ON UGLINESS - UMBERTO ECO

A companion piece to HISTORY OF BEAUTY, a set I wish I owned. They’re really gorgeous books with really high-quality and ample full-color reproductions of hundreds of artworks. The selection of artworks Eco chooses ranges from the very obscure and forgotten to major, marquee names in Western art. The project itself is mostly about this selection, Eco is sort of a visual art DJ, but the pedantic-type, like someone who’d make a mix tracing the “Dembow” rhythm (to be clear, I love that sort of shit). I would say that, if pressed, this is the better volume. Truly, they should be considered as a set, but I would say ON UGLINESS is more wide ranging and interesting and that Ugliness as a subject is clearly more interesting to Eco. Which makes sense, Beauty is static, in the Western mind, a sort of eternal, platonic ideal. Eco does a good job poking holes in this and showing how Beauty does, in fact, change with time and culture, but it’s a much more complicated and nuanced argument than just pointing out the things that aren’t beautiful. Also, ugliness is just more fun. You get to see all these crazy medieval monsters, and paintings of the War-wounded as well as devils and prostitutes and bizarro avant-garde weirdness. Ugliness goes more places, and is really only defined as “things that aren’t beautiful.” Even in HISTORY OF BEAUTY Eco sort of pads it out by including chapters about ugliness in order to show what Beauty isn’t. I think that makes sense, but this book is basically these sections flushed out. This leads to a bit of redundancy. In fact, the Baudelaire quote I’ve remembered for almost a decade since college, is in both. But either way, I love this book, I wish I owned it. 13 ugly scenes.

A SELECTION OF WORDS I PRINTED OFF AT WORK

It’s been a long standing habit of mine to print off long articles for free at any job I’ve ever had that’s given me access to a computer. Typically, I hum the Dead Prez song “Hell Yeah” while I do this. The internet is stuffed almost pornographically full of wonderful essays and papers and bizarro rants and all sorts of great stuff. You can get lost forever in it. I used to print out 20 or so pages a day when I worked at this shitty school in Mexico City to tide me over on the outrageous commute. Here I’ll quickly review 10 I finished recently. They’re all obviously, available online but if someone wanted I’d mail them my copy. 

HUMAN ORIGINS IN A SOUTHERN AFRICAN PALEO-WETLAND AND FIRST MIGRATIONS - EVA K. F. CHAN ET AL.

I had to hit up my mom for access for this one. They published it in NATURE magazine which wants $9 for. Outrageous. Insane that they’d put up a paywall for research conducted by scientists who work at public universities. Outrageous that they’d charge for research period. What about the spirit of scientific discovery, etc.? But all that aside, this is fascinating. We’re all swamp people. Or, delta people, if you want to be precise. The scientist in this paper trace anatomically modern humans (AMH) to 200 thousand years ago, or at least the ones that represent our ancestors (based on mitochondrial DNA data), in the Makgadikgadi-Okavango paleo-wetlands. The Okavango delta, basically. All of our ancestors lived in this swamp prieval for 70,000 years, a period of time over time times longer than humans have had writing. We split up after this, the paper identifies major lineages moving out of this region and going on to populate the world. They figured this out (as far as I understand this, and, to be clear, I know very little about science) by mapping 198 new mitogenomes from current southern Africans and found the oldest strains in KhoeSan population who live in the area. When I visited South Africa I did hear about (from both whites who were making bizarre, racist analogies and from Black African folks) the San and how they predated the other major groups (Zulu, Xhosa, etc) in the area, and seemed to be thought of somewhat the way people might think about Native Americans in the USA. It was an interesting history and now corroborated by science. I love all this early man stuff, and I always feel like a genius when I read a scientific paper. 

THE PUGILIST AT REST - THOM JONES

The big homie Nick recommended this one to me; the man’s an English major so I’ll always take his literary suggestion somewhat seriously. This story slaps. The obvious comparison is THE THINGS THEY CARRIED which I was asked to read in more than one class and I’d say that Jones wins. His story also features gritty jungle battles and moves back and forth in time but THE PUGILIST hits harder (pun intended) and the twists and revelations are unforeseen and ambiguous. After reading I did some research into Jones and his personal bio wraps around this story in strange ways. He was all ready to ship out with the same sort of ReCon unit described in the story but was badly injured in a boxing match right before shipping out. All but one of the men in that unit were later killed in battle. This is one of the more elegant reworkings of a spectacularly specific and horrific trauma. I’d recommend for sure. Get kids to read this in High School. 

