaper being a woman is a Spanish tradition, their version is called La Parca and was brought over with the conquistadors and turned into Santa Muerte. This might be the largest area where Chesnut and I differ. He really plays up the Spanish and Iberian connections of Santa Muerte. Every single person I ever spoke to about it in Mexico City talked about her Aztec origins, both as a point of pride (about how this powerful force is homegrown and deeply Mexican) and a testament to her efficacy (since Aztecs are assumed to have powerful magic). Chesnut relays the story about how most people look at the owl that often accompanies her as a symbol of wisdom (a la Athena), others people who want to emphasize her Aztec-ness point to the owl that often accompanies her, which, in pre-invasion Mesoamerica, was a symbol of death. The thing is, I heard the thing about the death-owl connection often. I never once heard anything about the western symbolistic associations with owls. I saw lots of statuary depicting Santa Muerte in Aztec clothing, paraphernalia that was supposedly enhanced by it’s Aztec origins, and occasional explicit references to Mictecacihuatl, an Aztec underworld goddess. Chesnut address this:

“However, many of those who do take an interest in the origins of the saint tend to emphasize her putative Aztec or other indigenous roots. This perspective derives, in part, from the nature of Mexican nationalism, which, since the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), has glorified the pre-Colombian indigenous past and downplay and even vilified the Spanish influence off the construction of national identity.” 

This is an interesting but wrong critique to me. There is certainly a deep and fascinating strain of the Mexican psyche that is tethered to a very mystical, utopian view of what life was probably like for the vast majority of their ancestors during the height of the Aztec, Mayan or other civilization. You see something like this in the Hotep communities views on pre-Triangle Trade Africa. Again, it is fascinating that such large groups of people have such a strange view of the past, but ultimately any sane sense of Mexican identity and history must certainly “vilify” the Spanish and their influence. The take on death that Santa Muerte embodies always felt very Mexican and very pre-Colombian to me and the majority of her followers. It’s strange to me how Chesnut insists that this isn’t the case. Either way, very good. 9 votive candles. 

POPULAR CRIME: REFLECTIONS ON THE CELEBRATION OF VIOLENCE - BILL JAMES

I finished this book the same day I finished the McKenna one and they both would have been better served as podcasts. This book rambles like crazy. It’s loosely structured around the largest crimes of the 20th century, in order. Each crime includes a short description and often short reviews of the different books on a given crime. James has read a lot of crime books so for each incident, he’s read maybe 3-5 books. He gives them short reviews (typically negative, for as many crime books as he’s read, he doesn’t seem to like the vast majority of them) and ranks them. My god does he love ranking and listing. This should be unsurprising given that James is famous for inventing Sabermetrics, a way to turn baseball into math. He attempts the same trick with crime, He comes up with an elaborate, 100-point system to ascertain the likelihood that a suspect is guilty. He outlines a way to place descriptions into different “levels” depending on their believability and specificity. He eventually outlines a grand system for categorizing popular crime that is built around 18 elements. For instance, the JonBent case is a IQBX 9 (innocent-victim, mystery, bizarre and sexual elements, 9 in terms of notoriety). While this all seems very wonky and “stats nerdy,” it was written by the ur stats-nerd, the objective or dispassionate patina that such numbers crunching is suppose to signify is totally undercut by how strangely personal all this is. He doesn’t decide which crimes to cover in any sort of systematic or consistent way beyond these are the 60 or so crimes he’s most interested in. He glosses over major 20th century crimes like Leopold and Leob or the Atlanta child killings. There’s also some very weird stuff, like a full throated defense of Mark Fuhrman (it comes as no surprise from a while male baby boomer, that this book about crime has little to say about race) or constant reference to the deserved failure of the 60s. There’s more interesting tangents like his JFK theory (a Secret Service agent killed him by mistake), or a long section about reforming prisons to a system where we have thousands of tiny 20-40 person prisons, all ranked and classified in a complicated system, of course (I like this idea.  But while all these weird tangents and sidetracks are scattershot and frustrating in the book (you want some to be longer and others shorter) they would be well served as podcasts where he could just take a crime a show and dive into it and share his theories and book reviews. That long formless ramble part that is before the “show” part of most podcasts could be where he tells us what a great guy Mark Fuhrman is or how claims that Micheal Jackson was not only not the World’s Most Famous Person but at no point in his life was he ever in the top 100  most  famous people(I swear to god James writes this. He posits this as part of trying to prove how out of touch the “Los Angeles Media” is with “real america” and ends up seeming like an alien). Either way, I was interested throughout. Get a crime podcast Bill. 6 bodies. 

TRUE HALLUCINATIONS: BEING AN ACCOUNT OF THE AUTHOR'S EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES IN THE DEVIL'S PARADISE - TERENCE MCKENNA

