A BRIEF HISTORY OF NEOLIBERALISM - DAVID HARVEY

This book is also the third in a series. Between this one, CAPITALIST REALISM and THE POORER NATIONS I’ve been doing more economic reading and trying to understand where we’re at. I’m a big believer in the idea that economics is basically a psuedo-science, or, more precisely, economics often uses the language and positioning of a “real” science (and by this I just mean a discipline that relies primarily on the scientific method, something that social sciences aren’t really able to do) to obscure what are actually social and political concerns. CAPITALIST REALISM is probably my favorite out of the bunch, mostly because it’s about how it feels to live under this current regime (which all three books date to the mid 70’s). The other two are more technical and persuasive and take on how the current economic model works and how it got put in place. ABHN is simply a POORER NATION but mostly about the US and China. It was actually the China stuff that I found most interesting and persuasive. Typically western writers, left and right, speak of China as a monolith or as being fully represented by the statements of the government and ignore internal disagreements and  even the variety of views within the Chinese Communist Party. Harvey gets deep into it. He’s a communist himself so he’s able to simplify Neoliberalism down into an attempt to restore upper-class power, which is a compelling and simple way to look at it. I’ve read a lot about this topic so I didn’t need too much convincing; I’m largely on Harvey’s side. I do detect a hint of a moralizing that I find conservative. For instance, he talks about how Neoliberalism privileges short contracts and constant flux which, when applied to our personal lives (more the territory of CAPITALIST REALISM) erodes traditional relationships, like marriages. I view this as a positive or neutral development but Harvey would probably argue I’ve let postmodernism melt my brain and trick me. He might be right. Tho, he also occasionally comes down on the sex-trade as specifically exploitive and bad in a way that, when seen in the global context he rightly insists on, I can only read as reflecting a conservative squeamishness. But these are minor quibbles. The book is really good and I would really recommend it for people who are starting to think about this stuff. I really enjoyed the passages about information technology being the “privileged technology of neoliberalism” since I deal with the nonsense-fallout from this reality daily. You wouldn’t believe how much data has to be collected and analyzed to help people. This book is also interesting to read in a historical context since it was published in 2005 and therefore written before the housing crisis, the most serious test of Neoliberalism hegemony in the last 50 years. Harvey doesn’t predict a housing crisis exactly, tho he does talk about the rapid, insane debt-financed spending in the USA and discusses what will happen when this dynamic, inevitably, blows up. “It could be that the US ruling elite has calculated it can survive a global financial crisis in good shape and use it to complete its agenda of total domination. But such calculations could be a monumental error.” Sadly, they were not. The $-elite were able to do exactly what that first sentence predicts, Harvey was overly-optimistic and the situation is somehow worse than when the book was written. Still, a quick good overview of the world we live in, which were going to have to think deeply about if we want to get ourselves out. 1 Totalizing system.

