SPEEDBOAT - RENATA ADLER

The source of the sauce. The sauce fount. The origin story. There is so much current cool lit-hipster content (to use their term) that owes Adler a fucking check. I had no idea. I hadn’t even heard of her until recently, when I read something that suggested that she was having a renaissance amongst New York publishing types, since the publishing arm of the New York Review of Books reissued her shit. It’s always interesting when things are rediscovered and gain popularity decades after they’re published. Adler is still alive and doing great, something I’ll get into in a second, so this is not some Herman Millville thing. But it’s still interesting to consider. But here there is no mystery as to why she’s newly popular, the rest of us have caught up with her style. The short, seemingly unconnected paragraphs, the lack of a strong narrative drive, the emphasis on vibe or feel over story. Even the setting is unfixed. It takes place in a milieu of young and young-ish rich intellectual types. Journalists, college professors, magazine writers, all of whom travel around the world doing rich people stuff. But between these factors and the way Adler whips back and forth between banal and profound/startling “It’s not so bad...it only isn’t wonderful. Nobody has an obligation to be wonderful.” “Many sentences contained their own congratulations. Suffice to say...or, the only word for that is.” “The shortest distance between two points may well be the wrong way down a one way street.” It breezed by, it managed to be both slight and engaging. The afterwards has a long section where Adler’s style is compared to a variety of different activities. It’s flipping channels on the radio, it’s a DJ curating a masterful set, it’s like living in NY. In reality, Adler nails the experience of being online and switching tabs and apps and conversations while simultaneously thinking about a million things, personal and mundane to cosmic and spiritual. Her other book of fiction has been reissued. I’mma have to cop that as well. 74 short scenes.

THE SELECTED POEMS OF TU FU - TU FU (translated by David Hinton)

I can’t even remember now why I decided to pick up this Tu Fu (most online things about him render it “Du Fu”, which I’m assuming stems from the same confusion that causes Taoism vs Daoism) but I remember it somewhere got it in my head that he was the premiere ancient Chinese poet. Well, apparently him and Li Po. I’ll have to cop some Li Po next, given that several of the poems in here are about him or addressed to him and the intro to this book tells us that Li adopted a literary persona that could be described as “banished immortal” which is obviously very trill. Fundamentally, issues of translation are going to come up, especially with poetry and especially with non-European languages.  I thought the books intro did a good job explaining how chinese poetics work, how important word order is and how there are resonances and references that are impossible to render. Here is the example the book gives, of the same poem translated “literally” then translated again with an english reader in mind:

                                                 (bank)

Sand   head / sleep   egrets // gather   fists / tranquil

Boat   tail/ jump   fish // spread   cut / cry (sound)

                                               (wake)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                                       Serene

Flocks of fists on sand- egrets asleep when

A fish leaps in a boat’s wake, shivering, cry 

Pretty incredible, huh? The individual words are supposed to be considered with their counterparts on the next line, a level of poetic depth that is impossible in english. I find all this stuff fascinating, language is amazing. As far as the content of the poems themselves, Tu resonated with me more than I expected. Tu wrote most of his life during one of China’s (many) golden ages, the Tang dynasty (shout out to Mr. Brown, my high school world history teacher who taught me a song to the tune of frère jacques that lists all the major Chinese dynasties in order, a song I remember and reference to this day). But, as all empires do, this one crumbled into a hellscape of warring states and chaos, a milieu that Tu Fu spent the last decades of his life in. As someone who expects to live the last few decades of his life in a global hellscape, this hit hard. Especially since the stereotype, one that I shared, is that Chinese poetry is very ethereal and light and nature-focused. This is as engaged and political as anything. There’s a really interesting and I’d say modern (by “western” standards) tension between wanting to be involved with courtly drama/political reality and a desire to live as a wise sage in the mountains away from the bullshit. Very dope, will need to cop some Li Po. I’ll leave you with a favorite line, “It is here, in idleness, that I become real.” 8 complicated poetic verses.

SABRINA - NICK DRNASO

I suppose it should not come as a surprise that Chris Ware’s influence all over these new comics. The clean lines, the flat color, the suburban midwestern milieu and the quiet desperation and sadness, Ware is all over this thing. I also see some Ivan Burnetti, especially in the simple style. In fact, the way Drnaso renders people can be so simple and unadorned in certain scenes it’s hard to tell characters apart. Though this is obviously on purpose, a nebulous sense of identity and even setting is a big part of this, especially with the characters who are in the military. Also Ware-like is the layout. Each page is a grid, for squares wide, 6 squares tall. Squares can be combined to form splash panels, but only in units of full squares, meaning the large panels are, say, 4x3 (half the page) or 2x2. To deepen the vibe, these panels are often silent panels of setting, breaking up panels of back and forth dialogue. And since the setting is pretty drab, a military base and surrounding areas in Colorado, these larger panels struck me as sad. I liked the plot, it concerns 2 friends that aren’t really friends with each other (since they’re both sad, quiet men in the Ware tradition) living together after the girlfriend of one goes missing. Eventually, we learn that she’s been killed on camera as a sort of terrorist act and the characters try to deal with it. For a while an Alex Jones like figure is telling people that the girlfriend’s (the titular Sabrina) death was a false flag operation. The comic was smart to not let this plot overtake the whole book. I was worried it would become about the fanatics or, worse, about getting to the bottom of Sabrina’s murder. But the book is actually about grief and male isolation so this aspect of the plot boils up and then just kinda fizzles away, just as it would in real life. Likewise, since there’s so much silence and things left unsaid and characters failing to communicate with each other, it’s jarring to see the panels where the radio host is going on about conspiracies since his ramblings take up basically all the space. It’s a good visual reminder about how isolated and alone the Alex Jones people are and how little human connection they have and how listening to someone on the radio or podcasts or whatever would feel like a good substitute for actual human connections. I’d never heard of this guy before but I really like this one. Gonna have to check out his first book. 2018 sad suburban men. 

