SEATTLE WALKS - DAVID B. WILLIAMS

AVAILABLE

55.4 Miles. That’s the total length of all 17 walks in this book. It took my partner and I 2 years to complete, since there’s only a short season in Seattle to take a nice long walk outside. I don’t have a PNW local’s relationship to the rain. I won’t fuck around, this book was amazing. I wish this would have existed all of the places I lived. I remember walking around Watts in LA going from former nightclub to coffeeshop to riot ground zero(s), I remember walking down LSD in Chicago just to see how far I could go (as well as scope out what remains of the White City), I remember trying to wrap my head around the 100s of years of history visible (if you know how to look) at all moments in Mexico City’s endless sprawl. Can you imagine one of these for Calcutta or Antananarivo? A dream. Anyway, in the world we live in, there only exists one such guide and it is for Seattle. As I said before, there are 17 walks in the book and Williams does a better job than most at providing a geographic diversity. 5 of the walks are downtown, I agree that fewer would have been fine (or combine the rock themed downtown one and the stone animals one), and the rest are spread fairly evenly around the city. I could always use more info about Seattle’s South Side, there’s a Rainier Beach walk and a Beacon Hill walk but more would always be welcomed.  In a total dreamworld, I’d add a Queen Anne Walk and a Central District walk to the book. But fantasy aside, what makes this book engaging is the range of disciplines Williams is able to deploy. Obviously, there’s lots of history and urban studies stuff but there is also a ton of ecology and geology. Full confession, I’m not a rock guy. I’ve never been that into geology or cared about rocks and their origins. My understanding is that John McPhee wrote a really good book about rocks (possibly several? Hard to tell.) but I haven’t fucked with em and I’m not sure I will. Rocks, sadly, are boring. However, Willimas weaves the rock stuff in masterfully. There’s a lot (I’d actually say, it’s still a bit too much, but I ended up liking it way more than expected) of about how and where the rocks featured in downtown skyscrapers were sourced. He calls limestone a “matrix of corpses” and points out a,rather beautiful, 4 billion+ year old stone in a bank. Beyond that he puts a lot of emphasis on the way first nature then YTs physically reshaped the landscape of Seattle. It’s hard to grok that the way Seattle looked in 1855. Denny Hill was regraded. What is now downtown was regraded and filled in. The International District was regraded. Beacon Hill was sliced and reshaped. All of SODO was a marshy swamp, full of delicious wildlife and spiritually important to the Duwamish. There was a very important ghost-canoe journey undertaken on the winter solstice in this swamp (a journey that people were undertaking until at least the 1930s, I have an anthropological survey of Natives at the time that mentions their reports that the dead now drive cars). Now all warehouses and  pavement. Williams doesn’t do the best job weaving in the pre-Vancouver history of the area into his book, I’ve gotten most of my knowledge on these topics other sources. But its the variety of types of knowledge as well as the breath that really stand out. I found this book really inspiring, I’m writing my own guides to a few of the things in Seattle that I know about that the book glosses over or doesn’t address (red-lining, the various totem poles, the more radical labor history, etc). Some of the walks’ routes are impressive in a how-did-he-figure-this-out way, sometimes involving finding trailheads at the ends of parking lots or other less than obvious itineraries. Also, some of the longer ones, the 5 mile and up ones, really benefit from a bike. Overall, wonderful. Really, really great, if only they existed for everywhere. 17 long walks.

BREAKOUT - RICHARD STARK

AVAILABLE

ADDENDUM: Well, that’s strange. Turns out I’ve already read and reviewed this book. I suspected I’d read it before. This feeling was especially strong during the jewelry heist section. I initially thought I’d read this before in comic form, since, as mentioned, some of the classic Parker novels have been remade as moody comic books. But, I discovered there is no comic version of Breakout so I chalked up the deja vu to the underlying sameness of the Richard Stark books which I consider to be a strength of the series, I’m not knocking it. Well, I noticed that the novel makes a reference to the M.O.V.E. bombing, which is a subject I’m pretty fascinated with, and I remembered that the last Stark I read also had an oblique reference to this obscure event. I looked back on my reviews to see which Stark was the last one I’d read. Lo and behold, Breakout. So here you go, a second review, written before I realized the first one existed. You can see the exact moment at the end where I realized what’s going on. I’m not a smart man. 

