NOCILLA DREAM - AGUSTÍN FERNÁNDEZ MALLO

I think this novel gets the vibe right. There is a strain of thinking about novels, where the goal is not so much to tell a story as to replicate what it feels like to be alive (either generally or at a specific point in time/history). I’m thinking of something like TO THE LIGHTHOUSE here. For lack of a better term, i think of these as vibe novels. Often times these sorts of books are very closely focused on one or a small number of characters who’s lives were shown and made to experience. DREAM was cool because it managed to be a very vibe-y lil’ number but also not have much in the way of main characters. The books broken into over 100 numbered chapters, none of which are more than a few pages, many of which are a handful of lines. By the end there were a few stories or at least narratives emerging. There were, however, themes and ideas that circled around and looped and marinated and repeated. It has an almost Bolañoian post-national, this-is-happeing-all-over-the-world-and-all-these-forces-are-sinister-and-defuse-and-global thing going on as well as lots of great stuff about micro-nations, which I always find to be a fun topic. I think the book did a good job replicating what it’s like to walk around thinking nowadays, when facts and other narratives and vast global implications seem to pop-up constantly and nothing stays still for more than a page or two. It felt like having a bunch of tabs open, some of these obviously related, some that’ve been open so long it’s not clear why it was pulled up. This book is one of three in the NOCILLA trilogy. I’ve got the whole set and I really don’t know anything about the series as a whole. Perhaps the other books are in this style. Perhaps the continue the “story” of this book, such as it is. Who knows? I think I’ll catch up on a few other things I’m part way through before fucking with the second part of this collection. 3 dreams. 

WHORESON - DONALD GOINES

I’m almost positive the first time I heard the name Donald Goines, it was on a Re-Up gang mixtape. I believe it was Ad-Liva or Sandman, the members of the group who aren’t the Clipse, who claimed to be (and this is from memory, I tried to find the lyric but couldn’t, perhaps I made it up), “Donald Goines reincarnated”. I was really into the We Got It 4 Cheap series and made it a point to look up references I didn’t get in the lyrics. These tapes all came out before RapGenius so you had to listen closely and hope that google could figure it out. Most of the references were either to the Wire or a quasi-famous real drug lord (think Larry Hoover) but I was struck by one of them mentioning a crime author, since they were so insistent that they weren’t trafficking (pun intended) in fiction. Irregardless, this book is wild and perhaps the bleakest book I’ve read. Whoreson is basically Goines’ take on PIMP, the Iceberg Slim book that somewhat inaugurated this genre, black street crime stories. Goines began writing because of Slim’s success. He saw how Iceberg leveraged his street credentials into a legit career and wanted the same for himself. PIMP is set, primarily in the 30’s and 40’s, WHORESON takes place about a decade later. Both are first person coming of age stories about young black me who grow up in grinding, horrifying poverty, become pimps and underworld figures, then  suffer the consequences of the life. Both of these books are quasi-autobiographical, though Goines wrote this while in prison and apparently folded in the experiences and life stories of the people he knew there. I was trying to remember how long ago I read PIMP. I know it’s been a few years and I wonder if the second-hand (and, to a lesser extent, first-hand) trauma I’ve experienced in my life since that reading has made me more sensitive to the brutality of this book. PIMP was also brutal, both books pride themselves on being unflinching and they certainly appeal to a lurid instinct (which I have more than my fair share of), but I found the cruel and violent sections of this book, and there are many, harder to read than I had anticipated. That being said, I got through the book in day or so, and the story is engrossing. Towards the beginning of the book, a classmate asks a 5 year old Whoreson (the main character, I’ll bet you can guess how he got his name) what he wants to do when he grows up. He answers, “pimp, baby, pimp.” And it pretty much goes from there. In this world, as in PIMP, Whoreson and other players and pimps are also con-men and scammers and robbers and boosters and general chistlers. Professional criminals, hustlers. I’m always interested in the mechanics of the cons they run (lots of them seem to be change-based) and this one has some good ones (as well as a complex scheme to marry a white woman that never really pays off to me). Not unlike PIMP, this book occasionally “opens out” or seeks to wax philosophical about the nature of pimping or race relations or whatnot. PIMP, I think does this better (the ultimate authority of the “deeper” meaning of PIMP is Dave Chappelle) but it does happen in this book. Unlike PIMP, which posits that pimps are themselves basically prostitutes that prey on prostitutes, Whoreson maintains that prostitute themselves are tricks. PIMP is full of passages about how race and capitalism are manifested and made clear in the underworld; you have to read between the lines to get most of this stuff in WHORESON. Interestingly, both of these books have, what I call, the Clockwork Orange ending (specifically, the “original” book ending, the one with the extra chapter) where a violent/depraved anti-hero gets older and looks at his life and decides he wants a family and middle class normality. It’s a weirdly happy and out of place ending for all three books. One assumes these endings (at least in the case of PIMP and WHORESON) exist because the primary audience were actual criminals and pimps who maybe wanted some hope? Goines wrote WHORESON in prison and worked on it with fellow inmates, perhaps they didn't’ want a story where the player-hero dies or is resigned to jail forever. In both cases, PIMP and WHORESON, it does seem like the main characters get off easy, given the depths of their savagery and evil.   Either way, good and brutal and exciting. I want to read his other famous book, DOPEFIEND, now, as well as his Black Power Kenyatta series.