THE INVISIBLES - GRANT MORRISON ET AL & KRAMERS ERGOT - EDITED BY SAMMY HARKHAM

I’m putting these together because they’re both relatively short and I finished reading them together on the same comfortable chair that, sadly, is returning to my partner’s classroom, where it lives during the school year. Irregardless, I’ll start with THE INVISIBLES because it would be extra sus to give it its own review (and thus goose the total review count) since I just read like half of the contents of this trade. For whatever reason the count is off, or I was pulling from two different print editions but the first half of this book was the 2nd half of the last Invisibles collection I read. While somewhat disappointing that only a segment of this was new, sadly, the disappointments didn’t end there. The new section was really all over the place, it mostly concerns the backstory to Lord Fanny, an Invisible we met early on. She’s a transvestite, a terms the book uses which gives you an idea how this thing reads now-a-days. His notions of gender and sex are really phallocentric, the sexaual violence seems to be there just to shock and he uses the wrong sort of butterfly for Ītzpāpālōtl. There wasn’t anything, such as the guard sequence from the last volume, to really redeem this one and make it more than superheroes with a not-all-that-well-researched Aztec gloss. Not sure if I’ll make it through the next couple or if this reread is done. I suppose it depends on what they’ve got at the library. However, to switch gears, the Kramers was wonderful. KRAMERS ERGOT is a long running (this is the 10th) anthology that is now put out by hometown heroes, Fantographic Press. This thing is huge and gorgeous. They wisely put the table of contents at the very end so spent the whole time reading it, not knowing who wrote what. The folks I did recognize were universally excellent. I especially enjoyed the Anna Haifishch stuff. It’s great to get here weird, spare animal/artist world in such an oversized format. The greatest discovery was this story called “Sarka” by Lale Westvind, an artist I’d never heard of. The story concerns a woman who becomes some sort of mythical fish/shark creature in a series of underseas adventures. It is very weird and very beautifully drawn. You can get a quick sample of the style by looking at the cover. Gonna have to check out more Westvind. Also, for whatever reason, there are several comics where characters are talking about different “sectors” in a fantastic/sci-fi setting.  A great sampling overall and a clear sign that Fantographics is the best at what they do. 5 disappointed yawns for THE INVISIBLES, 2019 emerging comiX artists for KRAMERS ERGOT

THE INNER CHAPTERS - CHUANG TZU (trans. David Hinton)

I’m not quite sure really how to begin a “review” (as i EVERY BOOK REVIEWED) to religious text like this. I’ve just finished it, so it’s ostensible goal, to clarify spiritual matters for me, can’t really be evaluated quite yet. I suppose I do feel slightly more enlightened and spiritually at ease. I can’t believe I didn’t even know about this book until very recently. I read and really enjoyed the Tao Te Ching in high school. I’ll dip into it when I see it laying around. There’s a stillness and detachment in what I gather from Taoism that I find really appealing on some level. This book, which most people apparently render as ZHUANGZI these days, at least on first read, is better. The Tao Te Ching is elliptical and strange and beautiful, but, tone-wise, it sticks to a really limited register. Now this might totally be a translation issue, I speak not even a little Chinese and have no idea how the authors of these texts intended them to be heard, but the Inner Chapters weaves together silly stories and fables and anecdote and humor in this pastiche manner that I found really appealing. It’s always great to be reminded that people have always strove to put their actions and lives into perspective. These categories you make in your mind and in your life are fundamentally ridiculous and counter to reality, which itself is best experienced as a void or profound emptiness. Beyond the personal spiritual lesson that the book may or may not have for a given reader, I was able to read some historical context into the book. I don’t know a lot about Chinese history but I do know that this was written during the Warring-States period (which is what it sounds like) so the idea of a philosophical tradition that encourages kings and rulers to do nothing seems like an easy sell. The book again and again features dialogues where a sage or wiseman is encouraging a tyrant or ruler to consider the Tao and make no actions. Certainly a lesson that contemporary rulers could stand to internalize. All that aside, I did find the book actually moving at several points. It is comforting to feel the exact same groping around for answers and confusion and awe in people over 2000 years dead as one feel today when one considers life and purpose and right action and all of that. I’m not sure that these are the answers, I’m not even sure the book is positing that it has answers, but it provided an exciting and momentarily comforting way to think about it. Zero Taos that can be known. 

SEATTLE WALK REPORT - SUSANNA RYAN

I’m in the middle of a project now where I’m reading through various Seattle Walk guides and, eventually, attempting to create a list of places I think deserve touristic repute. The main emphasis for this is another book called, SEATTLE WALKS, which I just finished. It took 2 years, since I went on all the walks in the book (55 miles) but I haven’t reviewed it yet because I wanted to write up my proposed stops first. So, keep your eyes open for all that. This book is a hot little number that, for whatever reason, got lots of play in local press when it came out. It’s also a library PeakPicks, a designation reserved for the most popular new titles. It’s more a sketch book than anything else. We don’t really get any history or geography or geology or any theories as to why a neighborhood might be the way it is. We just get drawings of doorways and coffee cups and cute dogs and so on. Even then major landmarks don’t really get anything but a quick sketch. My larger, more substantial complaint has to do with how North Seattle focused the book is. Seattle, not unlike many (most?) cities is divided racial on a North/South axis. To oversimplify, the more north you go, the whiter it is. This book has 16 walks, only one is in South Seattle. I sense a lot of cultural enthusiasm around new urbanism and seeing oneself as a Flâneur but cities aren’t neutral and the contours you walk and enjoy are fraught and, if you’re paying attention you can do more than count coffee cups, you can see large ideological forces, normally hidden, at work. Pay more attention when you’re walking. 23 Reports. 