WEIRD SCENES INSIDE THE CANYON - DAVID McGOWAN

The final in a trilogy of CIA books that I got into recently. This one plus POISONER-IN-CHIEF and CHAOS. All very focused on the 60’s and made possible (each to their own extent, some of these books are more fact-based than others) by recent declassifications since the 60’s is now so long ago. The War on Terror will be a fertile ground to write horrifying books along these lines, exposes of the evil/shady shit the CIA gets up to. Just this morning I read an article in the Guardian about how one of the founders of the YT terrorist organization The Base was(is?) involved with military intelligence. And, of course, the current most interesting conspiracy, Epstien and his role with various intelligence agencies. It’s always hard to tell where any of this fits on the truth/fiction spectrum, and, to finish my digression and get back to this book, WSITC falls heavily on the entertaining fiction side. I read this book, like the Manson book, before falling asleep at night, which is the ideal context to encounter these ideas. McGowan has a conversational, snarky style that is slightly annoying but read really quickly. If you don’t like the current conspiracy, wait 2 paragraphs and he’s on to another, each so juicy and dense, they warrant their own book. Or rather, it would take a book length explanation to convince me that most of this stuff is “true”. The broad outline is that the Hippy/folk-rock/flower-child counterculture was a PsyOps program, run by the CIA, to nuder the anti-war movement/radical left. In its specifics, it’s dense. Jim Morrison’s dad was the commanding officer at the Gulf of Tonkin incident (I looked this up and it’s true), ipso facto, CIA plant. I’m very amenable to this idea, only a cop could write poetry as bad as Morrisons. But on the other hand, I’m very pro-Frank Zappa, and this book comes down hard on him. His father worked at Edgewood as a chemicals weapons guy and he was, apparently, personally right-wing. Also a CIA plant. Same with Captain Beefheart (conducting cult research). Same with the Police and Sting. Same with Jack Nicholson It is weird that McGowan seems so surprised that so many Baby Boomers would have parents who had been in the military. Or that rich and famous people would have found ways to avoid the Draft and/or consequences for misbehavior (a lot is made of the fact that so many of these young musicians and actors aren’t drafted and are never arrested for their public drug use). Or that it seems nefarious when people living wild lives die bizarrely and suddenly. I’m not going to say I was “convinced” by as much of this book as I was by the other 2 in this little series. Additionally, I don’t like this type of music, era of music too much. I like Zappa, as I said, Beefheart, some of Gram Parsons and that’s about it for me. I don’t have too much of a taste for CSNY or the Byrds or the Eagles or The Mamas and the Papas and I think I would have enjoyed this book much more if I was more into those bands. But I like this sort of paranoid freak-out, it’s a dope genre. Finally, I’m very pleased I learned, from this book, a new word: spychologist. 70 PsyOps

CAPITALIST REALISM: IS THERE NO ALTERNATIVE - MARK FISHER

Damn this slaps. This was a library book but I’m tempted to offer to buy a copy for anyone who wants one. I’m not sure how many people read these things (zero?) but if you read this, and want a copy, DM yr boi and I’ll send it to you It’s short and manifesto-y, a quick read (80 pages, not too jargon-y). I actually intended to read the whole thing over one double shift at my work but shit got too crazy with the Narcan and whatnot so I had to polish off the last dozen pages the following morning. In a unique twist, I know about this book because of the publisher. Or more specifically, the publisher’s podcast. Zer0 books is a theory/short-fiction/lefty publishing imprint run by a guy named Doug Lain who’s podcast, Diet Soap, I used to love (I don’t think it exists anymore, or maybe it’s behind a paywall or something) and he was constantly talking up Mark Fisher and this book in particular. Now I see why. It’s all hits. This book is basically an expansion of that old Jameson quote about how it’s easier to consider the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The book is also helpful and illuminating w/r/t the connections between neoliberal capitalism (which is basically interchangeable with the term “Capitalist Realism”, there differences are minor and illuminated in the book) and the mental health crisis and widespread despair we all feel. The sense that we have that the current system is both hopeless and endless (either endless in the traditional sense, or endless in the sense that we’re going to destroy the environment in a way profound enough to “end” modernity) is, to Fisher, the defining feature of Capitalist Realism.  He keeps it short, the way he discusses pop culture is illuminating, he doesn’t just seem to be showing off how obscure a reference he can muster. I found the stuff about HEAT very helpful. The idea that we went from these old world connected, family-based almost glamorous criminals of THE GODFATHER, or GOODFELLAS to the disconnected, atomized, professional and unfeeling criminals of HEAT who don’t know one another, have no greater loyalty and are interested only in the $. It’s been a while since I’ve read a book with such clarity. I’m not sure what more I can say besides, “same”. It’s a bad sign, as far as I can tell, that Fisher killed himself. It’s that DavidFosterWallace-feeling of groking what an author is saying about modern life and how sad and alienating it can be only to find out that the author didn't seem to find a way out of the bind they were so good at articulating. 1979 Alternatives to Capitalism. 