STICK ANGELICA, FOLK HERO - MICHEAL DEFORGE

The library must have re-uppped it’s DeForge section. I had thought I’d read all of the SPL holdings but was pleasantly surprised to find some more downtown. Of all the stuff I read from the library and don’t buy, his stuff makes me the most regretful. I’d love to own it all. It’s so lush and beautiful and distinct. He’s got the thing that, to me, is most important in a comic illustration artist, an individual style. He could draw anything in he world and it would immediately be clearly a DeForge. His common theme are all here: the natural world, dreams, loneliness, longing, parasitism, symbiosis, etc. The book is a somewhat straightforward story about a Canadian folk hero called Sticks Angelica who lives in the woods. At first, I was convinced that Sticks herself was an author aviator, then a rabbit named Oatmeal, before DeForge himself showed up as a character. This is strange since I never before have felt, while reading DeForge, that anything in them was at all autobiographical (with the exception of the one about some people secretly being trees, which struck me as a metaphor for being queer, though I don’t have any idea if DeForge is queer) and I’m not sure why this one struck me that way, even before the author appeared as a character. Lisa Hanawalt, the cartoonist who designed the BoJack Horeseman world appears as a moose-headed woman, drawn in Hanawalt’s style. Man, does the world ever need an adult animated TV show from the design sensibility of DeForge. My understanding is that he worked on Adventure Time, so perhaps this isn’t that far-fetched. Either way, everything DeForge makes is good and I found this one better than most of his, the story was stronger and the art was, as always, god-level. 1 enormous and scary forest. 

