THE GOVERNESSES - ANNE SERRE

A sexy lil’ french fable. Kate got this on a whim at the library and I read it because it’s so small it fit easily into my coat pocket for bus rides and could be easily devoured (a word this book loves) in a few commutes. The plot is fairy tale simple: three governesses live at this sort of bizarre dreamlike school/orphanage where to boys don’t seem to age nor have new boys added. While caring for and teaching these kids they’re also on a fuckathon across this bucolic landscape. Gardeners, repairmen, men and boys in the town; swept up and fucked dry. There’s an old pervert with a spyglass. I found it interesting that one of the governesses (who are super interchangeable, I finished the book 2 days ago and have totally forgotten which one is which) gets pregnant and has a kid and the nature of the book doesn’t really change. I can’t imagine a male writer doing that. Are there lots of french books like this? Does the French public consume a-lot of erotic, modern tales? We’re missing out. 69 secret trysts. 

THE LINE BECOMES A RIVER - FRANCISCO CANTÚ

A impulse pickup at the library where the library staff had stocked dozens as part of their policy to provide lots of copies of new trendy books that you can’t reserve or renew. I actually got this one and that new book about post-post-Wonder Knee Native American history but since you can only have such books for 3 weeks, there was no way to read both. Besides being shorter, this book is lyrical and poetic and strange right out of the gate. We get lots of wonderful descriptions of the desert and the mountains that, of course, double as the wasteland and charnel house that Cantú patrols for 4 years. The book has a strange format. It starts where I assumed it would, with Cantú joining the Border Patrol and reporting on what that experience was like. Not unlike the Shane Bauer book about private prisons or, to a lesser extent, NICKEL AND DIMED. But the experience, or his description of it, peters out as he both gets numb to what’s going on and as he’s moved out of the field and into an “intelligence” job in an office. There’s some stuff in the middle about the border in history including a part about the Juárez femicides that 2666 is so interested in. The final section of this book concerns years later, when Cantú befriends a man who, after building a life for himself in the USA, returns to Mexico to visit his dying mother and is detained and removed when trying to return home. Partly, this section makes me feel like Cantú didn’t grasp how awful and terrible the US-Mexico border situation is until it destroyed the life of his friend. It’s hard to think of what to make of this section because the meat of the book, his time as a BP agent, is likewise tonally confused. It wasn’t clear he wanted to write an expose on what’s going on at the Border, though it does seem monstrous. And it also isn’t the case that this is someone who gradually came to regret what they’ve done or been a part of. He seems pretty passive the whole time, the only explanation he gives us w/r/t motivation is a vague “I’ve always been into the border, I studied it in school” which the other agents are likewise confused by. Even by the end it isn’t clear to me how he feels about the border. It’s devastated his friend and his friend’s family and he’s seen firsthand the cruelty of our immigration policy but he stops short of an outright condemnation, let alone suggestions. Either way, the writing was good and I’m always interested in stuff about Juárez. 1 horrible border.

HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES - CARMEN MARIA MACHADO

Kate got my parents to buy her this for Christmas, I do not know where she heard about it. Apparently, Machado has written for the New Yorker, but since I usually don’t pay attention to the fiction there, I was unawares. In general, I don’t really like short stories. I like novels and some short stories really slap but overall, they’re not really my thing. They always seem to come off to me as too cutesy and trite or not enough. That being said, I loved these. I only read this because I found out one of the stories in here is a fictional description of Law and Order: SVU episodes, kinda short, one or so paragraphs, TV Guide style write-ups. I started reading them out of my love of SVU, not realizing that Machado’s commitment to verisimilitude required she use the actual episode names as well as the then-current number of seasons (12, but the show is now up to 19) and renders the whole “story” 60+ pages long. That “story”, or collection of recaps or bizarre riff on the canon of a popular TV show, was good enough and represented enough of the total page count of HBAOP that I decided to read them from the beginning. Not unlike the SVU segment the rest of the collection is weird and genre defiant. There are frequent elements of Sci-Fi or fables and fantasy. The writing is likewise strange and wonderful. Once, the book told me, the reader, to look outside because it would be raining and, lo, it was (I do live in Seattle, but still). Besides the SVU thing, the first two stories are my favorite. They both represent the best of total genre freedom Machado is able to achieve and contain some of the hottest book sex I’ve read in a while. I hope she writes a novel. 13 Ribbons. 

CONFLICT IS NOT ABUSE - SARAH SCHULMAN

AVAILABLE

A doozy. I would say that this book holds a reputation of being vital in the larger do-gooder-sphere (where I heard about it) second (but it is a distant second) to THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE. TBKTS might be more helpful and insightful, but is is significantly less challenging. This book, at it’s best, is a manifesto encouraging people to handle their problems face-to-face with the people. Schulman is deeply opposed to either exiling or “cancelling” or shunning a person or to calling the police. She’s ruthlessness in pointing out how it’s almost never the case that one person is totally at fault, but that everyone has a role in maintaining the conflict. Most controversially, Schulman is against people scrabbling to be the victim, I can certainly see (thought I would say I disagree) why people would accuse her of victim blaming. As someone who is reluctant to call the police and who longs for a day without police I found this book really helpful in showing how tough situations and dynamics self-perpetuate and can be short-circuited. This, of course, takes strong communities full of emotionally healthy adults, the very thing the police are meant to replace. I plan to use some of the techniques she recommends at work. As a final note, the book takes two strange detours, one into HIV law in Canada and another into Schulman’s Facebook feed w/r/t the 2014 Gaza conflict. In the case of the Canadian HIV issue, I felt the overall point (here was a community trying to police itself instead of calling the police since the police overreact and don’t have the communities best interest at heart) was lessoned because the context was so specific. In terms of the Gaza War section, I have to be clear. Throughout the book Schulman discusses Israel and it’s clear that the human rights of Palestinians are deeply important to her. I have less than no problem with this, people don’t talk about the Palestinians enough. However, for about 60 pages Schulman basically reproduces, along with the little blue and white “f” logo, large portions of her Facebook wall during the summer of 2014, when Israel attacked Palestine/Gaza. As you can imagine it’s full of news updates plus friends of her’s decrying what Israel is doing and other people praising Israel then these two groups arguing and no-one changing their mind. Schulman’s point is, as I gather, that social media increase conflict because people aren’t face to face nor are they able/interested in really understanding one another (right after this part of the book she shares a story about a time on stage where she changed someone’s mind through thoughtful engagement and deescalation). 60 pages is too many pages to make this point. We’ve all been on the internet, it’s really destroyed our ability to parse out conflict IRL. Anyway, great book, very interesting. 22 communities. 