CITY OF SACRIFICE: THE AZTEC EMPIRE AND THE ROLE OF VIOLENCE IN CIVILIZATION - DAVID CARRASCO

AVAILABLE

The Aztec kick continues. I think I’mma read one more book on this topic, now that I’m all deep into this. Unlike THE FIFTH SUN this is not a history. Carrasco is not a historian, he’s a scholar of religion, a discipline I think of as more speculative and hermetic. I feel like I trust Townsend more, overall, since she’s taking a wider view of the nature of the contact between Europe and Mesoamerica. Townsend’s more critical of the various codexes and Spanish accounts that exist whereas Carrasco is more interested in analyzing them and creating theories of religion and space. For example, Carrasco treats as plausible the story about Montezuma mistaking Cortes for Quetzalcoatl, a piece of Spanish propaganda that I thought Townsend did a good job debunking. Nor does he get into the problems surrounding the term “Aztec”. But Carrasco isn’t interested in the “truth” of this encounter, insofar as literal facts are concerned, he’s project is to try to reconstruct the Aztec religious worldview and show us something about how cosmo-magical deposition can be read into the physical of a city. The whole thing was very interesting, I was a bit bored by talk of creating “magic circles” with movement around the city, this seemed connected to some larger Religious Studies debate that I’m fully on the outside of, but a few concepts really jumped out to me.  First, the whole heart-ripping thing, that lurid ceremony that occupies such a large chunk of people’s conceptions of the Aztecs, is fascinating to think of as a representative and symbolic of an empire doing almost the exact opposite of the empire I live in. What people think of as the Aztec Empire is more correctly understood as the triple-alliance of Mexico-Tenochtitlan , Texcoco and Tlacopan, who over a course of about 100 years before Spanish contact, expanded an Empire in what is now central Mexico that reached, through allies, and defeated enemies and subjugated populations,  to both coasts. What is interesting, and to Western understanding horrifying, is the obsession with not killing one’s enemies on the battlefield but rather capturing them in order to bring them to the exact center, both literally and mythologically (the temple is on the site of the vision of the Eagle eating the snake that remains on the Mexican flag), in order to use them in a series of ceremonies, culminating with their hearts being pulled out on top of the tallest man-made structure in the hemisphere. What I find fascinating is how much work and effort was put into this display of war and violence at the center of your social structure. Currently, I live as a citizen of what is to the current world what the Aztec triple-alliance was to central Mexico in the 15th century, namely the largest, most violent empire. What is interesting to me is the extent that America chooses not to center the violence being done at the frontier but rather to do the opposite, to push away and disengage from that violence as much as possible. Newspapers won’t show bloody carnage, during the Bush years one couldn’t even film the flag-draped coffins of service members. Osama wasn’t captured to be tried and killed under our laws and on our land, he was killed (on camera but we’ll never see it) and dumped in the ocean and erased. The violence isn’t here, it’s out there. We no longer need to demonstrate our empire’s strength, by stacking skulls in a massive, fearsome tzompantli, it’s taken as a given. Perhaps this very belief that war was sacred and the point was to use it as a tool to fulfill various religious and cultural obligations rather than a true, annihilating fight to the death that the Europeans were more familiar with that gave them (the Europeans) the advantage.

I would have liked to see more comparisons between the Mexica specific religious beliefs versus the beliefs of other groups in the area. My understanding is that these ethnic city-states each had a pantheon that partially overlapped with others. Tlaloc, for instance, seems to be a very old and widely worshipped figure. Was adding the war-god Huītzilōpōchtli a major turning point, since it seems to be a Mexica thing. Your neighbors taking up the war/human-sacrifice god as their patron deity must have been seen as a really bad sign. In fact, it seems telling that the Temple Mayor features 2 shrines on top, Huītzilōpōchtli to the south and Tlaloc to the north. Seeking to architecturally reinforce that this new hummingbird god was the equal of a deity that preexisted Aztec culture by at least 800 years.

The next Aztec book I’m trying to cop is about Tezcatlipoco, to me, the most confusing god in the Aztec pantheon. This book has an amazing chapter on his celebration, Toxcatl. This year long event requires selecting, from the war captives, the most beautiful, tall, articulate and perfect warrior. He lived as a in ixiptla in teteo (a person acting as the human embodiment of the god, they’re used for multiple gods and used in multiple ceremonies) for Tezcatlipoco. He learns high diction and to play the flute and goes around the city being showered in gifts and treated like a god for a year. He is given 4 wives, who are themselves in ixiptla in teteo for various female sexuality and fertility goddess. Finally, he travels to Chalco, walks up the pyramid of his own free-will, breaking a flute on each step before being sacrificed then flayed, is skin placed on next year's selection. That’s an amazing story. Where is the movie about that guy’s year? Maybe center it around the last pre-contact year, the man dies not knowing the entire world he’s giving his life to is about to be irreparably destroyed. This is also a good candidate for the books about Mexico City/Mexico (my list: Savage Detectives, Down and Delirious in Mexico City, The Story of My Teeth, Labyrinth of Solitude, History of the Conquest of New Span and one really great overview of Mexican History I read, really long, that now I can’t remember the name of). The relation between violence and religion and civilization is a dark corner to poke around in I’m glad Carrasco is making headway. 1521 Hearts offered to the fifth sun. 