THE MAN WITH THE GETAWAY FACE - RICHARD STARK

Another of those one day reads. I thought I’d read all of the Parker novels available in the SPL system (though hardly all of them, there are dozens and I believe some are out of print) but new ones keep coming up. I’m hardly complaining, I’d like to read all of them at some point but they aren’t the sorts of books that make you obsessed with reading it all right away. There aren’t really cliffhangers or any sort of over-arching story. The closest we get to this is the shifting relationship Parker has with the more organized, corporate criminal world called the “outfit” or the “syndicate”. They’re constantly trying to hem Parker in or violating his rigid thief’s code, which requires the plastic surgery referenced in the title. So the books feature the ageless Parker, moving through the mid-century criminal underworld with machine-like efficiency, using all sorts of great mid-century criminal slang like, “the finger” or “the boodle”. Parker is so single-minded and ruthless; the books always go the same way. There’s a job (armored car in this case) and a group of criminals brought together to do the job, and Parker always has a bad feeling about it because no one is as professional as him, then there’s a double-cross and it’s looking bad but Parker always pulls it out. He kills whoever he needs to and outsmarts the rest and moves back down to Florida to live at a resort under a different name in a sort of reptilian languor until he runs out of money and has to pull another job. He’s so single-minded it’s hypnotic you’re pulled quickly through the book and you never have to wonder about what Parker is thinking. Here’s Parker explaining his feelings about his dead wife (who he was going to murder, for betrayal, before she killed herself), “She was the only person he didn’t feel simply about. With everyone in the world, the situation was simple. They were in and he worked with them, or they were out and he ignored them or they were trouble and he took care of them…He didn’t want that to happen again, ever, to feel about anyone that way.” There’s always a part in these books where the main character switches for a chapter or two and we follow a secondary character around and, typically, learn their life story. Normally, or at least in the other Parker novels I’ve read, this person is a high-up criminal who Parker is coming to kill. Typically, they reflect on the changes in the criminal underworld since the end of Prohibition (not an uninteresting topic to be sure). This time Stark changes it up and we get the perspective and history of a man who was a communist party goon in the ’30’s who was beaten and given brain damage by scabs and now works as a low-level criminal enforcer. There’s enough stuff like that, specific weird details, coupled with the pleasing sameness and brevity (they really take an hour or so a piece, they’re great plane books) which make me want to, over the course of my life, finish the series. I suppose I should make a list of which one’s I’ve read. 54 new faces. 

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE THE PHOTOGRAPHS - PAUL MARTINEAU & BRITT SALVESEN

Should photo books count? Doubtful, but this one is huge and comes with 5 essays about Mapplethorpe and is organized around a show I ended up seeing at LACMA when I lived in LA. So, Imma count it. First, the easy stuff. The book is gorgeous and wonderful and the prints looks great and I wish I owned it. The collection of 176 plates (plus some extra featured as examples in the essays section and printed smaller) does really show Mapplethorpe’s diversity. They are all portraits (except for one bad landscape). Even the ones flowers and fruit and furniture are portraits. They take a discrete subject which Mapplethorpe then drips in elegance and sex, lights perfectly, theatrically, almost religiously. Have you ever seen a bunch of grapes that ache sex and longing and elegance? Mapplethorpe’s got you. They whole aesthetic and vibe reads to me as very renaissance sculpture. Composed and beautiful and balanced and very homosexual. The bulk of the photos are from the X, Y and Z portfolios. Y is the collection of flowers, X is the S/M (which apparently Mapplethorpe backroynm-ed to Sex/Magik) stuff and Z is a collection of black male nudes. It’s weird that none of the essay writers point out the most obvious connection between the X and Y portfolios, namely that flowers are sex organs. Flowers themselves are shaped and colored and designed to facility pollination. The flower is the sexual organ of the plant. Since we aren’t plants, or even insects, the pleasure we get from smelling them or thinking about them or looking at them or composing superb photos of them isn’t really “sexual” in nature, but the joy largely universal. Flowers are wondrous, sexual, varied and strange.Mapplethorpe is asking us to take this same impulse and apply it to human sexuality, which he sees as equally diverse and elegant. While he does give us a good and unflinching overview of the sorts of stuff that was going down in the NYC S/M world in the early 80’s. But this isn’t anthropology, you aren’t suppose to to look at the photos of fisting or digital urethral sounding and ask how and why. you’re suppose to admire how wonderful and strange it looks, like a rare orchid. 