SKID ROW: AN INFORMAL PORTRAIT OF SEATTLE - MURRY MORGAN

I’ve wanted to read this since I moved here, it certainly has the reputation as “the” Seattle book to read. Actually, the book begins by positioning itself as not one of your “classic” Seattle histories the glorify the city fathers. It is unclear why he thinks there are many such books. Either way, this was incredibly interesting. Morgan has opted not to write an overall history but instead focus the individual chapters on either people (like Doc Maynard) or events (like the 1919 general strike) which makes each chapter it’s own little stand-alone unit. I’m glad I read the book about Chief Seattle first, Morgan goes into much, much less detail about the indigenous side of the history. For example, the Buerge book had much more detail about all the different factions and sides and opinions and strategies that lead to the battle of Seattle (1856 not 1999) but as far as an actual description of the battle, the Morgan book was better. Morgan for instance, mentions that much of the gunfire exchanged took place over what is now Smith Tower. The feeling I get when I quickly overlay what I’m reading about and what I know from walking around the city is exactly the feeling I want from these sorts of books. The descriptions of the Skid Row brothels (including what was then the world’s largest brothel, stocked entirely with Native women and named Illahee, the Chinook word for “earth” or “homeland”) and vaudeville halls was all very interesting and exciting. The section about how the Alaska Gold Rush affected Seattle included a description of an Alaskan criminal named “Soapy Smith” who’s gang included people with names like, “Fatty Green” “Kid Jimmy Fresh” “Yank Few Clothes” and “Jay Bird Slim”. Again, all wonderful stuff. My favorite section, and the part I’d like to read another book on is the 1919 General Strike. What’s interesting to me about it is how it’s success doomed it. On February 6, 60,000 workers walked off their jobs. What’s amazing is not only that they did this, but that they did this without violence. In what seems to be a case of the dog catching the car, the people involved in the strike seemed to not know the next step. I think they were expecting more violent resistance and something sturdier to push back against, when, instead, they needed to focus on a positive project of building the kind of city and society they wanted. I know, easy for me to say, I’ve never been involved in a general strike (some day, fingers crossed), but it does seem important to keep these lessons in mind. The 100 year anniversary is coming up, I can only hope we all agree to stop working. It’s also fascinating where the book leaves off. It was originally published in 1951 so the tone at the end is all boy-thoses-crazy-pioneer-days-are-over-now-we’re-just-a-sleepy-city so all the stuff about Microsoft and Starbucks and Grunge and Amazon and everything else that exploded Seattle since the book came out is absent and makes the end of the book seem silly. I’d love an updated version that goes from 1951 through today. But, again, can’t really complain about what a book isn’t. This book makes walking around town more interesting and magical. That’s more than enough.  1855 Brothels

OVER THE LIP OF THE WORLD: AMOUNG THE STORYTELLERS OF MADAGASCAR - COLLEEN J McELROY

The quest to read all the english language material on Madagascar continues and this time it gets a bit more uncanny. The author of this one is a professor at UW so occasionally she’ll compare Madagascar to Seattle, a comparison not all that many of us could be totally familiar with. Also, she at one point stays in a hotel I have a very clear (then very, very blurry) memory of drinking in. This book is strange. I thought it was going to be a collection of Malagasy folklore and proverbs from across the island (such a book still doesn’t exist, to my knowledge, in english, which is a real cultural lacuna). But then it becomes a travelogue, which is fine, but less interesting to me than a collection of tales. It’s always interesting to see different writers try to come up with different ways to get across just how bad the roads are. The travelogue sections include mini-biographies of the storytellers and a little bit about Malagasy history and the difference between ethnic groups but not enough to makes these sections too interesting. To be fair, McElroy is not, nor does she claim to be, a historian nor a sociologist. The categories of expression she documents are all over the place. There are traditional, mythological folktales and sayings, but she also includes hiragasy, a type of storytelling song, as well as contemporary poetry. It’s really interesting to read a poem written in the late 60s about another former French colony, Vietnam, written by a Malagasy person (the poem is called Isan’andro Vaky Izao), but the breath of this collection leaves all the individual components unfilled. She makes a point of leaving out (but hardly mentioning) Kabary, a style of Malagasy public speech that has it’s own interesting set of informal rules and quirks. I wanted a book of all oral stories, or all poems, or all variations of hiragasy. I think it’d be easier to contextualize and make sense of the material if it was more limited but deeper. But, it’s a foolish complaint to complain about something not being what it isn’t. And there’s lots of really wonderful stuff in this book. When I was in college I really like this book of Russian folktales, mostly because their morals and lessons seemed so confused and bizarre. You’d read them and have no idea what one was suppose to take away. The best stories here have that quality. The author doesn’t speak any Malagasy nor is she in expert in the island and occasionally there are questionable translation choices and cultural subtleties that she clearly missed. For instance, she goes to a Famadihana, obviously, but one where they are moving the bodies to a new tomb instead of rewrapping the corpses and placing back where they came from. This is much, much rarer than what people usually mean when they say Famadihana, it requires a different party and slightly different procedure. I never saw such an event (thought I did see a few Famadihanas), and I believe there’s actually a different word than “Famadihana” for this ceremony. Anyway, it’s got a lot of great stories and tales. I only wish there was more. 22 Lemurs.