SONGLINES - BRUCE CHATWIN

A wonderful failure of a book and exactly what I needed to read right now. The book is nominally a sort of travelogue/investigation of Australia and the Aboriginal culture that he’s fascinated with. What makes the book a failure is that it seems to be the remains of a much longer book about nomadism and humanity in general. I know because one of my best friends has an English Masters and wrote his thesis on Chatwin that he (Chatwin) spent much of his life obsessing over nomads, visiting them around the world, living as a sort of nomad himself. The book could certainly be knocked for not knowing very much about Aboriginal culture and Songlines themselves, which are fascinating and I’d love to hear more about from a more academic/indigenous source. It is clear though that Chatwin takes them seriously in a way that other YTs don’t. The way he ruminates on their meaning and their use and the way they represent a vast human project, like a pyramid built with just words and songs, is interesting and admirable and it’s always important to remember that the greatest and most monumental human accomplishments aren’t the largest/oldest buildings. But the book isn’t really about that, by the middle he’s breaking off into his larger theories about human settlement. He does one of my favorite things and just lists quotes about the human need for movement and the despotism of settlement. I feel this urge and this shit is pretty close to my heart. The idea of ethical nomadism or what it means to live an unfixed life is something I think about all the time. I love the way he was able to cannibalize what must have been this huge labor of love, a lifetime’s work, that turned out to be unreadable and then, instead of freezing with despair, condensed it into this perfect little ode to movement. Shout out to Nick to putting me on to this. Endless Songlines. 

FIFTH SUN - CAMILLA TOWNSEND

Fucking amazing. Very, very helpful and insightful. As someone who’s been interested in “Aztec” (you can tell the book is on the right track by using the introduction to point out that there never was a group that called themselves that and the word most people are looking for when they say Aztec is Mexica) for as long as I can remember and who lived in Mexico City, the fabled Tenochtitlan, and who spend countless hours at the various museums and temple ruins thinking about what this world must have been like, this book is a real godsend. I’ve read countless other accounts, including the first-hand Spanish ones as well as more scholarly histories but this is the clearest and most illuminating one I’ve read. The book traces the Mexica people specifically but the larger central Mexican world from early human settlement to about 100 years after Cortez. It really focuses on about a 200 year span that places Cortez right in the middle. You often think about the “Aztec” as being a static timeless empire, hated by those around them until the Spanish showed up and upended everything. This book does a good job showing how recent their accent had been and how things worked more generally in their world. The real insight is the number of Nauhl sources Townsend is able to use, as a speaker, and the appendix at the end, where she explains where the various sources come from and how much she trusts them and why, is some of the best stuff. I won’t rehash the whole book but I’ll point out some highlights. La Malinche, come off as one of the most vital people in human history, given how in the right place at the right time and being exactly the right person, given the languages she already knew, (and you have to keep in mind that the elites in this world spoke a separate version of Nauhl that she also knew) and how quickly she was able to pick up Spanish. Even her name itself is interesting. The Spanish called her Marina, the natives had no “r” sound so called her Malina+tzin (which is an honorific), the Spanish assumed that was her name but since they didn’t have a “tz” sound they settled on Malinchi/Malinche. One of the most important people in human history’s name is a the result of a sort of cross-cultural game of telephone. I was also taken by the story of Paquiquineo who was a kidnapped kinfolk of Powhatan (in Virginia) who lived in Spanish, learned Spanish, was sent to Mexico City and saw how the Spanish were treating the Natives and eventually convinced the Spanish to take an expedition North to the Chesapeake bay, with him as a translator. At which point he convinced the Natives to kill all the Spanish and returned to live with his family. The Spanish decided these northern Indians weren’t worth it, leaving an opening for the English to set up Jamestown. There’s a lot of wonderful stuff about pre-Colombian Political history though sadly less about the Nahua religious worldview, which Townsend points out what the heaviest target of Spanish oppression. Townsend does this strange thing where she more than once credits the European advantage with 10k of settlement in Europe vs. only about 3k in the New World which is a strange way to explain the lopsidedness of what happened. Especially since it doesn’t seem that amount of settlement equals military might. We aren’t all under the sway of the Aboriginals, despite their 60k of settlement. It seems much more likely that they, again and again, underestimated their brutality, despite being from brutal societies themselves. It seems like, again and again, the Natives assumed that these knew Spanish would be powerful players in the complicated violent world of allegiances and subjection that already existed. I don’t think they could have envisioned the genocide, mass rape and cultural annihilation that the Spanish had in mind. The sections about how the Spanish ruled the central valley after the initial conquest were also illuminating and new to me. I finished reading this book on a beach near La Paz, Baja California Sur. La Paz was one of the last places that Cortez “discovered” in Mexico, still pushing west, still murderously obsessed with gold. 1519 altepetls