BILL TRAYLOR: HIS ART, HIS LIFE - FRANK MARESCA & ROGER RICCO

I’m not quite sure why but Bill Traylor seems to be having a moment. Or, perhaps the Al-Gore-Rhythm decided recently that I wanted to look at way more Traylor (I own a wonderful coffee-table book highlighting American Folk Artist and I’m often stoned and admiring the Traylor pages, but how does/do the machine(s) know(s) this?). Irregardless, I can’t complain, Traylor is amazing. Not unlike other famous, unsung american folk-artists, say Henry Darger, he has an amazing, almost folkloric, biography. He was born a slave, in Alabama, about a decade before the Civil War. He stayed on the land, “working” for the former plantation owners for most of the rest of his life. At retirement age, sometime in his 80s he moved to Montgomery where he was basically homeless and spent all day hanging out on the street and creating these spectacular works of art. I don’t want to dwell too much on his personal life, mostly because I’m worried it will, as is often the case with non-white male visual artists, be the only thing people talk about. I will say that most of the biographical info that’s in this book, comes from a long interview with the artist Charles Shannon who knew Traylor in Montgomery and collected his work. He relays a lot of interesting useful information, we surely owe some part of Traylor’s legacy to Shannon’s preservation. However, the interview is frustrating when they (Shannon and the interviewer) act like no one in the world knows Bill Traylor at all and only Shannon could let us know what he was like. Yet, they also mention his 10 children as well as local kids that hung out with him on the street (there are photos of this) and the people he hung out with on big market days. Any of these people could have given us more context on Traylor’s life and it’s annoying we don’t hear from them. But to the art, it’s glorious. He’s got such a style right from the beginning. Large figures, filled in. His people are always wearing shoes with a little heel and have what I would call a sassy or evocative posse and big asses and bellies. The large pale eye that face the viewer when the characters are in profile, which they almost always are, is also classic Traylor. While he made all of these images on an urban street in Montgomery, one of the largest Southern cities at the time, the images seem to be from his experiences on the farm. Lots of farm animals and farm houses and men sitting around with guns and, my favorite, scenes of folks celebrating and drinking and acting up. Traylor is showing us something really specific and wonderful. These are rural black folks, before during and after the great Migration, getting together and celebrating and drinking and experiencing joy and community. This is exactly the milieu that produces the blues. Looking at Traylor’s work and thinking about, say, Robert Johnson, feels like looking at early 80s train graffiti and thinking about Afrika Bambatta. It’s so hard for an artist to develop a style to the point that it’s unmistakable. How the fuck did Traylor just arrive, as if fully formed. 47 amazing drawings.

THE BOYS - GARTH ENNIS & DARICK ROBERTSON

It becomes clearer and clearer why Alan Moore is so grumpy. Let me backup; I didn’t pick this one out. It’s a library book that appeared mysteriously at my job. Well, probably not all that mysteriously. There’s a night shift and whatnot that’s gotta do something all night, and apparently these folks are reading Watchmen rip-offs. This thing is fully 20 years after The Watchmen and it follows the same basic premise: what if superheroes were really naughty hypocrites? Plus, the thing where all the characters are slight knock-offs of famous superheroes (we’ve got a Flash and a Captain American and a Superman, and the main guy is basically the Punisher). It throws in a little of Millar’s Wanted (which also predates it), specifically in that it follows the villains. There’s alot of “Superman” sexually harassing people and crazy violence and fringe sex-acts (a charcter dies and a hamster crawls out of their ass) and I get that it’s all meant to be shocking and “can you believe that a superhero could really be a bad guy?!!” but c’mon. Watchmen came out before I was born, the idea that their might be something evil or upsetting behind the hype and goodness of the Superhero is the opposite of shocking. A totally straight superhero would be more surprising and interesting at this point. It’s not unlike the clown thing, where, at this point, most of the depictions of clowns are the wicked or twisted types, the straight-laced originals that were supposed to be sending up are so far in the past they exist primarily as historical artifacts. Maybe we just don’t need more superhero stories. This was boring and violent. 72 rehashed ideas

HIGH WEIRDNESS - ERIK DAVIS

It’s hard to imagine a book more narrow-casted to my interests. Erik Davis, my favorite “counterculture” “reporter” finally wrote a big huge scholarship-adjacent tome. The other Davis stuff I’m familiar with is essays/reportage or this wonderful kinda coffee-table book thing about fringe religions and religious movements in California. And while all of that stuff was certainly brainy and highly informed, this book literally began as a PhD thesis. Specifically a religious studies reading of PKD’s religious writings. What we ended up with is a broader overview of Terrance McKenna’s, Robert Anton Wilson’s, and PKD’s weirdest experiences. I’m obviously heavy into PKD and Terrance McKenna though I’ve never read anything by RAW. I’ve always felt I missed out on reading ILLUMINATUS! by not catching it at age 16 (there is a large, large category of art that can only really be accessed at 16) but this book really made me want to pick up Cosmic Trigger. I’ll have to keep a used bookstore eye out for it. Davis made the right choice to expand the scope of the book away from just PKD’s 2-3-74 writings to a more general study and deep dive into the weird. I love the mystical, gnostic PKD stuff as much as anyone, I also long of a religious movement that is to PKD what Scientology is to LRH, but  a whole book of just this would have been too much for me. As Davis points out the best weird fiction ripples with brief asides and references and winking glances and seems to point to a larger web of connections. This book is firmly in that camp. There’s a lot in this book about weird books that are themselves about books (ex. The King in Yellow) and this book does a good job to mimic the effects it’s describing. The secondary cast of characters, the folks that have influenced the 3 main guys or provide a lense to understand the core trifecta are an almost more intriguing pantheon. Burroughs, Lovecraft, Pynchon, Guattari (the one I was most excited to see features pretty prominently). All yt guys, you’ll notice. Someone pointed this out at the reading I went to recently. Davis had a good answer; he explained how you could certainly write a book about the psychedelic history of various communities of color in the 70’s but that his project is shackled by the fact that society is set up in such a way that only yt guys can go crazy. That if others in less privileged positions allowed themselves to go as far down the rabbit hole as the trinity in this book, the costs would be exponentially higher. Lots of great diagrams. Tons of wonderful quotes and suggestions for further books to read. I got the motherfucker signed. 2,374 limit-experiences. 