The book’s inclusion of the Z portfolio also brings up some interesting ideas about desire and race. First of all, put in the content of this book overall, I don’t think it’s fair to say that Mapplethorpe had a particular obsession, in his photography, with Black men. The subjects are varied by race and gender (with a noted absence of Black women) and unvaried in terms of physical beauty and musculature. Mapplethorpe makes everyone a sculpture. The body is always prime. Likewise, the criticism that he is reifying the big black dick stereotype also seems off to me. Yes, there are big black dicks, ask Jesse Helms, but all the dicks are huge. Mapplethorpe’s photos, even when photographing himself while dying, float in a cold and perfect world. The one photo I can’t get over though is one he made, in ’81, entitled Isaiah. In the photo, which like all of them is beautiful and well composed and balanced, a Black model posses with a cheesy prop spear and leopard loincloth. I assume this is suppose to be a sort of ironic answering to criticism about his work w/r/t race but still, yikes. 

Beyond it’s overt racism, the other thing that stands out in Isaiah is the fakeness of the prop spear. The model clearly didn’t “use” the spear in his day-to-day life, which puts the photo out of step with the overall philosophy of Mapplethorpe’s photography. The people in the S/M gear really use it. Mapplethorpe time and time again pointed out how he trolled for subjects and hookups at the same time in the same infamous clubs. How he’d bring someone home and fuck them and photograph them in the morning. It’s important to the mystique that Mapplethorpe be a participant in the culture he was documenting (the saddest iteration of this is that Mapplethorpe himself got carried off by AIDS right as the disease was decimating this community). Mapplethorpe himself got ahead by cultivating a sexual and professional relationship with Sam Wagstaff Jr., a very important member of the art world, especially photography. The essays quote several gallery owners as saying the only let Mapplethorpe in the door because Wagstaff. It’s hard to imagine this going down if you reverse the genders or orientations. A famous artist who began her career by sleeping with a much older established pillar of the art world. Or a male photographer going to clubs to pick up young women to have sex with then photograph engaged in pretty extreme sex acts. At this point your basically describing Terry Richardson (who, and maybe I’ll elaborate on this more some day, is basically a bizarro, much worse Mapplethorpe). Do I not view these situations as the same because of misogyny on my part? Probably, but I’d also propose that perhaps the gay community, specifically the S/M community is much better at understanding power and power’s relationship to sex and the ways you can erotically encounter or embody or give up power. Straight power relations are much more fixed and thus, somewhat paradoxically, easier to abuse. Anyway, wonderful stuff. I could look at these photos all day. 89 fists. 

FOUCAULT IN CALIFORNIA - SIMEON WADE

I saw this in a bookstore a few weeks ago and figured it was more of an overview of the time that Foucault lived in Berkeley. I read the biography, THE LIVES OF MICHEL FOUCAULT, in college and was very intrigued by the sections about his time in the Bay. There seemed to be a lot of drug taking and pre-AIDS (or, more sadly and specifically, pre-knowledge-of-AIDS)  gay leather stuff, all of which is of great interest to me. I remember there’s a part in that book where the author quotes Foucault as saying that fisting is important because it’s the only sexual act invented in the 20th century. Obviously, this is a epoch worth deep study. This book, FOUCAULT IN CALIFORNIA, is not that. F IN C is something of a fanboy account of a long weekend with their hero. Wade, the author if the book, was a professor and huge Foucault fanboy who eventually convinced his hero to come down and kick it with him. It’s hard to overrated how deep this guy is into Foucault, here is a passage from the first time Wade sees Foucault at the airport, “Upon closer look the bare skull was marked by several extra lobes, which bulged from the apex of the brain stem. One did not have to be a phrenologist to recognize that an extraordinary cerebral mutation, something on the order of a supermind, had emerged from the outer limits.” And it goes on like that the whole time. There is some unintended comedy in the book when in is quite clear to the reader that Wade is annoying Foucault but Wade is oblivious. Which makes sense, Wade spends the whole time just asking for Foucault’s opinions on various topics (classical music, novels, different philosophers, etc.) in kind of a broad interview style. Wade agrees with everything the great man says. They talk about how much cooler California is than France (there’s a funny subplot about people trying to get Foucault, the architect of the concept of “biopower,” to do yoga) and agree that it’s important to fuck your students. They party and drink and, reluctantly, give half-assed lectures. The book is short, I read the whole thing in a single afternoon in basically one sitting. It’s relays what is really a long anecdote or party story about the author’s hero. Though, it is honestly impressive that at this point in his life, I believe he would have been around 50, Foucault is doing acid for the first time with strangers in a desert in another country, and going to very extreme S&M bars to fuck strangers. May we all be on that tip at 50. Wade himself turns out to be something of a maniac himself. His life seems to spiral a bit after the events of this book and by 2014 he’s a crazy recluse in the desert. Heather Dundas, who is a grad student and who writes the intro, hates theory and Foucault and tracks down Wade to get his manuscript with an eye to write a satire of stupid theory guys and their dumb “vision quests”. But the manuscript itself proves to be beyond parody so here we are, with the manuscript as originally written by Wade, shortly after all this goes down. Maybe someday we’ll get more about Foucault’s time in California as a whole. More stuff about the sex he was having and the drugs he was doing and the people he was meeting and the lifestyles he was encountering and how all of that influenced and shaped his thoughts and theory. FOUCAULT IN CALIFORNIA will be a great resource for whoever writes that book but, as it stands, it’s a really funny short little number about a theory-dweeb meeting his idol. 69 hits of acid. 