THE POORER NATIONS: A POSSIBLE HISTORY OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH - VIJAY PRASHAD

I don’t remember exactly why I chose this book to read, it must have come from something else, it’s reasonably obscure (tho it does have a Chomsky quote on the cover) and somewhat technical (tho it does it’s best to avoid the econ trap of obscuring moral questions with math). As someone who’s lived in the 3rd world and aspires to do so again I found the early sections, the sections about the history, helpful. I’m more familiar, due to recent reading, with the more colonial/earlier segments on the history between the “West” and the rest of the world. I’m always down for some intellectual history so tracing the idea of the “Washington Consensus” or “Neoliberalism” is appealing to me. It’s basically the history of a project that seeks to arrange the world in such a way that the elite get everything imaginable but they also skirt rebellions and dissent. What became most clear to me is the way in which the “unfinishedness” of Capitalism or Neoliberalism is a good faint away from actually changing anything. Since you’re always adjusting rates and opening new markets and reforming land agreements you never allow the subalterns to complain that this isn’t working. Of course it’s not working yet! We’ve got more technocratic tinkering to do, hold tight. I was of course taken by the sections about NGOs, since I have a lot of experience with them both here in Amerika and abroad. Prashad does nail the way in which they, “depoliticize a target population by concentrating on delivering goods rather than on social transformation.” I feel that tension at my current job. Like most communists (and, to be fair, leftists as a whole) he doesn’t have an answer or a very convincing answer for that issue. Also, he does the communist thing where he’ll declare “the African peasantry” as insufficiently politically engaged or something equally broad and, I would argue, unhelpful. It is in the final sections, where Prashad talks about the future where he gets off track. Climate Change is barely mentioned in the book but it’s about to totally upend the relationship between 1st and 3rd world nations (fun fact: Mbuto Miland, a Tanzanian diplomat coined the phrase 4th world to draw attention to the world’s indigenous population and the ways in which their treatment is both shitty and similar around the globe). But, very soon (now actually) the physical changes the world will undergo is going to send millions into a migration. It’s going to fuck up farming and fishing. It’s going to change what parts of the world are habitable and desirable. The book does a great job chronicling the ways in which the Global South have tried to form political solidarity and the ways that this fell apart. What does a nation like China have in common with somewhere like Zambia? In fact, there’s a whole long chapter about the relationship between these large nations, aka the “locomotives of the south” (China, India, etc.), and the 3rd world as a whole. As we move forward we need to begin to envision solidarities that will minimize the global catastrophe that is coming. Or figure out ways to make sure the catastrophes are felt primarily by those responsible i.e. the elite in the 3rd world and basically all of the 1st. I believe the model of aid and development is on its way out but this book is a bit slow on what’s going to replace it. Prashad has a really wide range of examples and quotes and the book is lucid and interesting. I would encourage anyone who is interested in building a non-hell world. 33 LDCs

