HILLBILLY ELEGY: A MEMOIR OF A FAMILY AND CULTURE IN CRISIS-J.D. VANCE

AVAILABLE This book made a bit of a splash when it came out and I remember reading reviews and hearing takes about how it had this great insight into white working-class culture and, though indirectly, into Trump. This book was allegedly supposed to be more nuanced then the dismissive these-people-are-a-little-stupid-and-a-lot-racist stereotype the costal elites, who Vance rails against constantly in the book, hold against hillbillys. Honestly, this didn’t seem super interesting and I ignored it. Fast forward to a few months later, now I’m in South Africa, on a Safari, with my girlfriend’s family. When it comes to talking about racial justice and equity and (the scariest one) privilege, as a white person to one’s family, even when they’re well-meaning (and often when they very much aren’t) can be tricky because of all sorts of complex, emotional entanglements. Might I suggest having these talks with your significant other’s family? Much easier. Anyway, apparently drinking tons of beer is part of safari-ing and I was a bit drunk and talking about reparations and my girlfriend’s dad was listening and disagreeing but being polite and maybe I was a bit drunker than I thought because I don’t remember him telling me about this book but, fast-forward again, I received it in the mail, paid for and shipped by him, Hillbilly Elegy. I love the idea of being mailed free books. I’ll read anything picked out for me and mailed to my door. Mail me books. Either way, despite my excitement about it came into my possession, Hillbilly Elegy is not good. The broader cultural discussion around this book lead me to believe that the book was mostly about White working-class culture and what’s currently imperiling it from an insider with insight. It is occasionally that throughout, especially towards the end, but it is mostly a very personal memoir from someone who had a chaotic childhood who connects that experience to a broader social category. It’s roughly the same format as “The Beautiful Struggle” which is about a childhood in inner-city Baltimore (These book also both contain really fawning sections about the universities the authors attended. Yale for Vance, Howard for Coates), and “You don’t have to say you love me” which is about life on an Indian Reservation. Hillbilly Elegy is the worst of these three, easily. The man had a sad, drug addict mom who he doesn’t really like and a maniac grandma who protects him and whom he loves. One wishes that Vance had just written a biography of his grandma, who’s life seems much more interesting than his, especially the parts of his life she isn’t around for. He becomes a marine that does media. He goes to law school at Yale and feels sort of weird for having been poor. As far as the insight into White working-class culture and what ails it, there isn’t really a lot there. He thinks poor Whites need to work harder and stop blaming the government. He’s the Bill Cosby (the post-shows-but-pre-scandal Bill) of poor whites. He also really seems to bend over backwards to avoid calling the White working-class, taken as a whole, racist. Take for instance the poll, which Vance cites, that says over half of conservative White Americans believe that Obama was not really American. It seems impossible to chalk that up to anything but profound and predictable racism but Vance certainly tries:

“Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception off the president. But the president feels lie and alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of then and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy and speaks like a constitutional law professor-which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up…Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right-adversity familiar to many of us-but that was long before any of us knew him…Barack Obama strikes at the heard of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears a suit while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain food, and we hate him for it-not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.”

Incredible. Imagine the mental gymnastics required to ignore that George W. Bush, a human cartoon character of privilege and a rigged system, and Donald Trump, a rich-kid con man who hates the poor and was a major amplifier of the very rumors Vance is explaining away, book-end Obama’s tenure. And yet Obama alone is the focus of this totally classed-based and not at all racist anger that has, regrettably, takes the form of these absurd but certainly not racist beliefs about his origins. Fuck outta here. 5 Stars for getting books for free in the mail. One star for this book. 

MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS- AMOS TUTUOLA

AVAILABLE Excellent. This book is actually 2 novels published together. I read the second novel (but first published), The Palm-Wine Drinkard, a few months ago and also loved that. The novels are similar, they both feature narrators traveling through supernatural settings on a, mostly vague, quest. In the Palm-Wine Drinkard, the titular character is searching for his palm-wine tapster and in MLITBOG the main character is trying to get home after accidentally running into (you guessed it) the bush of ghosts while avoiding slavers. The book is not flavored with a west-African (specifically Yoruba) vibe, and  that vibe is the main character. Imagine someone read Grimm’s Fairy Tales then rewrote them all in her own voice with a main character moving between and connecting the scenes. MLITBOG is that but instead of Grimm’s, the base material is all the folklore and ghost stories Tutuola heard as a Nigerian kid. Every vignette and chapter is distinct, they seem to have the own logic and to be fairytales unto themselves. As the narrator travels between towns in the Bush of Ghosts he encounters areas covered in webs where the ghosts hunt and eat spiders, television-handed ghosts, ghost kings and politicians, we learn that some ghosts are dead, even in the ghost-world and are in (what seems to be) hell, we learn ghost jail is a huge fire. We see the narrator marry a ghost and have half-ghost children. There’s a lot going on and it’s all excellent. It’s great to pick up and read small sections of, get your mind-blown, and then put it down without worrying about losing the through-line. 