BARTLEBY, THE SCRIVENER: A STORY OF WALL-STREET - HERMAN MELVILLE

 A known banger. I’ve read this a couple of times before but recently reread it for some reason, I can’t actually remember the motive. Irregardless, it still hits. I would say on this reading I focused more on the “A STORY OF WALL-STREET” subtitles and why Melville would have included it. The other readings I’ve done the Wall-Street aspect never really jumped out, it seemed like it could have been set anywhere. Not so, I believe now. I think there’s a lot in the story about the Bullshit Jobs phenomena. At the beginning of the story the narrator basically lays out that he doesn’t have a job that does anything real, he’s a lawyer that doesn’t go to court, he only handles “business” matters and agrees that what he does doesn’t make difference and isn’t important. But he’s okay with that, he wants an easy life and it pays well and he is getting along fine till Bartleby refuses to do work that the narrator agrees is tedious and, ultimately, pointless. I think it drives everyone crazy because the facade only works if everyone agrees that the labor has value and that one must do it. I don’t know. It’s also interesting to think about the story in terms of anorexia and how much a totally refusal upsets and confounds people and systems. Continue to teach this in school.

THERE NEVER WAS A WEST - DAVID GRAEBER

Speaking of Bullshit Jobs, here’s the first of a few David Greaber things. I’m a well-known Graeber-stan and, fortunately for the GraeberHive, the man’s anarchist principles mean that most of his stuff is available for free in someway online. I think this essay might be in some book? Anyway, it’s dope and helpful. Graeber takes on this dumb and widespread notion that “Democracy” is the endpoint of Western political thought that begins in Athens and runs through until today. The Western Chauvinist people are very tedious and, bizarrely, stronger than ever. You would think that these people would read some of the history the claim to hold so closely, but, of course, they haven’t. It quickly shows how all of these ideas one might think of as “Western” like say the nation-state, or individual liberty, or the sorts of contracts that make corporations possible, all have antecedents in other cultures and the very idea of a sealed, unified Western tradition is a racist fairytale. 

“OH YE AMERICANS”: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF OMAR IBN SAID

 Another thing I had to read because my public school education contained all sorts of holes. This is a short autobiography of a slave that lived in North and South Carolina right before the Civil War. Omar died in 1864, which is almost too sad to think about. It’s interesting to read about how he squares his islamic beliefs with the christianity required of him the new world. Omar studies to Koran for the first 25 years of his life in what is now Senegal before being kidnapped and sold into slavery and shipped to places the area I grew up in. It’s amazing he writes Fayetteville, Fayd-il. Very moving.

WHITE SUPREMACY CULTURE: FROM DISMANTLING RACISM - KENNETH JONES & TEMA OKUN

 This is a handout I got at a Coalition of Anti-Racist Whites training from a while back. It’s largely a list of characteristics of White Supremacy Culture that show up in organizations. They list the following: Perfectionism, Sense of Urgency, Defensiveness, Quantity of Quality, Worship of the Written Word, Paternalism, Either/Or Thinking, Power Hoarding, Fear of Open Conflict, Individualism, Progress is Bigger/More, Objectivity and Right to Comfort. I don’t have a problem with anything on that list, all of these things seem like a problem to me and I’ve had first-hand work experience bumping up against a couple of them. That being said, I have the same question for this training that I do with all of the diversity/sensitivity/microaggressions/racial equity/social justice trainings I’ve been in over the years (and it’s been a bunch): how is this supposed to work? If we could mandate that everyone took this training and paid attention, would there be no or substantially less racism? Seems unlikely since, as they often acknowledge in these classes, the issue is systematic an super-structural. It’s always the lowest level employees at these things, I never see the people on the board for example. I never see actionable suggestions like, immediately hire 3 people of color in senior management positions. Instead you get this bizarre ouroboros of the Seattle Woke training and taking one another’s training, it’s the first and last step since it’s all seen a personal project, like you need to excise the racism from you. I just can’t figure out if the people who run these trainings think that the list of problems they handed out could be solved in a single company by itself, and if such as company would be compatible with capitalism? A symptom of the neoliberal drive to individualize and atomize culture, here even infecting our ability to dismantle these problems. I am incredibly suspicious of this approach. 