Another one. I believe, based on Wikipedia, that there are 24 Parker novels by Donald Westlake. I believe I’ve read 7 of them. It’s a little hard to tell because in addition to these UChicago reprints (which is where I’m getting them now that the mystery bookstore is closed in Seattle) I’m also into the Darwyn Cooke series of comics adapted from novels. So sometimes I’ve read both the comic and the book, sometimes just one or the other, sometimes they merge together in my head and I forget which one I’ve read. For instance, I thought I’d read a comic version of this book, turns out no such book exists. 

It can be an easy mistake to make, the Parker novels certainly follow a similar script. Parker gets involved in a job, something seems off to him about it, the other people involved are less competent and less mechanical than he is, they’re greedy, etc. Inevitably, the job does go sour and Parker has to use his wits and ruthlessness to get himself out of there. This book puts a bit of a twist on this formula: there are 2 jobs in this one. First, the novel opens with Parker in jail (more on that in a second). The first third of the book concerns his titular breakout and it’s the typical Parker-is-smarter-and-more-patient-than-everyone-else storyline. There’s an interesting twist where Parker is able to avoid detection by teaming up with a Black inmate (or, to be precise, the inmates themselves become very suspicious while we later learn the authorities never even considered the possibility of YT and Black inmates teaming up) and the novel goes out of it’s way to point out how most/all other criminals (including the more minor Black ones) are, at minimum, prejudiced and unwilling to work across racial lines. However, since Parker is essentially a crime-shark, notions like this would only slow him down, so he has no use for them. There is a funny part at the beginning about how hard it is for a man to adjust to prison but then goes on to say that Parker was able to get into this dog-eat-dog mindset in a week. After they breakout (spoiler alert) Parker and the crew decides to rob a jewelry supply building to get some cash. Things get crazy, predictably, and Parker has to use his criminal know-how to straighten it all out. Comfortably the same as always. Also, as always, Parker’s lifestyle and outlook is the strangest and most compelling part. He never evolves or has a change of heart or even begins to feel bad about the stuff he does. He only wants to make money then live as a sort of powerful lizard, decadently at a Florida resort (tho, of course, even his decadence is tame, it’s basically living like a retired guy). This book has him going a little more out of his way for others but even this is explained, “Parker didn’t live by debts accumulated and paid off...Parker didn’t collect IOUs, either the good ones or the bad ones, but he knew he had to live among people with those sorts of tote boards in their mind.” Even his non-selfish actions, he justifies to himself as selfish ones. As an interesting aside, this book is one of the 8 Parker books he wrote after the hiatus. The Parker novels were mostly written in the 70s and seem to take place in the early 60s (tho it seems a purposefully vague) but 8 of them were written in the late 90s early 2000s (this one is from 2002). Bizarrely, Stark has aged the world but not Parker. Parker should be gereatric in this book but he presents as 30s-40s, just like in the original series. Stark should just have set these books back then since he doesn’t have a great sense regarding how technology has changed crime. For instance, the tension at the beginning of the book is that the cops at the prison will eventually figure out who Parker is,he’s in under a false name and on the run for killing a prison guard in California, by running his prints. Back in the 70s I will believe that this would take months. Today, it would happen during your arrest. Likewise, he puts the word cellphone in italics and refers to an office full of computers in the jeweler’s building as the “website room”. Somewhat adorable but unnecessary. Just set them in 1963. Finally, this book contains another reference to the M.O.V.E. bombing in Philly, just like 