I was also reminded of an essay I read, maybe a decade ago, by Thompson, who is a Yoruba expert, about the concept of Itutu, a Yoruba term that means (again, according to Thompson, I certainly don’t know anything about Yoruba culture) something along the lines of collected and calm and cool. In fact, Thompson seems to think that the very American concept of “cool” is rooted in this term that originally applied to the expressions and aesthetic of faces in Yoruba sculpture. Again, I don’t know anything about these statutes but the main character in MLITBOG (and Palm-Wine) is remarkably cool and calm. He is constantly being confronted with unbelievable and supernatural situations, he’s away from his home and family for years, he ran into the Bush of Ghost itself to avoid slavery and is constantly treated with slavery, cannibalism (is it cannibalism if you’re eaten by a ghost?), incineration and all other manner of terrible fates. He’ll often say he’s scared or confused but then just move on and tackle the next situation. It’s an admirable quality that confounds a more typical, character-driven reading. Again, very dope. I’d recommend it to anyone interested in fantasy or Italo Calvino. Also, Ice T’s character on Law and Order:SVU is named after the author, I have no idea why. 8 stars.  

THE TOTEM POLE: AN INTERCULTURAL HISTORY-ALDONA JONAITIS & AARON GLASS

Unbelievable. One of the best non-fiction books I’ve read in a long time. Honestly, I’d never considered Totem Poles at length, just always sort of vaguely knew what they were. I assume this is most non-NorthWestern folks’ relationship to these poles. Living up here in the top-left part of the country, you see lots of totem pole kitsch and detritus but also actual totem poles, which are deeply transfixing and haunting in real life, especially on days that are the deep rainy grey that only the Northwest is privy to. My unfamiliarity with the pole and it’s place in indigenous cultures was not an impediment to this book since the book is not really about that. It isn’t a style guide to let you tell a Tlingit from a Haida, despite how interesting those differences are, and it isn’t an anthropological theory about the cosmology the poles suggest. Instead, it uses the totem pole to illuminate the cultural interactions between whites and the various Native groups of northern Cascadia. 

This is not to say you don’t learn a lot about the poles per say. I didn’t know that carved interior house poles and poles that attach to the house and the bottom figure on the pole’s mouth is the door were much more common. This makes it especially strange, given how incredible these entrance poles are, that the totem pole, alone, became the cultural shorthand of the Northwest coast and beyond. It is this beyond part, where the poles stand in for “Indian-ness” generally where the book is particularly fascinating. There are dozens of examples the authors find of tepees and peace-pipes and totems juxtaposed to suggest a platonic Indian, noble, and non-existent. In that since, the totem pole, separate from a house, mysterious and solemn against an ancient grey sky, is the ideal symbol of this. The symbolism becomes richer when you consider how mapping traditional, nobel-savage Indian stereotypes on to totem poles is laughably wrong. They’re made out of wood, so they aren’t ancient (though they do live on in the sense that carvers will make new versions of existing poles), they are not idols or objects of pagan worship, they don’t even necessarily venerate, or even like, the subject of the pole. Look at this white-ignorance play out, “Early Alaskan tourists found one type of pole, largely confined to Prince Whales Island, especially delightful-those that depicted whites. While white observers assumed such images honored their subjects, some such poles, in fact, mocked them. These may have developed from existing traditions of erecting shame or rivalry poles to challenge other chiefs.” The book is most fascinating towards the end where it seeks to show a connection between efforts, by governments (particularly Canada, there’s lots of Canada national-image stuff in this book) to persevere the poles and the continued domination of Indigenous groups. “This process, by which the dominate society’s power structure assumes control, communicates a powerful message: Northwest cultures were once great, but they are no more. This, in effect, silences the living native people petitioning for improved conditions and better treatment.” This, to me, is the most provocative part. How dominate society can continue domination not by banning alternative cultural practice but by embracing it in an altered form. Totems were often raised to commentate potlatches, a Northwest culture practice that is deeply complicated but basically revolves around families/clans gaining status by making a big show of giving things away. It’s, obviously much more complicated than that and has religious/spiritual/political/etc. angles that I couldn’t begin to understand but the important part is that they were immensely important to Northwest peoples and they were banned by Canada (and the US) for decades. Now, Western governments pour money into preserving poles and placing them in museums and prompting them in tourist advertisements but in a sort of frozen-in-time aspect. You can see potlatches now, but they are an effort to celebrate culture and keep an almost extinct form alive and to provide spiritual connection. They no longer decide who has power in these regions, since that role has been filled by the Western governments who have refashioned themselves the stewards of the poles as well. 

They book isn’t too heavy though. It is full of short, interesting anecdotes, including one where John Muir curses out the whites he’s traveling to Alaska with for stealing a pole. Pole stealing, is unsurprisingly, a big theme. The pole in downtown Seattle, I learned, was stolen. When they installed it, they town let someone read a poem, written from the prospective of the pole itself, about how it was the only civilized pole. In actuality, the pole was erected for a woman named Chief-Of-All-Woman, who died in the 1860’s, on the way to visit her ailing sister. Either way, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the newspaper who paid for the raiding party that plundered the tole, eventually paid the pole’s family much less than they asked for, then, in the 30’s, someone burned it. Seattle was eventually given a replacement from the National Park’s Service as part of their efforts to revitalize the art-form. Lots of great stuff like that. 9 Poles. 