ADDENDUM: I heard a lot of stories when I was in Madagascar but informally since I’m not a folklorist nor an ethnographer. However, once in Ft. Dauphin a British student, who was trying to collect stories in a systematic, way let me come along and I listened while he recorded this story:

“At the intersection of 2 paths, 2 men run into one another. Each is carrying a sack and stops to take a rest. They get to talking and realize they have a lot in common. Each one is making a long, arduous trip to a market, to sell the same items they sell week after week. For both men, this routine has grown boring and unprofitable. One man is always trying to sell chickens, the other is attempting to sale metal spades. They both agree it would be more interesting to get a break from selling the same old thing and they agree to switch bags. They make the switch and each go off on their own way. A ways down the path the first man puts the sack down to take a closer look at the spades and decide how much he wants to charge for them. He opens the sack and pulls out a spade. The man tries to test it on the ground and it breaks apart in his hand. It was made of clay. On the other trail, the other man also places his sack on the ground, eager to inspect the chicken he just traded for. He opens the sack, and a giant vulture leaps out of the bag and takes flight. Both men race backwards on their trails meet again at the intersection. The both realized that they had tricked the other and been tricked in turn. The men laugh and spent the rest of their lives as friends.” 

DOWN AND OUT ON A YACHT - DELPHINE BEDIENT

AVAILABLE

This is a small, 66 pages, little chapbook thing I bought on a whim at a holiday DIY zine thing. Seattle has so many of these events it seems foolish not to take advantage. I appreciate that the publishing house, Two Plum Press out of Portland, from who’s table I purchased this book, included short, succinct descriptions of the titles for sale. Typically at these things the books/zines/chapbooks are just placed out (to be fair, they are usually really artfully displayed) and you don’t really have any idea what any of them are about. I don’t have infinite money and my hands are frequently covered in rare oils and whatnot so I liked that I didn’t have to paw through all of these to get a book that looked good. I picked this one out because it promised short 2nd person stories. The second person is underused and can allow for all sorts of interesting little tricks. For instance, I, of course, read the “you” of these stories as me and thus, a man. Every time the narrative would contradict that it would make me quickly readjust my reading in a way that felt novel. Likewise, I initial didn’t think the “you” of the different stories (the book is 66 one-or-two-page chapters) was the same person. I know this seems weird since I definitely would have thought an “I” narrator was consistent across chapters. But the book reads fast and you quickly come to someone understand the “you”. She drifts and makes observations and experiences romantic pain. There are some beautiful images of not wanting to get out of bed and quick flashes of forces larger than yourself. I enjoyed it. I should read more contemporary poetry anyway. 66 poems. 

CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA, BOOK 1 - ROBERTO AGUIRRE-SACASA & ROBERT HACK / SWAMP THING, BOOK 2 - ALAN MOORE & STEPHEN BISSETTE & JOHN TOTLEBEN

I combined these 2 since they’re both trade paperbacks of long running (in Sabrina’s case, ongoing) comics series taken over by famous comic authors, heavily influenced by EC horror comics, and I read them on the same day. There’s actually another, more subtle connection between the two. At one point, a talking serpent named Nagaina claims, “Our father is Glycon, little witch.” Glycon is an ancient Roman snake-god (albeit one with long, beautiful hair) who’s most famous ancient mention, by Lucien, calls Glycon out for being a hand-puppet and hoax. In fact, even in the next frame of the comic, Salem the cat accuses Glycon of being a puppet. This is connected to Swamp Thing because Alan Moore is certainly the most famous devotee of Glycon. I think it more than fair to say that Alan Moore is the only reason any non Classics professor has any idea who Glycon is. Those of us who follow Alan Moore, a category that certainly includes Aguirre-Sacasa knows that Moore famously “quit” comics and declared himself a Magikian and full-time occultist. Swamp Things was written long before this transformation but you can certainly see the thematic obsessions that must have been pushing him a more mystical direction. Swamp Things is constantly wrestling (sometimes physically) with questions about reality and identity and he encounters spirits and symbols and literally travels to hell (Neil Gaiman writes the intro to the volume, making it very clear where the Sandman hell episode got it’s start). In the best segment Swamp Thing uses his powers to grow a psychedelic fruit on his body and feeds it to his lover to have far-out vegetable-dimension sex. Real wizard shit. Why aren’t the getting Swamp Thing into these DC universe movies? He’d certainly make them less dull. Anyway, I thought the Glycon thing was a nice nod to Moore. 

Sabrina was better than I was expecting. It’s very Satanic, lots of goats and talk of the Dark Lord and a witches circles in the woods and all that great stuff. The general vibe is dark and campy and creepy in the correct proportions. It’s a little sad and a missed opportunity that the main motivation the villain, who is wonderfully named “Madam Satan” and who has skulls for eyes, is that a man scorned her for another woman. For something that otherwise has complicated characters, that part felt flat.The art, like the Swamp Thing art, is very indebted to those pre-code horror comics and is not what you would think you’d get from an Archie Spin-off.  I would say the both pass the most basic test of a comic book, I want to read more in these series (I think my library now has the whole Moore Swamp Thing run and Sabrina is ongoing). 333 satanic swamps. 

THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS - GENE WOLFE

AVAILABLE I’ve read Wolfe’s most famous thing, THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN, a tetralogy of novels that is so far-out and bizarre and confusing that only after finishing the whole thing did I feel prepared to actually read it and understand what was going on. It is certainly one of those things that requires several rereads (I am not at all pressed to do this in, say, the next five years) over a lifetime. The series has it’s own dictionary for god-sakes. Anyway, I love those books but this one, THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS, would be a much better intro to Wolfe. It presents itself as 3 novellas, which is a bit disingenuous since you do need to read them in order and, while it certainly doesn’t seem that way at first, they all both take place in the same world as well as connect thematically. The overarching story concerns space-colonialism, specifically Earthlings colonizing the twin planets of Saint Anne and Saint Croix and the issues they run into with the possibly-extinct-possilby-ubiquitous shapeshifting aboriginals. The final story deals with all of this directly, using the Le Guin technique of having a anthropologist study an alien world. This being Wolfe, he’s in space-prison and questions of identity are central. The middle story is “by” the aforementioned anthropologist, who is also a non-central character in the first story, and try to tell the story and recreate the vibe of the planet before human contact. It was my favorite part of the book and I love the name Cedar Branches Waving. The first section is part of a sub-genre that I’ve currently only found 2 members of. The other story, which is also the first story in the volume it’s collected in, is Purity by Thomas Ligotti. The genre (or sub-sub-genre) is “kid finds out his father is a mad scientist.” Again, this being Gene Wolfe we get all sorts of crazy body modifications and comments on slavery and space prisons. I’d recommend this to people new to Wolfe. Also, are there more stories in that sub-sub-genre? 5 Heads. 

MADAGASCAR: A SHORT HISTORY - SOLOFO RANDRIANJA & STEPHEN ELLIS

I’ve wanted to read a book like this for a long time. I’ve read a half dozen other books about Madagascar, mostly travelogue, ethnography, history or biology. This is the sort of book I’ve wanted to read for a long time and I’m glad exists (in English, for obvious reasons most of the books written about Madagascar are in French). My only complaint is that I wish I’d read it sooner, even before moving there. Even the ways in which the book is outdated (it was published in 2009) are fascinating. This book includes the theory that I’ve always heard, that Madagascar was one of the last places on earth people settled (New Zealand being the very last) and this took place only about 2,500 years ago. Well, just this year a paper was published in Science Advances titled, “Early Holocene human presence in Madagascar evidenced by exploitation of avian megafauna” which is presented evidence (tool marks on bones) suggesting humans were butchering the now-extinct Elephant Bird almost 10,500 years ago. That’s a 6,000 year window thrown open. Way less archeology and exploration has been done on Madagascar that it seems like anywhere else, which is why discoveries like that are possible in the year 2018. However, the fact that people were eating monstrous birds for millennia doesn’t, necessarily, mean that they lived there. This book did a great job explaining the early (w/r/t the settlement-2,000-years-ago timeline) history of Madagascar, specifically how groups from all over the Indian Ocean, from Malaysia to Oman to Somalia to India would use this large empty island to stop over on a long journey, or camp out until the Monsoon winds changed. Slowly one after anther of these groups stayed and set up permanent shop and slowly moved inland. This inland was driven by another force this book does a good job of highlighting: slavery. It’s impossible to talk about Malagasy history without mentioning the constant churn and drive for slaves, both to sell abroad and to use at home, and what that drive did to the island. Originally people were moving inland to escape coastal slave raids, eventually this flips and powerful Merina Kingdoms in the middle, highland portion of the island organize campaigns against all other parts of the island. This book does a good job highlighting how the fact that there is even one country that is all of Madagascar is largely a European desire projected on the island: “It was not Madagascar’s inexorable destiny to become one country under the rule of a single government. This outcome is best understood as the result of a long series of particular struggles and patterns of interactions.” There’s lots of wonderful stuff about all the different names Madagascar has been known under and Malagasy, the languages, doesn’t have non-European word for the whole island. My only other complaint is that the book focuses strongly on the highlands and northern coasts (Sakalava, Betsimisraka and Merina people get basically all the stage time). This is a pretty constant problem with Western works about Madagascar and I know that this book is a “short” history, but even still, it was a bit too myopic in this regard. Finally, it was fascinating to read this while I’ve been following the 2018 Malagasy Presidential election. Like I said, this book was published in 2009, so it doesn’t include information about the 2009 political crisis that the current election seeks (fingers crossed) to resolve. In 2009 Ravalomananan (who is still in power at the end of the book) was deposed by weeks of protest and unrest, much of which was lead by the then-mayor of Tana, Andry Rajoelina. In 2013, when I lived in Madagascar, they held an election but would not let Rajoelina nor Ravalomanana run. The winner was a man named Hero Rajaonarimampianina (longest name for a head of state) but this didn’t really solve the feeling of illegitimacy. This month they had another election. The first round of voting is over but since no one candidate received 50% of the vote Rajoelina and Ravalomanana will face each other again on December 19th. I will understand the results better having read this book. 444 Baobob trees. 

THE VISIONARY STATE - ERIK DAVIS

NOT AVAILABLE Technically a reread from college, but I got this book out of the library along with one of Davis’ other books, TECHGNOSIS, which I’ve only read part of. Didn’t have time to read that one before the library insisted I returned it, but it was nice to look through this gorgeous book again. Plus now I’ve lived in California and have visited a few more of the place he outlines in this book. The book is a sort of travel guide/atlas of different spiritual/countercultural landmarks across California (plus Burning Man which, while originally from California, takes place in Nevada), each site getting an essay as well as a set of wonderful photographs. In general, all the sites and spiritual movements they represent come off as well-meaning, cool and fun and, at worst, a little dippy. Basically only the Missions and Manson come off as truly dark and evil. But this makes sense I suppose, California is a very optimistic place. To Davis’ extensive and well-well-researched list (he mentions and includes a photo of the doorway in Fullerton where PKD had his VALIS experience) I’d only add Almighty Opp, a religious DIY puppet-show/ritual that takes place, as it has for 15 years, once a month on a street corner in Koreatown, LA and the bizarre handmade Disneyland that is Palm Spring’s Robolights. Like everything Davis does this book is great for wikipedia wormholes and endless tangents. I’d love to own a copy but I’m not quite at the buying-coffee table books stage of my economic maturation. Good thing libraries exist. 666 holy shrines. 

