THE LAST GOOD KISS - JAMES CRUMLEY

I picked up this book and read it because a podcast I sometimes listen to, The Watch, announced that this title would be the subject of their next book club (as of the time of this writing, I haven’t heard the podcast since it doesn’t exist yet). The hosts of The Watch are very mystery/thriller focused in their literary appreciations and these are genres where I need guidance. Like fantasy or horror, I don’t really know a ton about what goes on inside these very, very dense worlds, so it’s helpful to have someone who’s read widely tell you what the highlights are (this can backfire when the person giving the recommendation is so deep in the genre world, they have no idea what would appeal to an outsider. A lot of anime has this problem). Anyway, they’d recommended Ross Thomas before who I checked out and really liked so I was willing to give Crumley a chance. The book has some amazing sentences, including one of the best lines in any book. It describes the pornography business as a “hairy pie”. Like most good mysteries it’s settings and characters seem to exist in a more lurid and whiskey-soaked world than our own. The characters spend countless days driving across the west, from Montana to Denver to San Francisco and points beyond. Drinking at bars that might as well be on the moon and then driving hours to the next. They travel hundreds of miles to visit alcoholic bulldogs. All of that stuff was fascinating and, frankly, seemed like a lot of fun. The plot meanders around, for a while the main character, Sugrue, is babysitting a writer on a bender, then he’s looking for a missing person, then he’s involved in a family drama. It’s all over the place and got a bit dull in the middle. The book ends strong when the Sugrue and the alcoholic writer square off in a sense. They’re both veterans, Sugrue of Vietnam and the writer from WWII, and it was interesting to read this after having recently finished THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE, since they basically compare how the trauma of being a veteran has really fucked up their lives and turned them into total maniacs. I think WWII PTSD is a strong unspoken factor in lots of the classic noir, especially since it was made in the immediate post war era and the showdown in this book is an interesting way to show how that dynamic can mutate and survive into a later era. Overall, pretty good, a quick read. I don’t think I’d read another Crumley unless someone insisted emphatically that such in such book is totally his best by miles, which is a reputation that THE LAST GOOD KISS possess. 6 men sitting quietly, discussing nothing.

WHO? - ALGIS BUDRY

20

My pen-pal sent me this book the day before I left on a trip to Hong Kong and I read it on the flight over. He said he’d found the book in one of those free library things you see in nicer neighborhoods and thought the cover was too good and the story too weird to just place back so he sent it to me. I read it on the flight over to China and it is certainly strange. It’s about a man who’s captured by the Soviets and is inexplicably returned as a sort of cyborg. The book revolves around the quest to figure out if this “person” is the scientist who was kidnapped and who the robo-man is saying he is, or if this is some sort of Soviet trick. It’s always funny to see Sci-Fi set in what is now the past (the book takes place in the then-future 1980s) with entities like the Soviet Union that no longer exist. It makes you think about what aspects of our life do we assume will extend into the future but won’t. Prehaps the War on Terror, maybe the internet, or America itself. The book follows the quest of a government agent to look into the robo-man’s background in order to see if he’s who he says he is and most of the book is spent on these flash backs. The robo-man-man in a pretty standard sci-fi trope, the cold genius scientist, and we see how he became a genius and fell in love and got a job working on a top-secret weapons program. All of this is only sort of interesting. There are some weird scenes where the cyborg is wondering around the country just doing his thing that are pretty good but overall the book was dull. Fine to read on a plane. 3 Robots. 