CITIZEN: AN AMERICAN LYRIC - CLAUDIA RANKINE

I guess I should read more current poetry? I got this because I was hearing about it again as I read over these “best book of the decade” lists and I remember what a hubbub it created when it dropped in 2014. At that time it seemed outrageously timely; like Ta-Nehisi Coates here was a “new” writer writing about race and Amerika and policing right at a moment when all of those fault-lines seemed particularly volatile. I’m not sure why I didn’t read it at the time. Actually, I’ve certainly read the stanza: 

because white men can’t

police their imaginations

black people are dying

That sentiment was all over at the time, but I was unaware of the pedigree. As a YT man it was devastating then and now. The terroristic incidents, from the Baltimore Uprising, to Trayvon Martin to the London Riots to Stop-and-Frisk and on, sickeningly and indefinitely, are addressed directly. Rankine coins the phrase, “wrongfully ordinary” to sum up the sensation. Rankine chooses a Chris Marker, San Soleil epigraph to begin the book which had me sold from the jump. That’s a top 5 movie for me and the connection is so clear throughout. You can easily imagine these poems being read over the footage were all so familiar with from the aforementioned incidents, in fact that’s exactly what was going on in my, and I expect all, readers’ heads. Very moving overall, I was able to read it in 2 long sittings and really lock in. I was really touched by the sections towards the end about the nature and prevalence of injury, obviously a constant obsession of mine given my work. I’m sorry I waited so long to read this but I’m glad to see it’s getting the respect it deserves. I guess I should pay attention the contemporary poetry scene more closely. 2014 Citizens

BAD GATEWAY - SIMON HANSELMANN

I’ve been on a bit of a comics run. 5 of the last 10 books I read before this were comics. I would argue it is because the bookbooks I’m reading now are pretty heavy (one about the economic history of the 3rd world, one about the history of the Aztecs and CITIZEN, that poem from a few years back) but that actually doesn’t track since BAD GATEWAY is as emotionally intense as anything. It does read fast tho, I finished it in one sitting on a rainy afternoon. I’ve been reading in the Megg, Mogg and Owl-a-verse for years now and it’s really cool to see it reach a sort of “stage 2”. Before, when I mostly read it on the internet, it seemed kinda like a daily strip or like a sitcom, in the sense that the relationships seemed static. The characters were these funny, sad, druggy misfits who got into predicaments (and the genius of the strip was/is the ease and speed with which Hanselmann toggles from funny/sad) but basically ended up in the same place. However, now it appears that this stew of stoner-life has congealed into a more traditional story, with arcs and a single main character (as opposed to being about the group). In the last book Owl showed the sort of insight into his own character and situation (w/r/t his relationship to Megg) that would make a back-to-normal reset impossible, so in this book his absent. I believe the same thing is about to happen to Mogg. Mogg and Megg’s toxic relationship is the main focus of this boo and we get so much more of Megg I assume the next book is going to feature her more exclusively (perhaps as single and dating). Hanselmann does such a good job rendering  Megg and Mogg’s dynamic. They are so angry and hurt with each other but so numb and drugged and scared to confront one another they’re trapped in a very specific and very familiar type of hell. The Werewolf Jones stuff is also slightly deepened in this volume. Typically, his just comic relief and is my favorite, but this issue we saw him as more complex and more human (literally, I think this is the first time we’ve seen him in his non-wolf form), at least briefly. Excellent. 69 Tears.

STUNT - MICHAEL DEFORGE

Damn, the library really stays on top of DeForge. This is another volume he, apparently, put out this year, tho it is very different from Leaving Richard’s Valley. The most obvious difference is the length. LRV was over 400 pages and drawn daily, this thing is tiny (both in dimension and length) and can be finished in about 15 mins. Additionally, while LRV is stylistically flatter or more normal than what I typically expect of DeForge, STUNT goes off. The art is amazing, everyone has this Gumby quality that tracks with a story about feelings of malleability and morphing. The colors in a limited pallet but very well used. The story itself was pretty straight forward but it paid off well. It’s basically about a depressed Stunt-man who’s asked to fill-in for more and more of the Star’s life. It’s very well contained, the stakes and weirdness increase throughout the story and I enjoyed the ending (even if it was a little predictable). My only complaint would be that the book itself wasn’t physically larger so I could enjoy the drawings. Keep it up SPL, keep us well supplied with DeForge. 1 Sad man.