HOW TO CHANGE THE COURSE OF HUMAN HISTORY - DAVID GRAEBER & DAVID WENGROW

 More Graeber stuff, more early man stuff. What can I say, I like what I like. This one is about the origins of social inequality and the possibilities built into a study of deep history. This essay does a great job isolating the problem, where does inequality come from, and exploring/dismantling the mainstream narrative. Basically, the version you always here in history class goes something like this, for millennia, people lived in small hunter-gatherer bands which were egalitarian and equal. Then, agriculture and cities sealed our fates and mandated the sorts of top-down hierarchy that we see today. The utopia is lost forever. All of this is wrong, the Davids marshall all sorts of interesting evidence to show a double morphology in human organization during this time. They do some brain-stretching around thinking of ancient people as our cognitive peers and helps to dispel a trope that bothers me a lot, the insistence that modern hunter-gatherers are some sort of time-machine into our past rather than our peers here in the present. It also features this quote: “Inequality is a way of framing social problems appropriate to technocratic reforms.” That’s a fucking bar. Also, I believe these two are writing a book about on this subject, I can’t wait.

THE VERY IDEA OF CONSUMPTION - DAVID GRAEBER

More Graeber still. Of the three Graeber essays reviewed in this batch, this essay is my least favorite. Not to suggest that this isn’t a good essay or that it isn’t insightful, it is, it merely doesn’t reach the heights or contain as startling an insight as the other 2. Graeber here is mostly trying to sharpen our understanding of creativity and production in our world. When we use the metaphor of consumption to describe things from as burning fossil fuels to watching a TV show you’re making fan fic for we erase something vital. We get a lot about the history of desire and the ways in which desire is conceived of as unattainable and the ways in which desire connects with pleasure. 

HOW URBAN POOR COMMUNITY LEADERS DEFINE AND MEASURE POVERTY - SOMSOOK BOONYABANCHA & THOMAS KERR

Man have I been waiting for someone to write this. If you’ve ever worked in the 3rd World you’ll come across stats all the time about what percentage of a country live below the poverty line or how many people in such-and-such a country are poor. Where did they possibly get this number, you’ll ask. Has the person who wrote this ever been here or been poor? Obviously, they have not. The current poverty line, the one used by the World Bank and the UN and most international NGOs is $1.25/person/day (USD). This number was decided upon by experts and economics with no actual experience with poverty and, clearly, no sense and how silly it is to place a global below-this-you’re-poor line. I work at a homeless shelter in Seattle. If a guy here takes a bus ride, he pays $2.25 and is thus not poor by this standard. Likewise, I’ve met folks engaged in agriculture in Madagascar who certainly don’t really spend money in a way the UN would recognize and certainly spend less than $1.25/day but have a dignity and level of control over  their lives and circumstances that the middle class in the USA would envy. So how do you determine who’s poor? Easy, you ask a poor person. This paper was written by the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights a transnational advocacy group who convened groups in 6 SE Asian countries to define for themselves what it means to be poor in their areas. People who actually are poor or know a poor person are so much better than some 1st world UN dipshit in trying to imagine what the experience of being poor is like. For example, all of the 6 countries have “free” school but people who haven’t been in the schools in these places doesn’t get that parents still have to get transportation, uniforms, books, food and loose the labor in order to send their kids to school. Not really free. The paper also breaks down the Urban Poor into 5 types in a way I find interesting and not exactly transferable for a US city (mostly because we don’t allow the sorts of slums they have in SE Asia). Finally, the biggest takeaway is about how poor people understand that poverty is ultimately a lack of political power, the money issues run downhill from this. Anyway, great stuff, I wish they’d do research like this here in the USA.

REDLINING AND DISINVESTMENT IN CENTRAL SEATTLE - CENTRAL SEATTLE COMMUNITY COUNCIL FEDERATION

A real time-capsule. This report came out in July of 1975, over 40 years ago. The situation in the Central District, the area this report is about (the redlined district, as outlined in this paper, is actually larger than what people now call the CD but for the purposes of this review, I’m going to treat them as interchangeable) has managed to both change totally and be completely the same. This paper is trying to prove that redlining exists and that it’s harming Black neighborhoods in the present (the 1975 present). This paper quotes bankers denying redlining and crunches the numbers to prove it. According to them, only 24% of the money deposited in the CD is reinvested there. Contrast that with 97% rate in the suburbs. The paper is right to point out that the urban poor’s money built the suburbs. The paper points out the aggressive tactics and predatory lending of the mortgage Companies (where you have to get a loan from if you can’t use a traditional bank). There something sad about how fervently the paper is trying to convince you of something that we now know, beyond a doubt, is true. The banks and the goverment really did fuck these people up for generations and lock them out of the sort of generational wealth availbe to other. Imagine a house bought in Seattle in 1975, especially in the CD, how much would that be worth now. The paper also is written before this dynamic switched. Instead of the white flight outlined in ‘75, we have the aftermath. All of the housing prices in this redline areas dropped for decades and the people living there were trapped in poverty. Now people want to live in this are and are investing in businesses and development but without any of the people. I hope we don’t have to wait 40 years to believe the people railing against gentrification. 