VOODOO LTD - ROSS THOMAS

AVAILABLE

Full disclosure: I meant to read this thing on a recent flight over to Kansas. It’s basically a perfect airplane book (it’s also soft-cover and the perfect, pocket-fitting size). It’s all plot and milieu and vibe. The story is winding and complicated with all sorts of twists and double-crosses that are hard to remember when you’re not deep in it. It begs to be read all in one chunk, 30k feet in the air. Sadly, I feel asleep on the plane and only finished a little over half, so the rest I read in little fits on trains and buses around town. This is not the way to read a Ross Thomas book. They read fast but you want to break it up into big sections so you can be in tune with all the subtle backstabbing and alliance shifting. His books have this weird quality where you can be totally immersed and swept away after about 10 pages of reading, and once you’re locked in the book flies by and gets better and better, but as soon as you put it down, it all evaporates. Again, the perfect plane read. As for the book itself, I was engaged the whole time. The basic plot is that a movie star is framed for a murder (or maybe she’s a killer, it’s a mystery novel) and her handlers and enablers hire Artie Wu and Quincy Durant (WuDu, get it?) to track the blackmailers down. The blackmailers originally look to be two incestuous hypnotists but as you can guess, the plots and sub-plots and double/triple crosses pile up and someone astutely points out at the end, what would be the final exchange actually ends up being non-existent money for non-existent tapes. A good explanation as any for a McGuffin. Also, the novel takes place in the upper-class West LA, Malibu, Santa Monica world during the Gulf War (the original, not the overlong, tedious sequel) which characters will occasionally comment on. Between these facts and the sort of shaggy dog nature of the plot, I got heavy Big Lebowski vibes (tho not enough drug use to place the novel in the hallowed Psychedelic Noir micro-genre). I like world and the characters, they’re all street-smart international hustlers basically. They do quasi-P.I. stuff but they also make it very clear they’re not tethered to a sense of duty or morality. Actually, if I had a complaint about the book (or Ross’ books overall) it’s that the good guys are too good. You’re supposed to think of the main crooks, Wu, Durant and the various underworld figures they hire, as fundamentally good guys. We never see them fucking over people who aren’t bad and I find it hard to believe that these characters would only scam the wicked. This is a pretty common American trope, the loveable con artist, so I won’t complain too much about it, but it strikes me as wishful thinking. But the general paranoia and low-life schemers that make up the novel are really in vogue right now, perhaps were about to enter a Ross Thomas renaissance (I think they’re making one of his books into a TV show). Ross will remain my airplane go-to. 93 double crosses. 

AN ORESTEIA - ANNE CARSON

Where is the gofundme to get Anne Carson to translate and publish every scrape of Greek that we have? Her Sappho translations are among the greatest Classics stuff I’m aware of. I love Anne Carson, she easily my favorite living poet (not a competitive category, I’ll bet I can name less than a dozen living poets). I remember people talking about AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RED, and by people, I mean artsy English majors I knew when I was in college, but I never picked it up until I was across the world as a Peace Corps volunteer. During this time, I had no power so for entertainment, I’d read the same magazines my mom had mailed me again and again. In one of the New York Times Magazine issues, there was a long profile of Ms. Carson that I read again and again. She came off as so strange and thoughtful and otherworldly, or maybe ancient. Either way, I got my hands on AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RED and it’s sequel RED DOC> (who’s publishing was ostensibly the reason for the profile) then I was hooked. I’ll get through them all at some point, I actually think I’m pretty close. All of her work is weaved through with ancient greek culture and concerns, even AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RED is technically a retelling of part of the Hercules myth. I took Latin in high school and, despite being very bad at it, it was perhaps my favorite subject. It is basically the only high school class I look back on fondly (there were other teachers I enjoyed but, in retrospect, I was mostly taught bullshit). My Latin teacher was engaged in the same project that Carson is, namely, making sure the ancient world stays strange. There’s a bizarre trend in classics to pitch the idea that the ancients speak to our world or that they’re just like us or that we can learn a lot about our society from reading Homer or whatever. This isn’t true, or rather, this isn’t the right way to read this stuff. The ancients are very strange. They’re basically aliens. Their world and values are as curious and unusual as anything available in the “world literature” category. In fact, the idea of placing these surveying greek plays and fragments and epics etc. as the bedrock to a unified “Western Civilization” is racist nonsense that we don’t really have time to get into here. I digress but rest assured this stuff is strange. Carson’s crack at these plays is unique in that she translates the typical Orestiea cycle but chooses a different playwright and thus time period for each of the 3 plays. The short intros to each play describe the state of Athenian democracy and how we can see these conditions in the plays. This is interesting but not the main draw. The plays themselves are translated in a style that manages to be both contemporary/colloquial with moments of unexpected strangeness and beauty. The sense of grief and duty that characters feel is really zeroed in on and rendered wonderfully. The way the gods are cruel and inscrutable really resonates with me. Interestingly, Apollo at one point says the Trojan War was arranged by the gods in order to reduce the population as a sort of quasi-environmental intervention. I’ve never seen that reason articulated before. Also, might this be the earliest example of that trope where someone give a long speech before killing their victim, a character complains to another that it’s silly to lay out all your reasons to someone you’re just going to stab anyway.The profound misogyny of the ancient Greeks is clear (this is the one area where the Romans really come out on top) yet the female characters are not reduced to a cutout. I’d love to see these preformed. It was only last year that a translation of the Odyssey (my favorite Greek poem or play) into English rendered by a woman was published. Perhaps Anne Carson can give us the second. 458 furies. 