THE PEOPLE OF CASCADIA- HEIDI BOHAN/CHIEF SEATTLE - DAVID M. BUERGE/THE INDIANS OF THE PUGET SOUND - HERMANN HAEBERLIN & ERNA GUNTHER

NOT AVAILABLE, NOT AVAILABLE AND AVAILABLE (respectively) A rare 3 book review. As you can tell, I normally review these books in the order I read them, one at a time. Sometimes a few books in a row follow a theme or play into a current interest of mine, sometimes I read unrelated books simultaneously and they sort of run together in my head, but I’ve always reviewed them separately. This time I’m combining them because the Bohan and Haeberlin & Gunther books were really just supplementary stuff to help me understand the Seattle biography. I’ve been trying to read this thing for almost a year. I’ve started it countless  times; I must have taken it out from the library and/or renewed it half a dozen times. It’s always seemed like something I’m obliged to read if I’m going to live here (Seattle, I learned, is the largest city in the Americas named after an indigenous person). I’ve finally taken it down and I can now say definitively what I’ve suspected this whole time, the book is amazing. It’s one of the more interesting biographies I’ve ever read, full stop, despite taking on a particularly difficult subject. Despite being on the City Seal (and thus plastered all over the place) as well as a statue near a bar I like there isn’t much about Seattle the man here in Seattle. I took the ferry to visit his grave shortly after moving here and while impressive and sober even the close by museum doesn’t do a great job explaining why he is important. This, apparently, isn’t a new problem. The book mentions that no paper, local or otherwise, even reported his death (to be clear, the town was already named Seattle at this point). One of the reasons this biography must have been so difficult to write is that Seattle is from the generation that was born before White contact and died in a city that was majority non-native. Seattle claimed he saw Vancouver’s ships sail into the Salish sea in 1792 as a young boy so the entire arc of his life begins in the period before contact then follows the terrible decline on destruction that carries on to this day. The complimentary books I read to follow this helped round out this world. The Bohan book helps explain the way Native Life conformed to the unique meteorology of this part of the world, how the abundant summer is a time for travel and hunting and fishing while the rainy winters are for ceremony and feasting. That book is also full of really beautiful black and white drawings of different canoes, baskets, fishing techniques, etc. My favorite images were wheels that represent the different food sources available during different seasons. The Haeberlin & Gunther is a UW ethnographical study from the 30’s that I found cheap in a used book store. It has prettying clear and interesting accounts of the different spirits and powers and overall religious beliefs of Puget Sound natives which helped in understanding some of the events in Seattle’s life. It also helps illuminate how slavery functioned in this region, since Seattle, in addition to being a slave-owner, was also the child of a Duwamish slave mother and a high-class Suquamish father, and this stigma affected his standing constantly. This sort of insight (about how it was both possible to raise from the child of a slave to a chief, but how this birth would still tarnish your reputation) is what makes this books (the biography) so valuable, it is not just about Seattle when he was dealing with Whites, it includes huge sections about his life when Whites were rare in the region. During this time, Seattle comes off as a total maniac. He almost completely wipes out a rival group, he acquires a bunch of slaves and wives, he gets into a fight on a canoe and jumps off, onto a rock, right before the canoe, as well as the man he was fighting, fall off a waterfall. He’s a serious war-chief and legend before the Americans really start moving in. The books good about this section of his life as well. It’s a sad tale, and a familiar one. The Natives get fucked again and again by Whites that basically have no intention of being fair. Seattle understands early that White trade and settlement is going to happen one way or another and thinks he’ll position his people to reap the benefits by getting a settlement on his land so that by the time the settlement grows into a city his people and the Americans will be intermingled and be able to share the prosperity. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t quite go down that way. While I knew the Duwamish remain without a reservation or Federal recognition, this book really underscored the injustice of that. I didn’t know that when Seattle decide to become baptized (as a Catholic despite most of the Whites in the city being Protestants) he took on the Christian name Noah. The obvious joke here is about how much it rains in Seattle but that choice seems eerie now that we know how few of his people and descendants survived the flood. 1866 canoes. 

INSIDE MOEBIUS - MOEBIUS

Moebius is great. I found out about in in high school via an infatuation with Jorodowsky and then tried, not too hard, to follow up with some of his other stuff. It’s hard to beat that weirdo European comic stuff, and I, someone who knows very little about the subject, consider Moebius the best. His best stuff is so grand and bizarre you wish there was a drug that transported you into these strange worlds, if only briefly. Actually, drugs are the somewhat subject of this book. The hook is that the book is a sort of visual diary of Moebius, as an old man, as he attempts to give up smoking weed. Obviously, I can’t endorse this. However, he renders this sober ordeal as a vast desert “Desert B” where a drawn version of Gir wonders around and complains about how sober his is, or tries to write inside of a large stone. Eventually, characters from his past, like Bluebeard, come to interact with him and try to get him to smoke and learn/accept (to varying degrees) that they’re fictional characters in a comic. Then this shit goes completely off the rails. We learn that the comic is taking place (and being written/drawn, since the creation of the piece is the subject) shortly after September 11th. Eventually Osama Bin Laden shows up and talks with Moebius and smokes weed in front of him and gets to ranting. Part of me admires it for being so bold, another part of me admires how French it is (in both how Moebius argument against him is based on sex and love as well as how racist the drawing seemed). However, it definitely misses the mark. Geronimo, the actual Apache leader, shows up and agrees with Bin Laden and they talk about how they are both desert warriors who, “know either shame, nor guilt, nor fear.” Yikes. An alien gives Bin Laden a woman’s body. It’s all over the place. And the fundamentally featureless nature of the desert deprives us of major splash panels and illustrative brilliance; though it is astoundingly beautiful, it never kicks into a super high gear. Also, I feel that I missed a lot of in-jokes and subtlety since I’m not super familiar with Moebius’ body of work, there were many characters I didn’t recognize that were clearly meant to be familiar to most. 420 featureless deserts. 