POLYNOMIALS AND POLLEN: PARABLES, PROVERBS, PARADIGMS AND PRAISE FOR LOIS - JAY WRIGHT

100 R.I.P. Harold Bloom. The man died recently and I found myself considering his legacy and watching YouTube videos of his interviews. He’s a great at it. He’s overly dramatic (he’ll call something like Harry Potter the death of literature, or tell you that Shakespeare invented being a human), he can recite basically all of the Western Canon (which he, of course, famously defined) and he calls everyone “my dear” or “sweet child.” But when thinking about his legacy, I think he often unfairly gets painted as a racist and a YT chauvinist (as far as the other major Bloom criticism, the one alleging he harassed and molested female grad students, I feel disgusted and disappointed). I think it is fair and proper to say the Bloom is overly dismissive of art’s role beyond personal aesthetic pleasure, especially the ways people who are not ancient, tenured, rich college professors might want to use art. Though I do not think it’s right to say that he seeks to deracinate the Canon. While it’s true that he’ll say that Alice Walker or Toni Morrison don’t deserve places in the firmament (I don’t know Alice Walker but he’s wrong about Toni Morrison) he does propose non-YT alternatives. Which brings me to how I heard about Jay Wright. Bloom recommended him, suggesting that he’s being overlooked at a Black Poet due to academic desire to have Black Poets write more polemically. I would say that Wright isn’t more popular because he’s really hard. The work is rich with allusions and leitmotifs and all the stuff you’d expect from Poetry with a capital P, but the religious/symbolic language draws from Indigenous American and African traditions. Specifically, each chapter is a series of short poems built around a concept from Yoruba, Akan, Dogon, Bamana or Nahuatl cultural traditions. I don’t know a lot about these cultures and cosmologies, I’m sure I missed a ton of connections and thoughtlines. My favorite section is “Ilhuitl,” the Nahuatl one. Since I know a little something about Nahuatl culture (the title is the Nahuatl word for a day or festival day) I caught some of the stuff surrounding flowers and hummingbirds, which occupy a different position symbolically in Nahuatl culture than they do in the “Western” poetic tradition. Seems like it would be great to read in a class with a teacher who could walk you through the references. Plus,there’s some untranslated ancient Greek. I could read one word and felt like a fucking braingenius. Otherwise, I’m not the best poetry reader or reviewer. I will say that I enjoyed the length and that you can read each section in one setting and really lock into the flow and cadence. It was an interesting rhythm of sections that resonated and I enjoyed followed by sections I found impenetrable. But those sections never lasted long and the parts that hit really hit. 400 +1 non-Western conceptions of god.

CHAOS: CHARLES MANSON, THE C.I.A. AND THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE SIXTIES - TOM O’NEILL

Full confession: I’m not a Manson guy. I’m obviously not old enough to have experienced the Manso thing first hand, nor to really to mourn the world that his crimes supposedly ended, so it was never an option to be that sort of first-order Manson guy. However, there is a type of person, my age and older (are there young Manson guys? Or any non-male ones? I would guess that the sheer volume of lurid crime stories nowadays would make any potential gen z Manson guy pick another big-media-story atrocity to fixate on) who’s really into the crime and into Manson’s persona. I definitely knew these people in High School and College into his music and general vibe as a killer hippy (his racism was never brought up by these people). Second to the Kennedy Assassination (which, of course, come up in this book), Manson is the number one boomer conspiracy obession. I didn’t think I liked Manson at all, it always seemed weird but contained, a crazy guy got a lot of very stoned young people to do something awful, but then I listened to the You Must Remember This season about Manson and was intrigued. There’s so many characters in the Manson thing, and so many of them or either famous or so deeply bizarre (towards the end of the book, part of a conspiracy revolves around the facts that a) a body was discovered without pubic hair and b) there was someone in Manson’s orbit famous for having a vest made of pubic hair) it’s fertile ground to go deep. And man, does O’Neill go deep. The book stems from an article he was originally assigned for the 30 year anniversary in ‘99. Instead of making his deadline, he developed Manson-Brain and stayed caught in the web, catching the Tarintino lead 50 year anniversary “nostalgia”.