EDENA - MOEBIUS

Beautiful and lush. Moebius discusses wanting to minimize the number of lines he uses in his drawing and he fucking nails it. They’re beyond next level. Crisp, vast, mind-bending. This comic could be word-less and still be wonderful. I don’t know that much about European comics so my frame of references is narrow, but there’s something about the colors maybe that remind me of Tintin. Maybe because it’s saturated but flat? Who knows? The story is very dope as well, genderless aliens are drawn mysteriously to a giant blue pyramid that turns out to be a spaceship that takes them and aliens from all over to a paradise planet called Edena. Things escalate and there’s eventually a very gnostic sort of evil god figure introduced. Much of the story is very PKDian for sure, I don’t know if Moebius was aware of PKD at the time of this writing but there’s alot of overlap in general themes (evil gods, biblical illusions, space-drugs). There’s a point where the male “Adam” character gets rape-y and it comes across as very Pepe Le Pue which you think the French would be sensitive to. This whole thing apparently started as a Citrone ad. That part of the book is there and it’s insane. After some characters fly a spaceship, then fly an asteroid and crash into a planet, they pull a ‘38 Citrone out of the wreckage and drive around the planet. One character explains that the car can go forward, backwards and has 3 gears. The other character, who has just literally flown a spaceship, acts impressed. It’s a very strange movement. But overall, fantastic, very great stoned read. Moebius is a better writer than I knew. There’s weird space costumes and customs, underground mutants, saviors from the stars, it’s a nice blend of classic Sci-fi tropes that manage to engage but not take away from the real star, his peerless drawings. 1 perfect planet.

PICTURING THE ALASKA-YUKON-PACIFIC EXPOSITION - NICOLETTE BROMBERG

You know the deal, saw this at the main library downtown, had to cop. I’m always interested in the micro-genre of books about the city I’m living in (mostly non-fiction, very rarely does a fiction book have something profound to say about a city itself). LA has some of the best, between all the Mike Davis stuff and 4 Ecologies and An Island on the Land, to say nothing of Los Angeles Plays Itself, a top 10 movie for sure (perhaps tied with Sans Soleil for best essay-movie of all time). Chicago has lots of books but is especially rich in academic papers about micro-neighborhoods. The overseas places I’ve lived get a little spottier but Mexico City at least is rich in texts. Irregardless, this is a rather minor addition to the Seattle book pantheon. Honestly, it’s mostly a picture book, which is fine and what I wanted. The photos are from this Frank Nowell guy who lived up in Alaska and photographed the goldrush. There’s also a section of the book that tries a contemporary photo in the exact spot of the originals. This is mildly interesting, the fair took place on what is now UW’s campus, the famous framing of Mount Rainier on the quad is a A-Y-P thing, but it’s the same trick over and over and is mostly boring. The book also comes with an essay from Bromberg which is likewise disappointing. You have to read through the lines to get at the really interesting stuff. For instance, we learn that Japan is super involved in this project, they have the biggest pavillion and “Japan Day” is the largest and most successful of the “days”. China. however, due to the racism they, as a nation and individually, experienced at other recent World’s Fair style events as well as the then-recent expulsion of Chinese from Seattle, did not involve themselves. This hierarchy, this drive of Japan’s to be the Western Modern peer of the USA, comes to play itself out in WWII, which looms across all of these World’s Fair style events. It’s got all that classic World’s Fair stuff. Bizarre inventions like the world’s largest book, literal human zoos, endless imperial boosterism, blind optimism, cringy cultural pastiche. Lots of Eskimo-exploitation, a genre that I’ve only ever seen at the Velaslavasay Panorama. I first became aware of this fair when I saw a photo (reproduced in this book) a Torii who’s poles are carved to be “Totem Poles”. The animals in the pole have light up eyes. It’s an insane image, it shows a deeply American view of the world and it’s a pretty Seattle-specific image. Because of the Space Needle the ‘62 Fair is the famous one, but this “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” themed shindig is closer to the city Seattle actual ended up becoming. 1909 Torii