HARD RAIN FALLING - DON CARPENTER

AVAILABLE

Bought this on a total whim. It was on sale at the bookstore near my house and I felt like a needed a quick novel to get through, to entertain me during my retirement. Plus the back of the book comes with praise from Richard Price, Jonathan Lethem and George Pelecanos wrote the intro (which gives away major, interesting plot points, I would urge you not to read it if you’re going to read this book. That being said, I will be spoiling the book in this “review”). It did not disappoint. This book is interesting and compelling to me on two levels. First, on the level of plot and story and what’s in the actual book. The stuff that would have been compelling in 1964, when this book was published, and will be of interest in 100 years (assuming people are still reading books/novels). On that level the book is about the sort of rootless, rambling young man who’s looking to find some sort of meaning in his life that we see all over literature. This book comes out at what one could consider the tail end of the beat era or towards the beginning of the hippy counter-culture era so these sorts of narratives (ON THE ROAD being the apogee of  this line) are not in sort supply. HARD RAIN FALLING is an unbelievably bleak entry into this cannon. The wondering and restlessness and search for meaning that the main character, Jack, undergoes is never broken up with moments of rapture or clarity. Things don’t work out for him. He doesn’t have cool friends who are writers with big ides nor does he get lucky in terms of the people he mets on his journey. Jack himself is violent, in a world of violence and from a linage that the prologue makes clear stretches back since before his birth. At first I thought the books suffered from the classic male-writer pitfall of ridiculous female characters (esp. in a book like this that takes place in such a misogynistic milieu) but the final third of the book features Jack trying to make a marriage and kid work with a slumming-it rich girl who i thought was interesting, well-drawn and believable. 

The other level this book works on concerns its function as a historical document. The book came out in 1964 and offers us a glimpse into pre-mass incarceration prison and pre-stonewall male sexuality. Jack is institutionalized his entire life, from growing up in orphanages to Juvie to San Quinten, the book does a good job showing how these different systems are interconnected and turn Jack into the sort of person he cannot successfully live outside of this level of control. It’s sad that Foucault never got to read this, he would have been thrilled. There is a whole middle section that acts as a sort of prison Gulliver’s travels where Jack visit various different California prison and are run in different manners (some are very lose and anarchic, others are deeply controlling) and comments on the nature of prison and how people like him struggle to stay alive and form identity. Also, since this book takes place in the 50’s and 60’s it’s pre-mass incarceration so Jack and folks like him are getting couple year sentences for things like armed robbery or statutory rape or assault (though they do attempt to put Jack on death row for kidnapping at one point) that would most certainly get you put away forever nowadays. The other fascinating part is the stuff about male sexuality. At the beginning Jack is young and horny and very whore-focused. He recounts frequently how boring it all gets but keeps at it. However, during the mid-section of the book he becomes sexually involved with another inmate at San Quentin. There a lot about prison sexuality generally (masturbation stuff, stuff about rape, etc.) but this relationship is really interesting and well drawn. It begins as physical and desperate the changes into something that Jack can’t really put his finger on. When he leaves the prison he goes back to heterosexual sex but frequently thinks about and remarks upon what these instances mean to his sexuality, seen as a whole. Plus, his lover is black and the racial politics of their world (broadly as well as in the prison) is explored in ways that are not cringe-y to read 50+ years later and actually offer insight into how men thought of homosexual experiences and “sexual identity” during these times. The strangest thing about this book is that Carpenter, I learned from the bio at the beginning, was one of Richard Brautigan’s best friends. This book is so far from the quiet, slow, melancholic and stoned world of Brautigan it’s hard to believe, but I suppose their friendship started after this book was written. Either way, a good read. 17 windowless prisons.   