 And the book is really built around this: O’Neill’s development of a Manson obsession. It’s a book about putting together this book; we follow O’Neill piecing things together and pulling back layers, not the crime and surrounding milieu from start to finish. Which is why we get all these weird cul-de-sacs, like the first 150 pages where it seems like O’Neill is pursuing a theory that Manson didn’t do it (the Tate killings) because Jay Sebring and Wojciech Frykowski (2 of the victims) assaulted and raped a drug dealer in the Cielo house earlier and the famous slaughter was revenge. There’s also a lot of time spent trying to confirm a rumor and then uncover a cover-up w/r/t Terry Melcher hanging out with Manson (specifically several people report a tableau in which Melcher was tripping and begging on his knees at Manson’s feet) and a general sense that someone was covering for Manson because he’s technically on Federal Parole this whole time and he keeps avoiding trouble. Here I’m pretty sympathetic to the conspiracy that the LAPD and the LACS were lenient at best with Manson because he was a racist prison nut and violently anti-Black Panther and they (the authorities) were maybe hoping he’d not be all talk and try to start a fight with the Panthers.       Of course the LA Panthers were famously the target of a murderous COINTELPRO operation, very much along the lines of what O’Neill’s alleging in the book. My favorite section is the book focuses on the less famous CIA counterpart to the FBI’s COINTELPRO, CHAOS. In this section we learn about doctors in the Haight during the Summer of Love who were CIA connected. The guy who ran the Haigh Ashberry Free clinic seems to have gotten CIA money and did a lot of, what I would consider very obvious, research about how confining rats crowded conditions then subjecting them to doses of LSD and then Speed would make them violent. Manson apparently frequented the clinic with his girls for STD treatments. Dr. Jolly West, the famous MKULTRA evil acid doctor, was around in scene too, apparently doing research on implaning or erasing memories and getting people to kill. Clearly all of this is evocative but he can’t make the final connection and show the two together, beyond both being the San Francisco at the same time, both up to no good. There’s a great rundown of all the shady shit Jolly West was involved in, though I believe I’ve read about most of it elsewhere. O’Neill claims that he proves for the first time the West was definitely involved with MKULTRA, which I didn’t know was up for debate. There’s a few more people in Manson’s orbit that O’Neill pegs as CIA (or con-men who are telling people they’re in the CIA). I love all the crazy CIA spy conspiracy stuff and the LSD mind-control angle but even O’Neill admits that he can’t finally connect it all. He includes pictures in the book of his work space which is strewn with overstuff files and folders and feature literal white-boards with spider-web connections between names, the classic conspiracy nut decoration. We get interviews with major figures that stall out or end with them refusing to talk. We get the sense that this quest will go on forever. Either way, the CIA really was drugging people and trying to control their minds and all sorts of wild sci-fi shit. I wish I could believe that Manson was a CIA experiment gone wrong, or perhaps the model (since he could order his followers to kill on command and without remorse) for a particular CIA project but I’ll have to settle with what we do know for sure, which is already beyond the pale. 69 Political Piggies

SMASHED - JUNJI ITO

A Halloween miracle. I was able to get my hands on both of the Ito short story collections during October. Ito is a horror master, this collection does nothing to change that. It’s very similar to SHIVER, its a collection of a dozen or so stories that all last about 20 or so pages. The art is immaculate. The splash panels (not sure what the Manga term for this) are among the scariest, grossest, and coolest I’ve ever seen. The concepts of the stories are likewise brilliant and amazing. We get an evil tree, a man who replaces his circulatory system with a colony of vampire bats, evil mirrors/gazes, evil books, evil tickle-ghosts, it really has it all. Unlike SHIVER, this collection contains 3 stories that feature the same events and characters (plus a cameo from SHIVER). While this story is still good and scary, it was my least favorite part of the book. I like the quick in-and-out of the unconnected short story format. Having a story that retells and doubles back and asks you to remember stuff from 50 pages previous fucks with the flow of the story and the vibe I tap into reading it. However, let me not shit too much on this. It’s a classic, SHIVER is a classic. The sentence, “Try not to be noticed when you eat the secret nectar, otherwise you’ll get smashed,” is immortal. Ito is the master. Manga nerds, what else is this good and this scary. 13 scary trees. 