THE HELLBOUND HEART - CLIVE BARKER

I had no idea that Foucault wrote a horror novella. The whole book, but especially the first chapter, certainly reads like a Foucaultian odyssey into human sexuality and novel sexual practices. Basically, a straight man who considers himself beyond depraved and at the end of the “normal” human sexual possibilities and novelties seeks out demons the help him get to a realm of unnatural pleasures and bliss. Unsurprisingly, the demons don’t quite give him what he wants. The Cenobites, are really on some next level shit, sexually. Frank Cotton, the guy who’s seeking out these demons, mentions that he was expecting nubile girls with big tits and fat asses ready and willing to do whatever he wants. Typical straight guy fantasy stuff. The Cenobites are beyond gender, the book mentions their androgyny and their lack of interest in genitals multiple times, their pleasures are indistinguishable from pain (at least to a mortal). The “sex” they have isn’t genital focused, I’m sure you’ve seen Hellraiser or the Todd McFarlan toys that really stick out in my childhood memories of the extremely high-level body-modification s/m torture they’re up to. This might be the most far-out Foucaultian thing that goes down, the lack of phallocentrism in the pleasures the Cenobites offer. Fank thinks he’s here to meet conventionally beautiful women who will do whatever he wants (the straight male fantasy) and he’ll be the one doing the fucking. Instead, he meets a bunch of super far out gender-queer demons who are going to fuck him in incredibly innovative and elaborate ways for eternity. A parable for our times. Honestly, the book could end there, or have just followed Frank up until the point he’s dragged to sex-hell. The book gets kinkier, we realize that Frank can have limited contact with his sister-in-law because he jerked off in a room right before he was dragged to hell and his brother later cut his hand in that room. Irregardless, we discover that, despite the fact that Frank raped Julia, the sister-in-law,she’s in love with him and he needs her to spill blood in that room so he can return to corporeal form. So then the book becomes a sort of kinky cuckold situation where Julia seduces men in the room while Frank-as-a-ghost-monster watches then kills them so Frank can get stronger. All very crazy and very sexy. It’s a novella technically, I believe it was originally included in a book of horror novellas edited by the big homie George R.R. Martin, and it’s just the right length. The book kinda switches around who the main character is, which is a little disorienting, but it leaves you wanting to know more about the Cenobites and their world. The books a bit overwritten at times, we get this sentence, “The storm made a ghost train of the house.” who’s meaning in beyond me, a well as a moment where a penis is described as a “boastful plum.” But overall, wonderful. A great horror book. Maybe I should see the movie? There isn’t a character named Pinhead, tho there is one with a grid of nails stuck into their head who speaks in a woman’s voice (again, the gender of the Cenobites is opaque). Very kinky and spooky. 666 demons from sex-hell

THE INVISIBLES VOL. 1 - GRANT MORRISON et. al.

Normally, I try to credit the illustrators as well when I review a comic as a small effort to push back against this “comics are really just novels” idea that elevates the script-writer to an auteur position. This is a silly mistake, if you wanted to read (or write) a normal book, do so. Normally, I would say the “script” is, at best, the third most important aspect of a comic. I’m partial to the story or concept first (the same way I read horror/sci-fi books), art second, “script” or what’s being said panel to panel third. But the Invisibles series doesn’t have a stable artist, it’s a carousel of dudes (plus Jill Thompson) all of whom are pretty good. I read this whole series maybe a decade ago, in college. I read them in Firestorm, an anarchist bookstore  that had a great comics selection and didn’t care if just sat and read the books. A more useful and effective example of anarchy than what’s found in this book. A few things jumped out at me this time: there’s an Aztec themed villain as well as a whole subplot that takes places in a Voodoo/African-American roots religion milieu. Well, now all these years later, I know a little more about these topics and this knowledge on my part has made the comics a little more disappointing. The “references” don’t seem to go deeper than, I know the name of this deity. For instance, we meet Xipe Totec (or rather we meet someone pretending to be Xipe Totec, but let’s not get bogged down in pedantism) but the only “quality” that this character shares with the mezoamerican god is an association with flaying. Even if he wanted to pick an Aztec god that has some creepy or morbid practice associated with it, there are other choices. Xipe Totec is associated with fertility and corn (hence the flaying) but we don’t get that. Likewise, the Voodoo stuff is laregely set-dressing, a shorthand way to get witchy pagan vibes. They made reference to an aspect of Baron Samedi I hadn’t heard of before so I looked into it and most of the “voodoo” stuff seems to come from this seminal underground text called “The Voudon Gnostic Workbook” which sounds intriguing but (predictably) does not have very accurate information about Voodoo as it exists in Haiti (or anywhere). Just reading the first pages on google book, he’s already given a bad definition of hoodoo and voodoo and claimed that Atlantis connected Africa and Haiti and explains their religious similarities, not say, the Atlantic Slavetrade. So, it’s a little disappointing to see something that’s so interesting be reduced to window-dressing. However, I had forgotten that this collection contains the story about the nameless guard. I remember very vividly reading this story the first time I read through the invisibles and being really blown away by it. In my memory, it came later in the run, towards the very end, but I was wrong, here it is. It follows the life arch and story of a nameless guard that King Mob guns down while storming a building. It’s sort of like that Rick and Morty where they play the Roy video game. I found it moving as a young man and do so still. I was expecting this to be cringier, I ended up liking it more than I thought. Imma read through the rest of ‘em. 7 Invisibles.  

AMERICAN BOYS - SORAYA ZAMAN

Picked this up on a whim at the main library downtown. It’s all new so they were displaying it prominently towards the front. Since the books all photos and short bios I could read it all in an afternoon. The book is meant to be a broad survey or general sketch of trans men (and genderqueer men, as a few make clear). There are caveats of course: all of the them are Americans (hence the title. Also, there’s an inexplicable map at the beginning), and all of them are young. The oldest are maybe in their thirties but the vast majority are early 20s and many are teenagers. However, within these parameters there is a broad diversity of body-types and looks. The subjects seem to be in control of the general direction and look of their couple of pages. They all look handsome and fun and strong. Most of them choose to pose topless in at least one of their photos and many have the same top-surgery scars. I found myself lingering on the faces, trying to see what made me think these were “masculine faces,” especially the clean shaven one. Maybe something about the wideness of the chin or the “sharpness” of the face? But every time I thought I’d stumbled on something, I’d see a face that contradicted this. Gender is an endless maze. I’ve had the experience twice now where I’m talking to a white man and I find myself thinking, “holy shit this person is woke” which is not something I think a lot (I know this sounds like a humblebrag but please consider it more of a flaw and confession) only to find out that this person is a trans man. Trans men, the wokest men. The short auto-bios in this book bear this theory out. They’re uniformly considered and wise and tender. Anyway, interesting book, great, positive way to spend a late afternoon. 1966 men. 