THE SKATING RINK - ROBERTO BOLAÑO

I’ve read a lot of Bolaño, I recalled, reading the short bibliography at the start of this book and mentally checking off a bunch of titles. Is he the modern (though he is dead) author who’s work I’ve read the most of? Does that make him my favorite? It feels bad that I’ve never/can’t read his work in Spanish. Will I ever rectify this? What if I didn’t like it then? Sounds like the plot of a Bolaño book, albeit a short one. The Skating Rink doesn’t have translation but it has many of the other Bolaño motifs. It’s got young, romantic, beleaguered poets, it’s got violence, it’s got sexual violence against women, it’s got South American’s living abroad. It’s got people living on a beach in Spain, it’s told from multiple narrators as a sort of oral history. It also includes the beautiful imagine of a dilapidated beach mansion with a brand new ice rink in the middle of it, with only a single mysterious young woman practicing on it. And this passage, “From that vantage point, I had a panoramic view of what looked like a labyrinth with a frozen center, marked by a black hole: the body.” That might be the single most Bolañic image in all his work. 8 rinks.

INSTANT LIGHT: TARKOVSKY POLAROIDS

I suppose it should come as no surprise that the person who made films as pretty and still as Stalker or Solaris would be a total polaroid genius as well. I have a polaroid camera and when I picked up the book I, in a state of complete hubris, imagined I could learn some tricks or compare photos. Of course not. These photos are beyond. In the best ones have a golden, celestial glow I’ve never seen before. There’s an essay before and after, one of which includes a super trill story about giving a photo to an Uzbeki man who returns it saying, “why stop time?”, the other pointing out how these photos stress an Eastern Orthodox horizontality and flatness, not a more Western vanishing point perspective. All of that is certainly possible. I would say the photos are less interesting for their layout, which, admittedly is god-level, than their colors. More specifically a brightness and luminousness that you look at and assume is immediately going to start wilting they seem so in bloom. But all of this is aside the point, the photos themselves are well laid out and copied in the original polaroid scale. The shots are broken up by Tarkovsky’s text, not unlike the Teju Cole book (is there a name for this format?), and like Cole’s they are sometimes specifically, sometimes elliptically, about photography. Cole’s words are more interesting but goddamn these photos are good. Nine hammers and 10 sickles. 

BREAKOUT - RICHARD STARK

I read this because I’ve been stuck in something of a rut or rather a log-jam of non-fiction reading. I checked out a book about Chief Seattle, and started a book I’ve owned for a while about the American South and I’ve been toggling between them and not making major progress because all of them are pretty interesting. But if you take to long to read something you lose a piece of the picture. Plus, it’s frustrating. So I saw this at the library and grabbed it because I could read it fast, it only took two days. I believe I’ve read 4 (now 5) of the Richard Stark Parker books, mostly because there was a supply of them in Madagascar, where it’s hard to get English books. If you don’t know Parker is the main character in a series of novel a guy name Donald Westlake wrote under the pseudonym Richard Stark.  Parker, and we don’t get any more of his name and it’s occasionally hinted at that even this is a cover, is a professional criminal. He mostly does stickups and robberies but he’ll also commit fraud or blackmail or murder. He’s a remarkably flat anti-hero. He never softens or gets close to anyone or takes down the corrupt cops or anything that would make him seem complicated. He’s hyper competent. His crimes always go awry, otherwise there’d be no books, but it’s always because an accomplice, who Parker doubts beforehand, is cowardly, greedy or incompetent. Strangest of all, he seems to only want this money so he can spend months living in beachside resorts of Florida, surrounded by prostitutes and drink but not striving for a ecstatic bacchanal, more of a lizardly calm, until he runs out of money and needs to resort to crime again. I can understand why people would find these tedious or boring, since he never changes or grows but all I can say is that the books read really excitedly and I find his flatness and harshness transfixing, like a desert. Most of these books were written in the 60’s and have a sort of evil Mad Man vibe, this one was written in 2002 and it’s the first one I’ve read from this 2nd, post-70’s, run. 

Actually, as a quick aside, it’s hard to tell when this book is suppose to be taking place, people have cell phones but at one point someone says, “use the phonebook. Everyone’s in the phonebook.” and someone else makes reference (I think?) to the 1985 M.O.V.E. bombing in Philly as happening a few years beforehand. Who knows?