DRAFT NO. 4: ON THE WRITING LIFE - JOHN MCPHEE

I have no idea why I picked this up. I don’t write for the New Yorker and I’m not looking to hone my ability to write compellingly about geology (which, admittedly, McPhee is the best at) yet I grabbed it impulsively and read it quickly. I suppose that is certainly a testament to McPhee ability as a writer to take something that seems very dull (like how he structures his long non-fiction essays) and turns it into something you fly through. Actually, McPhee is so good at writing, on a sentence-by-sentence, word-choice level, that the idea that he could teach you how to write like him is laughable. On that front the book is a failure. However, there is lots of interesting stuff in it. His chapter on structure is the best in the book and it lays out his truly insane system of envisioning his essays or books at charts or graphs (like a clock that starts at 9 or a spiral) which he literally draws out then fills in the passages. He also mentions how he used to use scissors and tape to edit sections of his work. I’ve only known computers to write so perhaps this is really normal but I found it fascinating. On the computer front, he also mentions that he a computer programer approached him in 1982 about creating a word processor to McPhee’s specifications. Apparently this programer was an early personal computer innovator and worked under the wonderful but mistaken assumption that the personal computers of the future would be bespoke. But either way, McPhee got a program he helped design in 1982 and has used nothing else. Also, there’s lots of inside baseball stuff about the New Yorker, which, because I’m insufferable, I loved. For instance, if McPhee doesn’t know something trivial (like how many gallons of beer a factory produces) he’ll just make something up and trust the fact-checking department to figure it out. Also, the double dots over non-diphthong double vowels, like coöperate, are called diaereses. 65 essays. 

THE SHADOW OF THE SUN - RYSZARD KAPUŚINSKI

AVAILABLE I read almost all of this book while watching a 12 year old on suicide watch. Her world had been reduced to a desk where I hung out with her all day. She reads a lot, so while she read Charlotte’s Web, I didn’t move from my chair and read this very expansive travel book. I was gifted this one from my buddy Paul when I visited him in Istanbul. Paul’s been everywhere and lived in more than a few countries in Africa and, generally, has great taste in writing so I had high hopes. SHADOW OF THE SUN delivers. Kapuśiński really has been all over the place and across decades. Like Paul Theroux he’s a foreigner who was in Africa in the 50’s and 60’s, when colonialism was ending and the continent was being transformed and urbanized and, according to both of these men, there was a palpable sense of high hope. Flash forward to now, or any intervening decade and Africa is not where the postcolonial dreams would have it. But, one of the major advantages of not being an American is that, unlike Theroux, he understands things don’t always work out. Kapuśiński’s covered Africa as a reported for a Soviet paper in his native Poland. Poles have certainly been conditioned by history to expect setbacks and tragedy and when Kapuśiński finds these, he interrogates instead of wringing his hands over how ugly or chaotic the situation might be. Also, because he’s Polish you get a different frame of references leading to sentences like, “Habyarimana, one can say, is the Radovan Karadžić of the Rwandan Hutus” or his exploration of the differences between Hoxha Marxists and Maoists in Ethiopia. Those two essays, one about Ethiopia and another about Rwanada, are perhaps my favorite in the book. I like when he takes a whole nation and traces it’s political situation over the second half of the twentieth century more than the essays that are more traditional travel tales (about say, crossing a desert). He really harps on how hot it is, but perhaps this is also a Polish quirk. He introduced me to the term lumpenmiliatariat, which he borrows from Ali Mazrui and I find really useful to understanding some current political news out of the continent. Overall, excellent. 54 Suns

CAHOKIA: ANCIENT AMERICA’S GREAT CITY ON THE MISSISSIPPI - TIMOTHY R. PAUKETAT

I read this on the plane rides out and back to Kansas. It was nice piece of serendipity to get to see the landscape that was/is the background to the huge earthen pyramids the Cahokians built almost 1000 years ago. Personally, I find the midwest’s vastness and flatness terrifying. It gives me the impression of being lost at sea. However, I can imagine how making that unending plane of ground dramatically rise up out of nowhere into a pyramid would have a very dramatic effect. 

The topic of this book is another one of those things you get mad about not learning in school. Typically, if Native American are covered at all in US public schools it’s only the period during which they meet the Europeans or, sometimes if you’re lucky, the period right before this (i.e. what was life like for Squanto before 1614). But, of course, people had been living in these areas for thousands of years and there is exactly that amount of history to cover. This book does a good job filling in some of that deliberately ignored period between when people crossed the Bering Strait into the western hemisphere and Columbus. I remember seeing some “Indian Mounds” around the South as a child but it was never explained to me that there existed a Native society that was building some of the largest pyramids in the world during the European Dark Age. The largest pyramid, which I haven’t seen but now hope to, is as wide as the stone ones in Egypt. 

This book is doing two things at once. It is trying to synthesize and summarize all of what we think we know about Cahokia and the people who built it, lived there and were affected by it, and it’s also trying to explain why we know so little about these people. That second thread that the book is pursuing is either not very interesting (there are all sorts of micro-biographies of different archeologists who have worked on the sites) or infuriating (the book does a good job highlighting all the times that highway builds have destroyed and paved over huge swaths of archeologically significant areas). But that first thread is great. Because so much is not known about the people who lived in the societies that built the mounds we’re treated to a lot of speculation. Right off the bat, Pauketat connects a supernova that was visible to the naked eye in 1054 BCE to the founding of the city. There doesn’t seem any direct evidence of this besides the fact that this event (the supernova, which is now the crab nebula) was recorded by people all over the world (since astronomy was a very big deal to various ancient people’s, from China to Peru) and was a very big deal (it looked like there was a totally new star in the sky) and, temporally, this lines up with when the carbon-dating tell us construction started, ergo, this celestial miracle seems like the sort of thing that would compel one to found a city. I’m not sure that makes the most sense in the world, but I like the idea either way. There is lots of discussion about a game called Chunkey, which involves trying to throw darts/spears through a moving hoop, and how versions Chunkey and Chunkey stones are found all over North America and how this might show us Cahokia’s reach. When White People did arrive in the midwest, centuries after the fall of Cahokia, they would find people taking the game seriously enough to wager everything they owned on it. 

