THE MOVIEGOER - WALKER PERCY

Reading this was a strange experience. Partially because I read it during the 4 flights that made up my trip to and from Puerto Rico and reading on a plane is always strange (some of the best reading though, it’s possible to really lock-in at 35,000 feet and tear through a book totally absorbed. I did this with Pinocchio once as a kid). But mostly because this is the first book I’ve read by Walker Percy, the person I’m partially named after. I’ve avoid reading things by him as a general policy to protect myself in the off-chance that he’s bad. And I say “off-chance” and “general policy” because I have read 2 things by him, one, an essay about photography that’s really good as well as the intro to A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES. I love COD, it is one of my favorite books full-stop and knowing Percy’s role in it’s publication was enough for me to feel good about being named after him. Didn’t seem worth the risk to actually read one of his novels. But, for whatever reason, it decided to rectify that this spring-break and tore through this old-ass, 1980 copy of THE MOVIEGOER. 

First the good news: it’s good, no need to worry about changing my name. It’s very Southern (“Nobody but a Southern knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North…he knows a ghost when he sees one, and no sooner does he step off the train in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, then he feels the genie-soul perched on his shoulder.” as a Southerner who’s lived in Chicago and Frisco, can confirm.)  , there’s lots of New Orleans stuff, it takes place during Mardi Gras, there’s lots of swamp talk, all good stuff. At it’s most basic level, the book is about a sad man who eventually fucks his cousin, who is also very sad. The way in which he’s sad, the way he floats through his life and sleeps with secretaries and goes to the movies seems much more relevant now. If you replaced “going to the movies” with “staring at his phone” the book could be published tomorrow. I’m glad I waited until now to read this book, I’m now the age of the main character, Binx Bolling, and it’s easy for me not glamorize or idealize this character at all. I’m guessing this happened with younger readers, the way I missed the sorrow and bullshit in Ignatius the first couple of times I, as a teen and early 20 whatever. Binx comes off as pretty bad guy from my vantage point now. He basically just has his job to fuck a series of secretaries, talked about how he only loves money, he feels disconnected and alienated, his cousin tries to kill herself and, while she’s recovering he goes with her to Chicago and fucks her. There’s an interesting passage about how they almost don’t fuck because of their mutual ennui. He’s sort of like the main character in THE STRANGER, where he’s worried about being so alienated and disconnected all while not coming to turns with how garbage he is. I think the books knows this, although it is easy to read the ending as a happy one. I’m not sure this sort of character is still interesting and relevant. But I enjoyed it. I’ll need to read the rest of the Percy I guess. 1 Holy Week. 

ART COMIC - MATTHEW THURBER

Turns out one of the comics collected in the “Best American” book I just read was available in full from the local library. ART COMIC wouldn’t have been my first choice, if I could have read any of the selections from “Best American” in full, but free is free and I’ll take what I can get. In general, I’d say I like art-world parody stuff, things like “Velvet Buzzsaw” or “Art School Confidential”. It isn’t a world I know a ton about. For a while I hung out with an aspiring art world couple and their gallery-owner/artist friends in Mexico City and the whole milieu certainly seemed rife for parody. ART COMIC does this stuff pretty well but is much better when it’s weirder. Their are parts where characters are shipwrecked or meet God in heaven, etc. and I found those sections much stronger than the parts that are a more direct parody of galleries and gallery-owners and Art School satire. It is, however, during one in one of these sections a background character says, “from a Lacanian point of view, doing coke off a mirror becomes very interesting” which is an amazing line. During this period in Mexico City I did once do cocaine while an artist went on and on about Lacan. Truly, life does imitate art. 5 conceptual art masterpieces. 