BLIND SPOT- TEJU COLE

I’m glad I finally got my hands on a copy of this from the library. I read Open City a while ago and adored it and I’ve been following Cole’s photography column for a while and I adore that as well. Cole has that wonderful quality in a critic of being so encyclopedic and and careful in his criticism that he will mention another photograph or artist in relation to his main subject and it will instantly and irrevocably change the way you see the work in question. The man is so erudite and emphatic it’s hard to keep up. This book is very different. It isn’t photography criticism, like he does for the Times, and it isn’t a travelogue (though it documents one year of nearly constant travel), and it isn’t a portfolio of Cole’s photographs and it isn’t a collection of essays though it contains the elements of each of these forms. It’s, frankly, closest to a beautifully bound, physical copy of the world’s most high brow instagram account (Cole’s actual instagram account is currently posting very close up photos of individual brush strokes in paintings paired with, largely unrelated, lyrical prose). Each photo gets sits across from a short passage that may or may not be (obviously) related to the photo itself. I prefer the writing to the photography. Cole’s photos are almost completely devoid of humans and when we do see them, it’s mostly from behind. “Imagine, for a moment, that every face you cannot see is your own face, but years later. The future is lined with your face.” Cole writes. His photos also frequently contain sheets (often clear plastic) and panes of glass and fences and other visual representations of layers and screens. I’ve been flipping through just the photos senses finishing the book and they are growing on me. There’s something creepy and cold about them. They seem so composed and despite being photos, they suggest and eternity rather than an instant. But I stand behind my commitment to read whatever Cole writes. He’s so ethereal and poetic. Marinate on this passage, opposite a photo of a titled Nigerian grave: “The overlap between the grave, the bath, the bed: strategic escape from the burden of verticality.” Wonderful. 8 flashes. 

THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE - BESSEL VAN DER KOLK

I’ll be honest, this one took a while to read. I work with traumatized children as my job and some of the stuff in this book was pretty hard to get through, especially when I do my best to leave the trauma stuff at work. But, I heard about this book because a number of coworker raved about it and since I wanted a deep “theoretical” background in the work I was doing (my “academic training” is in sociology, not trauma-informed psychology) I picked it up. I would say the book confirms basic suspicions I had about these sorts of cases of trauma. I could imagine people complaining that Van Der Kolk endorses everything and seems to think all sorts of stuff works. There stuff about hypnosis and yoga and EMDR, which is this intense eye-movement based therapy, and this technique I once saw a video of Jorodowsky doing where you move people and objects around a room to represent your family and memories (in the Jorordowsky documentary the subject, the camera man, breaks down in tears) and Van Der Kolk has stories about how all these things lead to amazing breakthroughs in only a few number of sessions. I can see how one would be doubtful but, I don’t know,I believe him, at least generally. The trauma stuff is weird and deep and I do think basically boils down to an inability to feel present since you’re sense of safety and you internal regulation is all fucked up from this/these traumatizing situation(s). Trauma fucks up your ability to feel a baseline level of safety and to communicate your needs in a healthy way. I think it’s smart to get outside of the pills and talk-therapy hamster wheel. Van der Kolk and I share a similar mistrust/suspicion of psychiatric drugs, the kids I work with are, often, heavily medicated and it certainly helps curtail the more extreme violence but you can often feel a distance inside of them. I like taking drugs, so I know exactly what the feeling is, but I doesn’t seem like a good state to be in if you’re trying to take on trauma long-term. Fascinating stuff, psychiatrists are so arrogant it’s hard to imagine this changing anything (I understand I sound like a Scientologist) but one can hope. 7 big white pills. 

ONE MORE YEAR- SIMON HANSELMANN

I’ve been a fan of Megg, Mogg and Owl for a while, since I saw it in Vice. Since I now live in Seattle, I’ve seen Hanselmann at some events and I was excited to see this new book at the library (c’mon Fantagraphics, $40 for this thing is steep). It delivers. Megg, Mogg and Owl gets darker, if that’s possible, since the last book contained an amazing panel where Megg’s depression is depicted as huge faces manifesting out of her walls and pouring some sort of black inky slime out of their mouths, flooding the room. Hanselmann can pivot from that sort of stuff (like, in this book, Mogg asking if they can live in “drug-world” forever and Megg saying, sadly, “one more year”) to goofy/gross stoner antics (which are often dark and sad, look at Werewolf Jones’ children) to backstory that fills in the relationships between these witches and wizards and owls and werewolves. I like how Hanselmann shows how depression can not only make one pitiable but also a real dick to people, both on purpose and inadvertently. I like Megg and Mogg’s codependency, they come off as very broken. This thing is great. 5 joints.

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