Anyway, it’s mostly the same stuff, Parker is in prison which is interesting but really written no differently than the robberies he preforms. For part of the book Parker is teamed up with a Black criminal and people in the novel keep pointing it out. I suppose the point is that Parker is too monomaniacal for racism. They then need to tunnel through building to rob a jewelry store, which is also ends up being pretty exciting. Either way, it reads fast and I think got me out of this reading rut. 4 guns.

TRIP: PSYCHEDELICS, ALIENATION AND CHANGE - TAO LIN

Found this book a few days ago at the bookstore and picked it up real quick based off Lin’s articles about Terrance McKenna from a few years back. Terrance McKenna is a certainly a favorite of mine. Lin and I agree that one of the most basic aspects of McKenna’s appeal is his voice. You can find hundreds of clips on YouTube that are either recordings or simple videos of McKenna talking in front of various groups, extemporaneously, for hours. This seems like it would be tedious in real life, let alone on low quality tape, but one of the things that saves it is McKenna’s hypnotic voice. It’s equal parts comic-book-store-dungeons-and-dragons nerd and groovy-dude druggy. He’s able to speak for hours on a few connected but varied topics, drugs, human evolution, technology, time, etc. for hours and never seems to slow down or stammer or lose his train of thought. It’s incredible, especially that since he claimed to be he heaviest cannabis user he knew. I’ve been a fan of McKenna since before I ever took any drugs, for decades now. Back when I took drugs more regularly and thought about them more often, I’d play a McKenna speech maybe once a week, nowadays, maybe once a month. 

I also have a somewhat long history with Tao Lin (though I’ve known of McKenna longer). I was introduced to his work during my first semester of college in Asheville. I got invited to a party for the English department at some professors fancy house in the woods. I felt mature and flattered to be there. I drank a beer by a bonfire and asked a beautiful upperclass man, who I assumed was a lit major given the nature of the party, what her favorite book was in a pathetic attempt to flirt with her. She talked to me about Tao Lin, a writer I’d never heard of, for about 20 minutes before moving on to talk with more interesting people. I remember this episode clearly because it seems like the sort of interaction, one that features alienation and awkwardness, that would take place in a Tao Lin book. Tao Lin often writes autobiographically and portrays an alienated, reclusive, depressed New York writer so it was a bit of a surprise to see him embrace psychedelics in their positive this-could-save-the-world form. In some ways his transformation from jaded Literarti to psychonaut reminds me of Daniel Pinchbeck. Rest assured he is significantly less annoying that Pinchbeck, the worst McKenna since McKenna’s death. Tao talks about different psychedelics and gives a pretty good overview of their place in the world and their effects. I’m not sure if I really read anything that I haven’t heard before from other, similar, works or from McKenna himself. The personal stuff is more interesting. I remember reading his last novel Taipei, which is about a person who seems to be Tao Lin taking a lot of pharmaceuticals and seeming very sad. His narrative about how psychedelics brought wonder and hope into his life and brought him out of a dark, addicted place is compelling. The stuff about McKenna’s life is likewise compelling, that man is a manic. Perhaps I would have been better to just read McKenna’s TRUE HALLUCINATIONS, which I just ordered from the library. Either way, the book was interesting, it made me want to smoke salvia again, I’m still a bit weary of more DMT. 4 strong hits.