THE LEFT HEMISPHERE - RAZMIG KEUCHEYAN

I read this one off the recommendation of Charles Mudede, a local newspaper writer. He writes in the Stranger, and, until recently, was tied for my favorite local columnist with this witch who used to write a weekly essay about weed and mythology that I really enjoyed. But the witch’s paper, The Seattle Weekly, folded, the city is worse and Mudede is the undisputed champion. Irregardless, Mudede has referenced this book, THE LEFT HEMISPHERE, a few times in his columns. It’s been a while since I read any theory/philosophy, looking back on this list I think the previous one was CALIBAN AND THE WITCH, from September, so it seemed like as good a time as any to try to dip my toes into some of this stuff. I read this book very out of order, an experience I’d recommend. The book starts with sections that attempt to outline the history and develop a typography for current (post 1975) philosophers and theorists. I don’t really care about that aspect of this stuff, people’s career trajectories and who studied under whom and all that. Therefore, I skipped to the second half of the book, Theories, which is broken into two sections, “Systems” and “Subjects”. This part of the book was great. I had to read a bunch of this stuff in college and a lot of it is (I think on purpose) mystifying. This book was very clear on people I do know (Spivak, Zizek, Butler, Foucault, Jameson, etc) I made me want to look more into people I did not know (Mbembe, Balibar, Wright, etc.) which surely is the goal of such an undertaking. I was so pleased with these last to sections I went back and finished the first part of the book. This section ended with a line of inquiry about how modern intellectuals are divorced from actual social movements (with the exception of Subcomandante Marcos and Linera, the book points out) which I found interesting and I wish Keucheyan had spent more time on. Perhaps because modern Marxism seems really divorced for actual real life. The book touches on this briefly but a USA professorial teaching job, not as an adjunct but the types of jobs the people in this book could get, is one of the few jobs left that does seem largely protected from the endless terror-cyclone of neo-liberal capitalism. And I say all of that as the child of a professor. Perhaps that’s where this disconnect comes from. I found the section on Subjects much more engaging and useful when I think about the world since it tends to not tow the standard Marxist line about how everything is the economy. That, to me, is a very inadequate answer when you look at something like Trump. Also, and this is very self-serving, I was disappointed to see a few figures left out who I like and who I think have interesting ideas I would have liked to see Keucheyan summarize and explain. Graeber, Mike Davis and Guattari  (who gets some shine but, like always, only with Delueze, which has always bothered me since I think I’m more interested in his solo thought, or at least, I’d like to know more about it.) and Federici. Perhaps they’re too minor of figures? I don’t think I know enough about this world to judge that. But still, I was much more engaged with this than I though I’d be. It really did clarify my thinking on a few issues and sent me back to a few essays I haven’t read since college that I’d like to revisit. They seem easier to understand now but I swear I’m dumber than when I was in college. A mystery. Anyway, thank you Mudede good rec. 75 glorious people’s revolutions. 

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.”