BEST AMERICAN COMICS 2018 - PHOEBE GLOECKNER, EDITOR/ THE TALKING EGGS - ROBERT SAN SOUCI & JERRY PINKNEY

I’ve been getting bogged down in that new James novel (which is good but, like most fantasy, requires a long engaged chunk to really get a sense of the world and what’s going on, which can make for slow reading since I don’t always have the time for all that) as well as this Maya Daren book about Haitian religion (also involved and heavy) so I needed something of a quick hit/palate cleanser and I ran across the Best American in the library and picked it right up. I read comics pretty regularly (I’m caught up and emotionally invested in East of West, The Wicked and the Divine and Black Panther. The first two are on their last arch and I’ll review the whole series when they’re done) but I don’t usually review them here since individual issues are so short and because I haven’t thought to long about what I do and don’t review here (for instance, I don’t review the academic papers or the magazines I read). But this book was hefty so I figured I’d review it. First off, I don’t know who Phoebe Gloeckner is. Apparently she wrote, Diary of a Teenage Girl, which I haven’t read but comes highly recommended. I always want these sorts of compendiums to be much weirder and feature less famous folks. I like the Hernadez brothers (I actually haven’t read that much Love and Rockets) and Simon Hanselmann (the best) and Guy Delisle as much as anyone but I’m not sure they need any help brining their work to a wider audience. On the whole I would say 2 things: first, many of these artist seem to be from/working out of Chicago and Seattle. Shout out the Chicago and Seattle. Second, I would say with the exception of Alex Graham’s entry, Angloild pt. 2, the autobiographical/non-fiction comics feel really flat to me. This isn’t to say that comics aren’t good at telling “true” stories, it’s just to say that Gloeckner didn’t find any. But it’s a compilation so more global critiques are useless, here are the comics I liked and will now buy the full versions of: Angloid pt. 2, Crawl Space, Playground of my Mind (another exception to the non-non-fiction slump), Fatherson, Ugly, How to be Alive. 33 Comics

The Talking Eggs is a favorite children’s book from my childhood that I recently read to the group of kids I work with. It’s beautifully illustrated (it won a Caldecott) and has a moral I can support. It’s about a girl in the American bayou who lives with an evil mom and sister. She finds a witch in the woods and, after treating her kindly, is rewarded. The evil mom and sister attempt to exploit the witch and are dealt with harshly. It teaches kids the importance of respecting witches and being nice. It’s also got a good message about the way you ask people for things affecting whether or not they want to help you. Important stuff. Anyway, the kids liked it more than I was expecting which was a pleasant surprise. 11 dancing rabbits. 

GYO - JUNJI ITO

50 I don’t really read Manga or watch Anime. It’s never made a lot of sense to me or connected with whatever part of the brain lights up in Otaku when they see this stuff. I mostly envy them because there’s so much of it, so much is apparently good and there’s such a large community you can tap into. But regardless of my intentions my familiarity with this stuff stops at Dragonball Z and Trigun and stuff like that. However, I have heard from fans of this stuff that JunJi Ito is the master of Japanese horror comics and a pioneer in the genre of fish-horror. I needed only to hear the term, “fish-horror” to be onboard. I read what I was told was his masterpiece, Uzumaki, a while ago. It’s amazing and creepy but I’d kind of forgotten about the whole thing when I saw this one, the one that built is scary fish reputation, at the library and grabbed it. I read it all in one day and it’s great. It’s got everything, walking fish, evil circuses, possibly sentient smells, the end of the world. Very creepy. It features some of the grossest images I’ve ever seen in a comic. Enough body-horror for anyone. The  main fish story directly connects to Japanese warcrimes in the 20th century and the second two shorter stories are about a man literally crushed by his house and family while the last one features people being distorted and harmed by holes made for them to fit in. All of these strike me as very Japanese concerns and themes. Either way, this was excellent. More scary fish. 1,000 walking fish. 

THE PENGUIN BOOK OF HAIKU - TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY ADAM L. KERN