SANTA MUERTE: THE HISTORY, RITUAL, AND MAGIC OF OUR LADY OF THE HOLY DEATH - TRACEY ROLLINS

I’ve been thinking a lot about Santa Muerte for whatever reason and it looks like the longest, most in-depth english book on the subject is a book called DEVOTED TO DEATH. I ordered that one since the Seattle public library doesn’t have it but in the meantime I read the Santa Muerte book that the SPL does  keep on hand. I wrote something else about Santa Muerte so I won’t get to deep into what I like about her (though I do think her appeal is pretty obvious).The first part of the book, the more interesting part to me, traces the roots of Santa Muerte in a few different directions. First it looks at the Aztec connect. Honestly, before reading this book, this was the only predecessor to S.M. that I’d considered (despite her obvious physical similarity to the Grim Reaper). Living in Mexico it’s hard not to see the Aztec connection to everything quintessentially Mexican. I’ve found that, generally, folks in Mexico (or at least Mexico City) are quick to point these connections out. And like it’s easy to see the Aztec Goddess Tonantzin smuggled by syncretism into the Virgin of Guadalupe (quickly, she’s standing on the moon and has the stars in her robe, the black rope around her hand is an Aztec fertility symbol, the Nahuatl word that is used to describe them both is “coatlaxopeuh” “she who crushes the serpent”, the current V. of G. shrine is in the location of the destroyed Tonatzin shrine, etc.) you can also see a lot of Aztec culture, specifically the underworld goddess Mictecacihuatl, in S.M.. All that stuff is endlessly fascinating to me but the the other couple chapters in this vein were more surprising. There are European folk traditions that Rollin sees in S.M., such as the Danse Macabre or La Parca that it never occurred to me to connect to S. M. since she always struck me as so pre-hispanic. Likewise, I hadn’t thought enough about the fact that, despite being an immortal skeleton, she is very much a woman. Rollin does a good job connect her to other female death goddess like Kali and showing why her being feminine is essential to her nature. The second half of the book was less interesting to me since it’s a practice guide to her worship. It was interesting to learn the difference between the 7 different colored votive candles and to learn about how to clean the statutes (something I’d seen preformed on the streets dozens of times but never had I seen a breakdown of the process). However, I do think she’s wrong, or at least off base about a few things. First, she really seems to minimize tobacco as an offering, often mentioning how much it smells or how you should only burn it outside or how you can give her tobacco in the form of a tincture or a non-lit cigarette. In my personal experience tobacco is a major gift to S.M. and leaving a lit cigarette at her shrine is basically the least you can do. Likewise, she never mentions marijuana which is a major aspect of her worship. Leaving her joints or blowing smoke in her face is incredibly common and gets no mention in the book. Finally, it seems weird to me to render the prayers in English. Can she be worshipped in English? This might seem like a silly thing for me  in particular to bring up since I don’t speak Spanish well enough to read the Spanish language scholarship on this, but if you’re interested in something so much that you are worshiping it, does it not behove you to learn the language of 99% of its devotees? This is not to say that I’m not interested in reading translations of rosaries and prayers, I very much am, but this book is not presenting itself as scholarship, it is very clearly a practical guide to influencing S.M. to intervene on your behalf. Either way, very interesting, I remain fascinated by the subject. 9 bones. 

ELECT MR. ROBINSON FOR A BETTER WORLD - DONALD ANTRIM

I read this book because it was recommended by John Jeremiah Sullivan who, in some article, mentioned the Antrim was an interesting take on the Wallace, Franzen, Eugenides, etc. group of writers. This book is about a man, Mr. Robinson, who lives in a dystopia (a la Idiocracy or actual lived reality) and is simultaneously engaged in a handful of quests or tasks that interconnect with explain and escalate with one another. He’s trying to start a new school for the kids of his town, he’s thinking about running for mayor and planning his campaign, he’s trying to bury the body parts of the pervious mayor, who was drawn and quartered, he’s trying to relate to his wife who can goes into ichthyiomorphic trances, he’s building a replica of a Spanish Inquisition torture room, and he’s engaged in a domestic project to build a moat around his house. The tension, where the various quest each ramp up in intensity and difficulty and make one another more difficult, reminded me of the part in Goodfellas where Henry Hill is doing a lot of cocaine while trying to juggle all of these domestic and criminal responsibilities. The climax itself was genuinely shocking and undercut the goofy tone in a really satisfying way. The main character reminded me of Ignacious in the sense that he’s smart but totally oblivious to others. Also, the book is often funny in the same way ACOD is. Overall, not bad. 6 votes. 

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.