After reading the Tao Lin book a few weeks (months?) ago, compounded by the new Micheal Pollen book about psychedelics that I haven’t read but have absorbed a lot of press about and recently trying Salvia again after ~10 years, I’ve been on a bit of a hallucinogens (entheogen?) kick. It occurred to me that while I’ve loved McKenna for over a decade (a McKenna related group was one of the first one’s I joined on a then-new Facebook)  and I read Food of the Gods way back when but all my other McKenna exposure has been through his talks, which are available in an endless library on Youtube. In fact, Youtube is an ideal media for him. You can bring up one of his hundreds of hours long talks and keep it up in a background tab while you do something else. His voice has a lulling, droning quality and his ability to just expound and yammer and preform these incredible acts of logorrhea is mind-blowing and, if your interests overlap with his, deeply enjoyable. He would have been the perfect podcast guest. The super flowery and descriptive mood he strikes in his speeches is recreated in the book where it is less impressive. Also, he chooses the wrong thing to focus on. I understand the book is explicitly focused on his experiences in the Colombian rainforest but I really wish it could have been broader. Even McKenna seems to sense that this story is a little thin given that he includes numerous  asides and tangents (biographies of his companions, short bits about meeting jungle-nazis, describing his travels in Asia) and you wish he’d just write a straight autobiography. We get mention of his time as a hashish smuggler in Tibet, wondering the hippy trail through India, the “rolling orgies of the summer of love”, his time as a violent Berkeley demonstrator, his pivotal role in magic mushroom industry, and all sorts of weird people he met. The main story in the book, the La Chorrera experiment basically boils down to a time he travelled to a very remote part of the world where he and his friends took so many drugs that his brother went temporally insane and McKenna was visited by an alien. This is a great story, but I don’t think it’s better than any of the other ones in McKenna’s life, in fact, in many ways it’s worse since describing drug experiences is really the ultimate “you had to be there” situation. But since he believes in the literally reality of the aliens who visited him and the vital importance of the “Timewave Zero” theory (as far as the grand Terrance McKenna theories, I’d put Timewave Zero behind both “Stoned Ape” and “The Mushroom is an Alien”) they gave him, the book hinges around that. Good book, interesting and insightful but, in the end, a missed opportunity. 7 Plants

THE COMPLETE CREPAX: THE TIME EATER & OTHER STORIES - GUIDO CREPAX

 10

I picked this up because it was large and beautiful and at the library. European comics is not a world I’m particularly at home in. I’ve read some tin-tin and I like Moebius and I’m semi-familiar with Heavy Metal. Crepax is somewhat like all of this but much sleazier. His busty women are robots or aliens or intergalactic pirates but they always scantily clad and horny. There’s lots of crazy bestiality stuff, and I mean really groundbreaking combos like woman and spider or aye-aye or praying mantis. There’s lots of really cool “overhead” splash panels that are disorienting and really dream-world it up. The best stuff looks wispy and baroque like Kevin O’Neil, towards the back have of the tome the lines get darker and heavier, to their detriment. The stories might suffer from being translated or maybe they never made a lot of sense but it can be hard to follow who is who and what’s going on and who’s a secret robot. Never mind all that, she’s about to use a spider of BDSM-purposes. 8 nude women making love to strange things.

BULLSHIT JOBS: A THEORY - DAVID GRAEBER

AVAILABLE I’m a Graeber stan for sure. He’s written the best english language book on Madagascar/Malagasy life and he’s an anarchist, it would be harder to imagine a “public” figure more narrowcasted to my interests. I’ve read a lot of Graeber and his work breaks, largely, into two camps: Scholarly work that stems from his position as an anthropologist (like his book ON KINGS, which I bought but haven’t read that whole thing, I’m mostly interested in the Malagasy parts, the rest is a bit jargon-y and wonky for me) and this more pop-anthropology stuff (most famously DEBT: THE FIRST 5,000 YEARS).  This book can be seen as a sort of continuation and expansion of his last book A UTOPIA OF RULES, which was about bureaucracy. Bullshit jobs and bureaucracy overlap quite a bit, if you can believe it.  The parts I cared less for mostly fail due to what I guess we could call an anthropologists bias. For example, lots of this book is concerned with creating a taxonomy of bullshit jobs  (like box tickers, goons, etc.) but basically all the real world examples tend to have elements of all the different types and it’s not really clear what this sort of filing adds to the discussion beyond enforcing a stereotype about a deep anthropological urge to classify and divide up. He also is really taken with the idea that bullshit jobs are largely created by a sort of covert feudalism. But these are minor quibbles. The book is great, it reads fast and is full of interesting examples and opinions. The Universal Basic Income stuff is always welcomed. Bullshit jobs are definitely huge problem and I’ve personally witnessed and heard accounts of massive almost unfathomable wastes of time and potential. It’s a good perspective to have that everyone should just be doing whatever they want for the maximum amount of time it’s possible. There really is something truly awful about doing something you know is bullshit and a waste of time for 8 hours a day. 9 hours of work

X - CHUCK KLOSTERMAN

I saw this guy speak a year or so ago in Los Angeles and it was interesting to learn that he can preform live the same tricks and techniques he preforms in his books.  This makes sense because he writing is consciously trying to invoke the spirit of a slightly stoned barroom conversation in tone. Since this is the defacto tone of the internet essay complex, wide and joking and not to deep, and since Klosterman came around right at the start of this genre, his success seemed sensible. The timing really does seem key, Klosterman was a written at midwestern newspapers before his books became popular and it’s hard to imagine his tone and style being as successful in that format. Anyway, I’d always assumed that the essays (I’ve read most of his books) themselves were basically stream-of-conciousness in essence with a solid few passes of punch-up and reference sprinkling. However, there doesn’t seem to be that much punch-up, frankly, given how quick and all over the place he was live. All of that is to say that this essay collection is exactly what you would expect from Klosterman. It’s mostly a collection of previously published profiles and essays, along with some stuff that wasn’t published elsewhere or was published somewhere so obscure as to be basically new (including a very long, self-parodic essay that reviews every KISS album). I skipped some of this stuff I’d already read in magazines and the ones about sports matters that don’t concern me. Klosterman is sort of in the Mark Maron realm for me where I’m interested in their essays/interviews when I’m already interested in the subject/interviewee. But the Venn diagram between Klosterman’s interests and mine has significant overlap, for instance when he discusses why people hate Nickleback, and he’s consistently sharp and funny. XXXXXX

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.