LEARNING FROM LAS VEGAS - ROBERT VENTURI, DENIS SCOTT BROWN, STEVEN IZENOUR

AVAILABLE

I’m not sure if I’ve ever  read a book in a building designed by the author. My dad’s a big architecture guy, and I’ve seen this book in his house for a few years now, but only on my last trip out to NC did I steal the book from him. I was somewhat familiar with the gist of the book since it features heavily in FROM BAUHAUS TO OUR HOUSE, the Tom Wolfe book that I believe I read in High School. The book itself came out of a class that Venturi, Brown and Izenour taught at Yale that focused around the Vegas strip, and an attempt to theorize the issues that the strip raises. That triad, Venturi Brown and Izenour go on to found, or be part of the foundation of, Postmodernism as an architectural movement (and architecture being the first field where the term “postmodernism” takes hold), as well as to create numerous world famous buildings, including the Seattle Art Museum. Since LEARNING FROM LAS VEGAS  was my daytime walk-around/transit book (due to being paperback and rather slim) I read some of it in the lobby of the museum, within a structure whose philosophical underpinnings are outlined in the book. And you can tell. The thrust of the argument in the book is that the buildings of the last, roughly, 50 years (the book came out in 72) can be broadly broken up into two categories, Ducks and Decorated Sheds. A Duck is their dismissive term for a modernist building. Basically, a Duck is a building whose very shape and structure is the point. They got the term from a roadside attraction on Long Island that’s shaped like a duck. So something like Falling Water or the Fagus Factory are shaped and constructed in a way to help announce what they are and how important they are and how clever the architect is. VBI see this movement as being connected to a sort of Fuller-esq mega-project Utopianism that they also dismiss. The opposite of a Duck is Decorated Shed, which is a basic building that is adorned in such a way to tell you what it is and how it functions. The SAM works like this. As the book itself says, “It is alright to decorate construction, but never construct decoration.” This is an interesting take, and I’m pretty favorable to arguments for abandoning elitist, lofty goals and instead meeting people where they’re actually at. The book points out that architects spend a lot of time designing huge mega-projects that never get built while ignoring the mobile home industry. I’m also partial to the sections about the interiors of casinos, how they seek to create an endless shimmering darkness, like the cave in Aladdin. However, I like a good Duck. Irregardless, it’s also interesting to consider how none of the Vegas stuff that they discuss in the book is there anymore, Vegas has been built and rebuilt 100 times since then. I’d love to hear VBI’s suggestion w/r/t a 2017 massacre memorial. 61 Ducks

HISTORY OF BEAUTY - UMBERTO ECO

I remember reading the sequel to this, ON UGLINESS, in college. In fact, it was the desire for a quote I half-remembered from that book that drove me to pick-up this at the library since someone else had ON UGLINESS. I’ve got OU now and I’m working my way through it, but it’s clear they should function as one volume. Beauty is a harder subject to write about. You know that “happy families are all alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” quote? It works for beauty and ugliness too. Beauty is static, a timeless ideal; Ugliness changes. One gets the sense that Eco knows this, BEAUTY has several chapters that are basically about Ugliness. Even that quote I half remembered, which was by Baudelaire and about ugliness (I’ll go more into this in the ON UGLINESS review), was in this book. Irregardless, consider these one huge volume on Western aesthetics and it’s a remarkable achievement. The format itself might be the best thing about it for me. HOB is basically a picture book. Each chapter takes one narrow theme (depictions of heaven in the middle ages, art deco designs) and goes in. Eco gives us small essays as well as tons of beautiful large reprints of the images he’s discussing. He also includes tons of long quotes from writers like Plato, Shakespeare and the aforementioned Baudelaire (who gets a lot in, Eco is clearly a big fan). It’s great to see he’s tackling issues around the creation of beauty in non-visual art as well as visual. I really wish I had copies of these to keep, they’d be great coffee table books, something you can dip into and out of, enjoying it piecemeal. I had to sort of sprint through the thing to finish it in time, but the book really wants to be admired over time. Additionally, I wish the book would have focused more on human physical beauty and how it changes over time and how large social forces shape and use this designation. It is also, by its own admission, “Western”  But, the book is already long enough, perhaps I just need to read more philosophy of beauty stuff to get that itch scratched. Very moving, 444 delicate paintings.