TRICKSTER MAKES THIS WORLD – LEWIS HYDE

First things first, this book does not slap as hard as THE GIFT. I know, I know, THE GIFT is a hall-of-famer. It’s one of the non-fiction books I think about most often and I read it over a decade ago. Hyde really is on another level, he has the ability to spin out a cultural concept that seems simple into some really mind-blowing and clarifying shit. And by that metric, how hard did this blow my mind?, THE GIFT still reigns supreme. Anyone who wants to think critically and honestly about cultural appropriation or artistic production or modern capitalism generally needs to quit fucking around and get on THE GIFT. TRICKSTER MAKES THIS WORLD is not as mind-blowing. That is not to say it isn’t excellent, it is, but it never introduced or clarified concepts that made me really change my mind. Like all right thinking people, I’ve got a pretty healthy interest in mythology and comparative cultural studies. While I was familiar with most of the gods (and goddesses, tho more on that in a moment) and all of the actual people mentioned in this book, this book was great at introducing me to lots of new trickster figures like Matlacihuatl (a Mesoamerican “entangling woman” who renders men pregnant if they try to seduce her) or Wakdjunkaga, the Winnebago trickster. Hyde’s wide range is refreshing, I was worried that the book would be really focused on European mythologies, especially since Hyde can and does translate ancient Greek (there’s an appendix that’s his translation of a Homeric Hymn to Hermes). And to be fair, there is a lot of Hermes stuff. For whatever reason Hermes wasn’t one of my favorite Greek gods as a kid, but this book makes a strong case for him. We get lots of Krishna and Raven and Coyote and Eshu. However, I will say that I think Hyde does allow euro-centrism trip him up conceptually, especially regarding gender. Hyde is really insistent that Tricksters are male and has an entire appendix called “Tricksters and Gender” that is, to my mind, one of the most interesting parts of the book. He lists a bunch of female tricksters, tho I would add Scheherazade, Lilith (Hyde does have a part about the difference between devils and tricksters, but I would argue Lilith is closer to the later), Morgan Le Fey, and fairies/brownies generally. I would have also liked more discussion of Tricksters and sexuality, especially non-straight sexualities, given the Trickster’s role as a crosser of boundaries. The parts where Hyde compares real people, John Cage, Fredrick Douglass, Marcel Duchamp, to tricksters was fascinating. As an American, I loved the connections he drew between con-men, the ur-American arch-type, and tricksters. I wanted more of this. Either way, I did really enjoy this, Hyde is still one of the best to ever do it. 256 Tricksters.

A FISTFUL OF SHELLS - TOBY GREEN

A doozy. This is one of the giant books about an enormous subject, complete with 100+ pages of notes and bibliography; it’s basically a textbook for a wonderful history class I never got to take (more on what I “learned” in classrooms about Afrika later). I got this at the library on a whim because the book I really wanted about Afrika, THE GOLDEN RHINOCEROS, was checked out. That book, GR, is about medieval Afrika so I suppose that makes it something of a prequel to this book, which begins with the Portegese exploratory voyages down the West Coast of Afrika and continues up until the early/mid 1800s and the dawn of colonialism. In every Western classroom I’ve ever taught or taken a history class this period is ignored totally. The basic story you get is that Europeans showed up and, because they were so much more advanced, immediately subjugated   classes did always point out that slavery existed in Afrika for thousands of years and it was enlightened Europeans who ended the trade) and colonialism, though all that is done now. This is the basic GUNS GERMS AND STEEL argument. Green reminds us of the famous Hegel quote, “Afrika has no history.” Obviously racist bullshit. So this book, in reveling what happened in Afrika from the mid-late 1500 until the early 1800, is really about the growth of globalization and the birth of capitalism. And, unlike GUNS GERMS AND STEEL, it offers a convincing and well-considered take on why Afrika ended up on the bottom when the dust cleared. I’m not going to get too into the details and whatnot, the book is almost 500 pages long and it’s too short to cover the topics it takes on, though I have pages and pages of notes and interesting facts I learned from the book. I will say this book makes a good companion to CALIBAN AND THE WITCH in that it also traces the decline in women’s power and positions during the rise of Capitalism, though this book traces these developments in Africa, not Europe and amongst new-world Whites. As an aside, there is a third book I’ve been meaning to read called MOON SUN AND WITCHES: GENDER IDEOLOGIES AND CLASS IN INCA AND COLONIAL PERU which I believed traces this devaluation amongst groups of indigenous peoples in America. Perhaps all 3 together would form some sort of depressing gyno-historical trilogy. Either way, this book really broke my brain in a good way. It’s one of those books that makes you upset they taugh you history so badly in school. There were 10,000+ things I learned that made me want to wikipedia figures or facts and dive deeper. It’s a wonderful overview, Green does a good job making sure to include facts about what life would have been like for regular African, not just those involved in geo-poltical games. He also quotes amply from non-written (ie griots and other oral historians) sources which rounds out the perspective, it’s not just the writings of white monsters on boats. Now I want to find a dozen smaller books on some of the specfic topics AFOS raised. I promise you that you don’t know enough about Afika, read this now. 1413 shells.