THE GOLDEN RHINOCEROS - FRANÇOIS-XAVIER FAUVELLE

Man, it has taken me a long time to read this. I must have wanted this since around the time I started FISTFUL OF SHELLS (to which this book is a sort of prequel, but one that in a different genre) and I’ve been slowly reading it while I finished maybe 3-4 other books. Part of it has to do with how much this book covers, from the 7th century, the first bookend being the introduction of Islam, to the 15th century, the second being the early Portuguese voyages. 800 years is a long-ass time for anything to cover. It would be a multiple season TV show (and a very trill one, given how much gold plays into it). Yet the book isn’t long, I was expecting to pick-up a zillion-paged monster and, instead, got 245 pages and illustrations, the best of which features a roc carrying away a few elephants and is the cover art for the only chapter that deals with Madagascar (and is, sadly, about how wrong many early surviving reports about Madagascar were as well as the well-known and bizarre story about how Mada got its name). The stylistic choice that allowed it to be so much shorter than expected while still taking me forever to read is predicated on total whiplash between chapters. Each chapter usually focuses on one artifact (like the Great Zimbabwe, or a giant throne base at Aksum) or one process (the production of eunuchs in Ethiopia or how a certain group would choose a leader) and build out from there. The chapters are short, typically less than 10 pages, and usually very interesting. The difficulty comes in the fact that the chapters themselves don’t connect in a narrative way with one another. True, they are all about Africa in the middle ages but Africa’s huge and 800 years is a long-ass time. Going from the Niger to the Limpopo so quickly puts a strain on my mental map and mental history of Africa. Frankly, I blame my education, not never did I get a real, overview history of Africa, I’ve had to build it piecemeal with books like this. This approach tho, is not unlike the book itself, which also seeks to build a comprehensive history out of piecemeal fragments. So much of what’s survived from this period is fragments or reports from non-natives or 2nd/3rd hand tales. Fauvelle does a good job explaining the current speculations and theories about this time. A sense of geography is vital to read this book, knowing the rivers and locations of the deserts (which act as a sort of vast sea, the original impetus for the Portuguese to sail around the coast was to avoid being forced to cross the Sahara for trade). It’s also amazing how much people are willing to do for gold. Slaves I understand more since you get an entire lifetime of labor, gold is more confusing to me since it doesn’t really do anything except be pretty. It’s also interesting that both the Muslim and Christian travelers/traders assumed there was a giant mountain of gold somewhere in the heart of Africa that was being kept secret from them. In reality, of course, gold production was incredibly diffuse and more more complicated than outsiders speculated, a single person averaged less than a gram and day when panning for gold. The book is basically that, a long argument for how medieval Africa actually functioned and an exploration of it’s complexity. Some quick asides: It’s sad there is no longer a genre of literature that is a combination travelogue/gossip/myths/speculation. This book uses accounts of travels from European, Chinese and Arabic men who, for a variety of reasons, traveled all over Africa and the known world, often for years/decades before they wrote down what they saw plus what other people had told them as well as some armchair anthropology and speculation. I find myself often day-dreaming about what their lives must have been like, to be in such a strange and unfamiliar milieu for so long. Also, there is an account of a Saharan tribe the chooses its leader by gathering the possible candidates at the mouth a sacred cave. Using ritual, they coax their god out of the cave. The deity looked like a large snake with a camel’s head. It would inspect the candidates then select one by poking it in the chest then quickly retreating into the cave. The person poked was supposed to quickly reach and pull out hairs from the God’s mane, each hair would represent one year of rule. This book is full of wonderful shit like that. Great pictures, great maps, I wish it had been more systematic and complete but perhaps I would not actually want to read the 900 page book that this method would produce. 751 golden rhinoceroses 

RAISED IN CAPTIVITY - CHUCK KLOSTERMAN

Finally got this one. I’ve been on a library waiting list for this title since before it came out and just got it 2 days ago. There are a few books I’ve had on request for months. That CIA Mason book that came out a few months ago? I’ve been waiting since June for that one. The line for HOW TO DO NOTHING was so long I just said, fuck it. All things in time, I suppose. Irregardless, I saw Klosterman speak a few weeks ago, as part of his tour for this book, and I’ve been looking forward to this book since it promised a new, or new-ish literary form, always an intriguing proposition. The book is subtitled “Fictional Nonfiction” which is also how Klosterman described it in person, this description is wrong. To me, Fictional Nonfiction would be something closer to what David Sedaris does or This American Life. Live, Klosterman explained that it was about writing fiction in the same way he would write a magazine piece, which also isn’t a good description of what he’s done with this book. Basically, the book is a collection of premises: What if a non-racist band’s song became very popular with white supremacists? What if you could use technology to transfer pain from one person to another? What if the universe was becoming less random? Is this sort of like having someone explain the plots of Black Mirror episodes to you? Somewhat, the book even raises then dismisses this idea in the dialogue of one story. The stories last just as long as it takes to really outline the idea, a few pages (the longest thing in here has got to be less than 15 pages, maybe 10), then abruptly end. It’s very Italo Calvino-ish. It’s got the typical Klosterman themes, rock music, identity and authenticity, pessimism towards technology. Like most Klosterman stuff it replicated the experience of being next to a smart guy at a bar who gets himself going about something (typically that something is KISS), in this case, this person is telling you a weird story they heard. Most of these short stories are strong, though there were a few where it wasn’t totally clear to me what the “hook” even was. I was partial to the one about cults as well as one about an afterlife that is either heaven or hell. Overall, read fast, fits comfortably in the Klosterman cosmos. 55 half-baked ideas.

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.