SHIVER -JUNJI ITO

I really don't know a goddamn thing about Anime. Or Manga or any of the 20th/21st century Japanese illustrated whatnot. Not that I’m an Ukio expert or anything  but this sort of drawing is an aspect of Japanese culture that hasn’t ever really connected with me. I like all and love some of the Miyazaki things but otherwise, I don’t know anything about it. Which, apparently and thank the gods, allowed for me to have constructed a life totally unaware of Ito (who I gather, is super famous and my “have you heard about this Ito guy?” thing might be like a Japanese fan raving about this underground Alan Moore guy) and thus totally set-up to have him blow my mind to smithereens. I’ve read a few things of his before, and loved them, but the short story is really the mode for him to work in. He has a terrifying imagination, and each story is short and basically outlines a nightmare scenario and lets it play out over a few pages. Since it’s horror they all just get worse and worse then end horribly. It’s an amazing set-up. Something like this rises and falls on the strength of the gimmick in each story and this book has a collection of all killers. We get evil records, evil ancestors, evil puppets, evil grease, evil models, evil giant balloons shaped like people’s heads. Ito’s got a better batting average than the Blackmirror guy or the whole Twilight Zone crew. I can’t believe I didn’t know about this and I’m so glad I’ve already got his second volume of short stories. 4 horrible deaths.

ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS - OCEAN VUONG

Another book I read because it’s trendy. I’m sure this one will get more likes than most of my boring, mostly for me, catch and release book posts. I saw Ocean Vuong on Seth Meyers. He was really charming and charismatic but you don’t see a lot of novelists/poets on late night TV. But actually that apperence helped clarify something that I would have found confusing (on purpose, for sure) otherwise. At the end of the interview, Seth Meyers invites Ocean to say something to his mother, who Ocean has explained is watching at home but doesn’t speak any English. Ocean looks straight into the camera and says something in Vietnamess with an incredibly ernest and intense look on his face. You can feel the intent across the language divide. Ocean’s work often traffics in this tension of languages. Several characters in the book speak only English or Vietnamese and are thus cut off from one another yet still manages to be in some form of communication. The narrator, Little Dog, speaks both and lets this in-betweenness act as a means by which to make the english of the novel strange and poetic. There was some rose/rose wordplay that I was particularly fond of, as well as several instances of short dives into the mechanics of Vietnamesse and how those linguistic relationships mirror human ones. I was thinking about how Ocean’s writing reminded me of Anne Carson, who also uses another language (in her case, ancient Greek) to infuse her English with strangeness and a bizarre poetic weight, but Ocean makes the connection himself, thanking her in the back of the book. The other thing that Seth Meyer interview does is complicate the genre of the book. The book really feel like a memoir, since the main character, like Ocean Vuong, is also a gay Vietnamese man who moves to the USA as a young child with his mother and grandmother, both of whom house horrific war/poverty induced traumas and neither of whom speak English. Parts of the book goes beyond simply being weighty and poetic in style to seeming poetic in form. There’s sections about Tiger Woods and his connection to the Vietnam War and American history that resemble the best sorts of essay writing and actually got me to think about Woods (a pop-culture figure I care almost nothing about) more deeply. I think he was smart to call the whole thing a novel though I would be shocked if the main love interest, a YT man named Trevor who dies tragically, a victim of the opioid crisis, wasn’t very closely based on a real person. Either way, worthy of the hype. Really, really heart-breaking and beautiful. Dirtier and sexier than I was expecting; always a welcomed surprise. The book is very shrewd and wise about the way traumas are passed on, about how people are trying to raise kids and keep it together and how all those experiences and feelings trickle down. If this is as close to real life as I believe it to be, Ocean is almost superhumanly perceptive about the dynamics and history and echoes in his family. If it isn’t then he’s an amazing fabulist. Either way, I’d love to get more Vuong. I hope he writes more “novels”. One endless ocean, connecting Vietnam and Connecticut.