THE EMPEROR - RYSZARD KAPUŚCIŃSKI

Haile Selassie is one of those historical figures it’s really hard to get a handle on through the haze of associations and cultural assumptions that have accumulated on him since his relatively recent death. I was just speaking with my gf who spend some years in Ethiopia as a child to try to get some handle on how Ethiopian feel about him now. On top of that you have to add in Selassie’s status as an icon of black dignity and Afrikan glory. The 100% black school I worked at on Chicago’s beautiful Westside had posters of him up around the school, in an inspirational context. And obviously this sort of remembrance reaches its most extreme form, in the Rasta movement, who literally consider Selassie a god. This book doesn’t really add to our understanding of Selassie as such. It’s a collection of first person accounts, an oral history if you will, of the people around his majesty. Kapuscinski has a great ear for the absurd, there’s a great long section with the guy who brings in the footstole or the guy whose only job is to open a door who goes on and on in very self-serious manner about the importance of timing the door so as to not in any way diminish royal dignity. All the historical stuff, the rebellions and plots and military movements and whatnot, is glanced only in the background or referred to semi-obliquely. I applaud this approach. Kapunscinski isn’t Ethiopian or an expert in Ethiopia, I don’t need a history from him. He does have a wonderful ear for governmental absurdity and bureaucratic waste and the ways those in power are oblivious, and he leans on these themes. It’s pretty easy to read this as refracted criticism of his own communist Poland, which I’m sure also seemed to be run by people more interested in palace intrigue and minor bureaucratic power-games. A great example about how to write about a forgien nation without coming off as white-splaining (tho, I’m not sure a communist Slav is “White” per se). Also, this book implies that the Peace Corps played a minor role in the revolution by putting on student events at the university that transformed into riots and rebellions. Always good to hear from the Peace Corps. Finally, this book makes reference to an Ethipian cultural practice I’d never heard off called “Lebasha” which involved drugging a small boy, getting him dizzy then allowing spirits to take control of him and, under their direction, he would identify thieves. Selassie apparently put a stop to the practice. Anyway, now I want to visit Ethiopia. 74 Lions of Judah.

AIRTIGHT WILLIE AND ME - ICEBERG SLIM

First, and perhaps most importantly, this book was put out by Ca$h Money Content, the publishing arm of Ca$h Money Records (where dreams come true). I hadn’t heard of this company or sub-company before, but I’m very excited to find out it exists. Will Baby be publishing a memoir? God, one can only hope (tho, I really good biography of Baby would be better, considering the nature of his life story). CMC seems to mostly publish contemporary Black crime fiction (ex. MURDERVILLE, JUSTIFY MY THUG, etc.) as well as the complete Iceberg Slim ouvre. This is great news, someone needs to keep Slim’s work in circulation and it might as well be tangentially connected to the creative forces behind “Stuntin’ Like My Daddy”. My actual assumption is that this CMC owns to Iceberg Slim stuff as a sort of I.P. play to own, and eventually put on the screen, the Iceberg Slim Cinematic Universe. Wikipedia seems to think there have been more than a few attempts to bring PIMP to the big screen, but, if I may, I’d like to offer the Ca$h Money empire some advice: Forget PIMP, film this. The popular version of the Iceberg Slim mythos is all shiny cars, and slick pimp-talk, and crazy suits and fast living. The Dolomite, Huggy-Bear shit. PIMP has that stuff (though it is set in the 30’s-60’s, and most people’s perception the quintessential Black urban pimp is a creature of the 70’s) but it’s too bleak and dark. Slim’s a wonderful writer and he can draw the connections between pimping and society as a whole, but on screen, it would just be brutality. The Pimp in PIMP is not a hero. This one, Airtight Willie and Me, would film better. The book is a series of 6 short stories, perhaps it could be a miniseries. The stories vary much more than I thought they would. We get stories that star female characters, as well as White characters (CMC’s tagline for this book is “The Story of the South’s Black Underworld” which is odd since only one story takes place in the South and that story stars White characters). Almost all of the stories take place in the underworld though one story features some great horror elements (a character has a book on her self entitled “How to Achieve Immortality Through Satanism” to give you an idea) which makes you wish Slim had been given the space to stretch more, genre-wise. The other 5 stories are more predictable, pimps and con men and prostitutes and hustlers all trying to score and make it out of the life (Slim’s stories are never celebrations, even the successful characters want out), typically there’s a sad twist at the end (white serial killer, OD, etc.). Slim’s the best at opening up the Pimp world and explaining how it’s a mircocosm for capitilism broadly: “I realized she was like ame and every other streeted poisedn nigger spawned behind the invisible wallas of the ghetto stackades. She was trapped, vulnerable but hurting human beneath the thought facade of leopard rage and bravado. But in the cruel nature of our special entrapment, and my survival, my comrade in pain was ironically my prey. I would have to scrape to the raw ends of her emotions, put her on the rack to steal her.” “Girl, why you so fucking square in this rich, fast cold world where every motherfucker in it that’s copping a big, easy fast buck and silky living ain’t?” 83 cold worlds.

P.S. As always with Iceberg Slim, there was a glut of wonderful street names. Unlike previous books, not all of these characters are pimps, many are robbers or con-men or other underworld figure. Also unusual for Slim, many of these characters are women:

Airtight Willie

Pretty Phil

Bitsy Red♀

Jabbo Ross

Pretty Opal♀

Candy Slim

Sweet Willie

Gold Streak

Sparky

Wee Billy

Dago Frank

Muskegon Shorty

Dandy Maurice

Pony Jones

Razzle Red

Jelly Drop

Frog

Mel the Ox

Caspar

Grandma Randy/Grandma Dracula♀

Satin♀

Tar Baby

Cassandra Jones♀

King Tut/Pharaoh Tut

Skeeter

New York Willie