Got this one because a) it was recommended by Jay Rubin, the guy who translates all the Murikami books and thus seems like someone who would know a thing or two about which Japanese translations are best and b) I’m trying to get through BLACK LEPORD RED WOLF which, so far, is really interesting but it’s hardcover (hard to take with me on the bus) and requires long sessions to really get into the world so I really wanted something I could pick up and read quickly, something akin to small little bites. There is no literary form more suited to quick reads than the Haiku. Going in, I thought I knew a thing or two about the form. I obviously was familiar with the 5-7-5 structure and I vaguely remember learning that “true” Haikus were suppose to invoke singular, natural scenes. I thought they were old and connected to an ancient part of pristine Japanese culture. Well, turns out that is not the case. Turns out the Haiku was created in the recent past, The 5-7-5 single poem written by a single author about nature is more modern than photography. Apparently, after the Meiji restoration, when Japan opened itself up to the world at large (or, more precisely, was forced open) Japanese poets considered how they wanted to share Japanese poetry with the world. There were/are dozens of indigenous poetic forms in Japan. During this era, many of them were collaborative, meaning that one poet would issue a challenge and people would see who could come up with the best “response.” It was something of a party game. This could go back in forth in a process called “linked exchange.” This is the sort of thing that Bashō was writing; he never composed what we would think of as a modern Haiku. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, poets (like Shōyō and Shiki) write essays and petition the government to deemphasize the often dirty linked verses and focus instead on single nature poems written by a single author and then make a conscious effort to promote this form as the truest example of Japanese poetry specifically and aesthetics generally. They actually go back and trim the work of older poets (like Bashō) into the shapes of modern Haiku, as if it these poets opuses were unruly bonsai. I found this part really fascinating and an interesting look at how a country integrates into a global system when they aren’t colonized. I’m sure lots of nations and peoples would have loved a chance consider how they wanted their art to be seen and digested by the outside world. Anyway, this book includes translations of these “pre-modern” poems and they’re wonderful, old and dirty (the one about going mouth to ass is from 1804). I’ll finish this review with a few of my favorites from the book. As a quick aside, I have no idea wha the last poem here is suppose to mean. What is a rice girl? When aren’t butts and heads “lined up”? I read the translator’s note on this poem (there are very exhaustive notes in this book) and it’s insight into the poem is that the poem also functions as an acrostic (Japanese poetry is, apparently, very acrostic heavy) for butthole. Important, vital even, information, but the central mystery of the poem remains locked to me. Any insight is welcomed. Either way, a great collection, 17 syllables. 

out of one hole

but with the help of another hole

into one more hole

this world of dew…

though a world of dew it remains

still, even so…

this world of ours;

viewing blossoms on the surface 

above hell

The bureaucrat’s tot

learns about grabby-grabby 

an awful lot

“Better not turn into a butterfly”

says the dream beast

about to chow down

Challenge:

Butthole

Response:

butts and heads alike

wholly lined up on rice girls

TREATING TRAUMATIC STRESS IN CHILDERN AND ADOLESCENTS - KRISTINE KINNIBURGH & MAGARET BLAUSTEIN

This is a bit weird to review because I didn’t read it for the reason (I want to) I normally read books. Which is not to say that I didn’t want to read this book at all, just that I doubt it would have come up naturally given how technical and specific it is. I read the ARC manual, which is how I think of this thing, because the place I work is switching over to this model of treatment. I work in a residential facility for kids (almost all of whom are in foster care) who have behavioral issues and the company I work for wanted to adopt a “trauma informed” theoretical model to structure and focus the work. The settled on ARC, the system described in this book, and have been implementing it over the past 2 years. Last year, they sent us to a training put on by one of the co-authors, Dr. Blaustein, who explained the whole thing over 2 days. I found this training interesting and parts of it useful but maybe a bit over-thought and optimistic w/r/t the efficacy of what they were suggesting. I decided to buy and read the book since, generally, I think I consume information better that way. I also read it taking notes and highlighting sections and marking worksheets to use at work, which is a very different way to consume a book. There was a lot in this book that was helpful and I could consider using. I found some good worksheets and lists of activities and coping skills and clarifying terminology. Overall as a theory, what i think it’s getting at is pretty obviously true. That kids who experience abuse/neglect (though with the kids I work with almost always both) have had to spend so much of their life being vigilant and taking care of themselves (since they weren’t being properly cared for) that they have both failed to develop normal personal/social skills as well as developed a whole series of situationally useful but big-big-picture harmful behaviors. Basically, the longer they can feel and actually be safe and around safe adults who in control, the better. It can help create the space and calmness necessary to “catch-up” developmentally and get some sort of a handle on the trauma(s). The book has some bad implications for my job since it stresses Attachment (it’s the “A” in ARC) between the caregiver (me and my coworkers) and child, which comes over time. An especially long time since lots of these kids have been cruelly taught through experience that adults are not to be trusted. Where I work has a very high turnover rate, making it really hard for the people who work together (i.e. the kids and the staff) to know each other. In terms of criticisms, there is a very upsetting “self-care contract” where a supervisor and employee are suppose to agree on how the employee will implement “self-care” in their personal life and private time and then they sign a document. Horrifying. Also the ARC diagram is confusing. The columns imply a “lined-up" connection that doesn’t exist in the framework. I get that lots of the stuff in here is very much not for me, it’s for therapists and parents and people who run the place I work, most of all. However, it was interesting to see some of this stuff and these concerns in a big picture way, the way my bosses see it and looks at it. I wish these people would take a similar interest in what this sort of work looks like from where I’m at. 12 Trauma-Informed Models.

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.