DOPE - $AX ROHMER (ADAPTED AS A COMIX BY TRINA ROBBINS)

Like most people born after 1900, I’m mostly familiar with Rohmer through his trickle-down influence on culture. While he didn’t whole cloth invent the “Yellow Menace” suite of stereotypes and cliches, his is the most enduring version. I’ve never read a Fu Manchu book but, like everyone else, I know the name (and the mustache, which I had for a while and people hated). Also, I’m partial to the Batman villain Ra’s al Ghul, one of half a dozen Fu Manchu rip-offs that litter pop-culture. I’m interested in Rohmer’s work as a sort of beginning of modern drug war scripts and cycles. The book itself I can review super quick: not that great. It suffers from the classic “originator problem” where it’s so influential and ubiquitous that it becomes hard to remember the cliches in this book aren’t really cliches, they’re the originals. Basically several viginal YT women, in upper-crust Victorian society fall under the spell of Sin Sin Wa, an evil Chinese drug dealer and his wife, Mrs. Sin, who is a Cuban-Jew. They get hooked on coke and hash and Veronal (I hadn’t heard of it either but it’s an old-timey barbiturate) and, of course, opium. Various police chiefs and inspectors and whatnot try to find the drug-kingpin before all of London’s beautiful young women are dead. It was actually mostly boring. The illustrations are good, though Kevin O’Neil is the king of Victorian looking/set comics (LOEG has a huge and acknowledged debt to Rohmer). Robbins really emphasizes the clothing, which looks great. The action and backgrounds are less well rendered. All that aside, it’s the stuff about the book at the end that’s most interesting. I didn’t know that London had the first Chinatown of a western city, called Limehouse (apparently destroyed in WWII), and it is interesting to chart the racism and stereotypes that came out of this. You need only turn on the news or listen to our president to see Chinese (or really any East Asian person) portrayed as sneaky or inscrutable or up to something. “He who looks at a Chinamen looks at an illusionist” comes straight from the book and you can imagine Trump saying it at a rally tomorrow. However, in the USA at least (and I assume England but I guess I don’t really know) EAs are no longer associated in the public mind with vice and drugs and crime. American assumptions around the Chinese now seem to largely focus around two opposing sexual stereotypes: men as unmasculine and nerdy and small-dicked. Smart but not leaders or charismatic (this particular storyline recently came up in that Harvard affirmative action case when it became clear that EA applicants were not scoring high on “leadership qualities” due to the racism of the admissions worker). Women are seen as subservient and young and innocent. I wonder if this has to do with our America’s love of outlaws and criminals. Deep down we think there’s sometimes cool and admirable in the you-can’t-tell-me-nothing-ness and get-it-by-any-means-ness of drug dealers and this didn’t square with a desire to see Chinese people as not sufficiently masculine and muscular and therefore not worthy of the status (and pay) of rugged YT westerners and rail-road workers. Not sure, just spitballing. It’s likewise telling that the narrative of a “drug kingpin” or one person responsible for all this addiction and sorrow. The book mirrors a real-life tragedy that really hits on all the tropes we see in drug war stories to this day. Billie Carleton was a young, beautiful actress and what we’d now call a socialite, who grew up poor but got some fame and leveraged it into relationships with powerful older men. She and these men and many upper-crust folks would slum in these new slums, dance and drink and try their drugs and have great stories to tell later. She died in the now classic manner, tons of coke and booze to party and stay up and look great, downers to go to sleep afterwards and help the coke wear off. Tale as old as time. People have been using opium and derivatives for 7k+ years. Likewise coca. What was new was the more powerful, industrial versions (powdered coke, Bayer-made Heroin, etc) and a press apparatus that could explode this into a national scandal and set a temple-plate we still use. Here rich friends were brought to court (mostly the court of public opinion since then, like now, actual judicial courts were not for the wealthy). They decided that their must be a king-pin. A criminal mastermind at the heart of the lurid Limehouse milieu. This book contains contemporaneous drawings of someone named “Brilliant Chang” which is a great drug lord name. All this stuff lasts to this day. It’s amazing. The final and cruelest irony this book calls to mind is how the Yellow Menace, drug-pushing, opium-enslaving asian person stereotype is a total inversion of actual relationship between England and China. Dope was published in 1919, the Second Opium War ended a generation before, in 1860. It sure seems like (fictional) fears about evil asian outsiders secretly pumping drugs into a society and destroying its moral fabric and subjugating it through addiction might maybe be displaced guilt from literally fighting an actual war for the right to pump a society full of drugs and destabilize it. All of British history is basically that Mittcell and Webb, “Are we the baddies” sketch. Lots to think about. Calls to mind that Jay-Z line from the Hell Yeah remix, “y’all don’t like that, do ya?/ you fucked up the hood, nigga, right back to ya”. 1919 racist wars.

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.