To my mind the most interesting stuff in the book has to do with Cahokia’s connection to Mesoamerica. Already when you see the mounds themselves, it’s easy to jump to thoughts about Mayan or Aztec or other southern, pyramids. Add to that a huge sociopolitical importance placed on a game played in a plaza, as well as similarities in their cosmologies and mythologies (there’s lots of wonderful stories about a trans-American hero named He-Who-Wears-Human-Heads-As-Earrings) as well as evidence of human sacrifice at Cahokia and it’s hard not to speculate (and to get mad all over again that most of the evidence that could shed some light on this was destroyed because people weren’t willing to move a fucking highway a few miles) about a connection. It’s also hard not to think how this experience with a large urban center and rigid hierarchy and human sacrifice shaped the various tribes and nations that arose and developed after Cahokia, which were the peoples that Europeans encountered a centuries later. Either way, made me want to take a trip to St. Louis to see some of these pyramids and I’m always happy to fill in a small section of history I didn’t know anything about. 77 earthen mounds.

CALIBAN AND THE WITCH - SILVIA FEDERICI

One time in Madagascar I was drinking with friends of mine, all men who had lived in rural Madagascar most/all of their lives (some of them had lived for a time in a Malagasy city) and I was asking them about this strange event that had occurred the day before. I woke up and went outside to walk to my kitchen. At the time I lived in a room in a family’s house in a town called Ambohitrolomahitsy. Like many Malagasy homes, it sort of rambled and connected in weird ways, a legacy of constant construction and improvement and growth, so in going to the small room that contained both my kitchen and my “shower”, I had to walk outside. During the brief walk I was typically accosted and followed by some of the many chickens that lived on the property, who would watch closely to see if I’d drop any rice. However, on there were no chickens following me. To be clear, there were chickens, as many as there had ever been, maybe 2 dozen, but each of them stood still. Stupefied or paused in a daze. You could wave your hand in front of them, push them over, pick them up. Whatever you wanted. My best friend, Heri, who lived in the house as well, looked around concerned but seemed to have dealt with this before, he asked me to help him gather the chickens and bring him to an old man who come over who was mixing water and a crushed up brick and force-feeding of few spoonfuls the brackish liquid into the mouths of the stunned birds. The chickens were all back to normal by the afternoon. I’d asked what the fuck had happened and my buddy told me it was probably a witch (mpamosavy is the Malagasy word) but he didn’t seem to concerned about it. This seemed strange to me and I asked him if he was going to try to figure out who the witch was. He told me that such a inquisition would be a lot of work and also, who cares, since the chickens were better now. He could tell I thought that was strange then asked if there were witches in the USA and I told him that people used to think so but then they killed everyone they suspected of being a witch and now it’s no longer an issue. He found this really horrifying (quick aside, in Malagasy history there is something known as a Tagena ordeal which involves making someone accused of a crime, typically witchcraft, eat the very poisonous nuts of the Tagena tree to see if they survived as a sort of legal test. Interestingly, there is some evidence that this practice started with people administering the poison to rooster owned by the accused and switched to actually poisoning the person themselves in the 16th century, exactly the time period Federici is writing about). Anyway, this was incredible, best book in a while. Honestly, I’m a little mad I wasn’t asked to read this in college. It was part of a pattern that I’ve noticed in the Social Science world where you don’t read the work but rather dozens of commentaries on said work. I feel like I must have been made to read 2 dozen Foucault responses and critiques but all the Foucault I’ve read has been on my own time. All that’s to say that I had heard about this book for years and thought I understood the general principal, something about how woman and colonial subjects are both oppressed in interlocking ways, but had never read it. Turns out this was a tremendous loss. This book is so clear and insightful about at least 2 subjects that I’ve always found a little “loose” or nebulous, perhaps on the more nonsense-y, woo-woo end of social theory. Namely the book clearly lays out the what the destructions of the commons meant and how it affected history as well as how nascent capitalism constructed modern humans. In the case of the commons, Federici does a great job showing how the destruction of landed commons, i.e. parts of the country that anyone could hunt or live on or tend, coincided with this idea that you would start paying people for specific labor (peasants do get paychecks) as well as the idea that woman’s labor (raising children, cooking, cleaning) wasn’t real labor and that it (woman’s labor) was in fact a sort of commons. Likewise, I’ve always found bio-politics/bio-power stuff a bit too much but Federici does the best job I’ve ever seen with making it clear how labor disciplines bodies into the sorts of disciplined machines that are optimized for production. The short histories of the various groups and movements who opposed this sort of arrangement are engrossing and let you play wistful what-if-they-had-won games in your head. Federici’s point about the sheer scale of the Witch Burnings and how they aren’t a weird throwback quirk in an otherwise enlightened society but a very necessary move in a  campaign to create a very particular type of world, the one we ended up with, is awful to think about. As are the connections between the terror against the New World occupants and the “Witches” of Europe that Federici highlights. Plus there’s lots of cool old woodcuts. Essential. 666 Witches. 

THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE - THOMAS LIGOTTI

I got this from the library after finishing Ligotti’s TEATRO GROTTESCO a few weeks ago. Say what you will about Ligotti, the man certainly has a worldview. This book, which is non-fiction, seemed like the purest distillation of how he feels about things. And things are not good. Their actually the worst they could be, to hear Ligotti tell it. I read some Schopenhauer in college but this is far and away the most pessimistic single work I’ve read. To simplify, Ligotti views consciousness, especially human consciousness, a terrible mistake. Life is meaningless and absurd and full of pain and the more one is aware of this the more one suffers. Also, since deterministic forces rule our lives, we are basically cursed, nightmarish puppets. It was unsurprising, based on his fiction, that Ligotti has thought a lot about the ways in which people are like puppets and the ways in which puppets are terrifying. As I’ll bet you could have guessed, Ligotti is a hardcore anti-natalist and and seems to broadly be supportive of suicide. While large portions of the book are something akin to straight forward philosophy (though largely jargon free) the book also features a lot of criticism. Ligotti traces this pessimism he’s describing though philosophy and fiction, pointing out and expounding upon his predecessors. He’s taken with a Norwegian named Peter Zapffe who wrote fiction and philosophy around the same subjects and who talks about how one of the ways to deal with this crushing insight into life is to sublimate it into art. Since Ligotti, to my knowlege, hasn’t killed himself, he’s clearly chosen to deal with his psychic burdens in this manner. Ligotti talks cleverly and at length about various horror writers who touch on these themes. He’s got lots of smart stuff to say about H.P. Lovecraft and Poe. He could be the world’s saddest English professor, if he wanted. Overall though, I would agree that these feelings are best sublimated into art. This book was alright but his fiction is better. He’s great a driving home a point, I really like how he always capitalizes MALIGNANTLY USELESS, a phrase he uses often to describe human life but in the end, I’m more dazzled by his imagination than his worldview. 0 meaningless lives. 

FINALLY GOT THE NEWS - BRAD DUNCAN

Another impulse find at the library and something closer to an archive or photo-book than the other stuff I’ve gotten to recently. This book is built to showcase a remarkable collection of 70’s leftist propaganda that Duncan has acquired. The material is broken into “themes” (such as anti-prison work, or feminist movements, general anarchism etc.) each theme given a chapter and each chapter is given an intro paragraph, some written by people I know (like Silvia Federici) but mostly by people I most certainly don’t. Many of these essays lay bare and break down the almost endless variety and subcategories of leftist groups. For example, the book includes a glossary that serves as a “brief list of some of the organizations mentioned” features the BLA, the ALD, the APP, ASPS, the BWC, the CAP, the AAPRP all of the first two pages, all of which “only” cover Black Power/Black Separatist issues. Each movement features so many groups and proliferations, all of which have their own (sometimes profoundly different, but more often than not, largely simpatico) ideologies which, due to the narcissism of small differences, often prevents these groups from being effective together. Plus there are more insidious examples of this, like stories about Marxist groups supporting the opponents of bussing in Boston based on a “class-first” reading of the situation. Regardless, the material is uniformly excellent, both historically and as pieces of design. Often times the flyers and pamphlets are very catchy and really well laid out. I’d single out the Queer Liberation stuff as well as the Anti-Colonial stuff and all the work related to Chicano Power to being really exciting to look at. You can see DIY punk-show and Soviet propaganda in equal measure. Likewise issues like the creation of “New Afrika” (a proposed Black-majority independent nation, sometimes called the New State of Kush, made up of the American Southeast) or the story of Susan Saxe (a White, lesbian, radical who hid out in various lesbian communes after being involved in a bank robbery/murder) are fascinating to think about. It seems that in my lifetime most American political radicalism and political violence has been decidedly right-wing (from Oklahoma City to the killings of Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche and Ricky John Best to various abortion doctors’ murders) but perhaps it’s a blacklash from this era. Or, more likely, the American, mainstream Right-wing supports its radicals and revolutionaries more than the Left. 77 burning cop cars. 

TEATRO GROTTESCO - THOMAS LIGOTTI

AVAILABLE: This one came brother recommended and it, frankly, had a lot of strikes against it from the beginning. First of all, it’s horror, which is not a genre I read a lot of or know alot about. Books, frankly, aren’t that scary. I’ve read some Poe, some King, some Barker and a lot of H.P. Lovecraft but that’s basically it (outside of things like Frankenstein, i.e. horror who’s cultural footprint reaches outside of the genre). Additionally, this book is a series of short stories, another genre I don’t really care for. However, despite these prejudices I held against TEATRO going in, this book came through and surprised me. The stories share a lot with Lovecraft in that they mostly chronicle a descent into madness. In Lovecraft, this downward spiral is typically precipitated by a character coming into contact with some sort of monstrous, cosmic being, most famously Cthulhu. In Ligotti it’s a sense of meaninglessness and pessimism that enters into a character’s life and slowly destroys them. Ligotti isn’t trying to invoke terror as much as hopelessness, bleakness and sorrow. Characters are constantly learning that life means nothing, that it’s a cruel joke. There’s lots of clown/carnival/puppet imagery (the only other Ligotti book I’ve read had a clown on the cover) to drive home this particular angle. There’s not a lot of big scares or even horrific Barker-esque images (one of the exceptions being a really gross, awful sounding human-spider hybrid) just this sense that life means nothing and that everything we experience is either stupid, fleeting pleasure or pointless misery. Lots of stories feature artists and writers, which is typically a trope that bothers me in novels (it implies to me that the novelist cannot imagine the lives of anyone but their artists friends and their lives) but it consistently works here. The art pieces that Ligotti describes fit right in with the larger themes of the book and are compelling in their own right. Reading Ligotti’s Wikipedia, I discovered that he’s a socialist. At first this seems bizarre since, to my mind, all leftism requires some belief in people and humanity, but you can actually read this inclination into several of the stories. One of the great strength of the book is that it features unconventional horror villains. There aren’t vengeful ghosts or psychopathic serial killers or anything like that. Often there are evil businesses and factories that spring up from nowhere and destroy people’s lives or government agencies that turn entire towns into nightmarish carnivals. Socialism without any hope perhaps. Either way, I really enjoyed it, it’s impressively dark, like turning your headlamp off in a cave. 13 evil clowns.