MARY WEPT OVER THE FEET OF JESUS: PROSTITUTION AND RELIGIOUS OBEDIENCE IN THE BIBLE - CHESTER BROWN

Still on my God shit. This was an impulse grab at the library but it does seem to be in line with the last book. I’ve read some other Brown books, though not his weird early stuff, actually all the stuff I’ve read has been really square. Even the previous book which was about being a John, called PAYING FOR IT, was remarkably restrained given the subject manner. It was clear reading that book that Brown’s thought a lot about sexwork and sexworkers  and tho I disagree with some of his conclusions (he is a libertarian and I have a much more pessimistic view of the market) it is clear that he’s a deep thinker on the subject and he’s refreshingly candid about his experience. Often when reading something “academic” or “policy driven” about a lurid subject, like drugs or sexwork or serious mental illness, you get the sense that the author has no real experience with the subject, just a lot of booklearnin’. I experience this constantly in my work. Brown has clearly read deeply about the subjects he cares about and is willing to discuss how these theories play out in his actual life. What I did not know is that Brown is really into the Bible and Christian history. This book is a comic retelling of a handful of biblical stories all of which revolve around prostitution or sex in some way (except for the Cain and Abel story, which is first). The retelling are simply illustrated and cleanly drawn-out. There are some differences between these versions and the canonical biblical versions but Brown really dives into this in a long afterwards and notes sections. This is where it becomes clear that Brown is pretty obsessed with the early church and the bible. He sites dozens of books. He goes deep on the etymologies of certain Greek and Hebrew words (the true sign of serious biblical scholarship, it never ceases to amaze me that “Christians” don’t think they should learn Greek) he gives us alternate versions from non-canonical texts, we get his opinion on various Biblical theories. My favorite are A) Mary Magdalene’s (who Chester and I agree is also Mary of Bethany) feet-anointing ceremony was sexual in nature since she was a prostitute (Brown gets deep into this), a woman’s hair was thought of as very sexual at the time (and is still in large portions of the world) and “feet” was a then-common euphemism for a penis. B) Mary, Mother of Jesus, was a prostitute. This Brown based on the unknown father of her child as well as a long genealogy at the beginning of Matthew that lists women, which is very unusual, and 4 women (Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba) who people familiar with the Old Testament would know engaged in some sort of prostitution or prostitution-adjacent activity. There’s also debate over the Greek word that gets translated as “Virgin” for Mary. All very interesting, I would have just preferred Brown writing some Biblical essays, he’s well read and highlights some interesting theories. Overall, quick and good. 3 Marys.

THE BOOK OF J - DAVID ROSENBERG & HAROLD BLOOM

The Harold Bloom death rereads continue apace. This time, perhaps his second most famous, the Book of J. Well, it isn’t really a Bloom book, it’s rather a new translation of the J writer sections of the Torah from the Hebrew scholar David Rosenberg. Bloom provided commentary before and after. Full disclosure, I skimmed some of the essays at the end of the book. It’s a lot and, in true Bloom fashion, it’s mostly comparing characters to Shakespeare. But you get great Bloomism too, like he’s convinced the J is a woman. Actually, he goes far enough to name a specific woman in Solomon’s court. He also claims that YHWH is an all time great literary character, in a vein that includes King Lear and Freud’s Superego. Tho, I will say that treating YHWH as a character in a story makes more sense than thinking of him as a peerless god. He changes his mind, people argue with him, his motivations are frequently unclear, he never seems too interested in “teaching lessons” in a manner we typically think of as Godly. As a child, I always found Old Testament God off-putting and repellent. And for good reason, Ol’ Testament God is a real bummer. Bloom helpfully points out that part of this is because YHWHism replaces many gods, who represent different ideas and viewpoints, with a single God that is supposed to be everything. This changes the cosmic relationship of man to God(s). When there are many gods, mankind’s place is to navigate these (literally) timeless obligations and alliances and really think about which gods they want to worship and in what way. Monotheism proposes that God is a parent, you are a child, and that’s that on that. I’ve never found this set-up very satisfying. YHWH is more interesting when he’s one of several gods with his own personality and quarks. By the time he’s in the “real” bible he’s flat, boring and cruel. 7 Sky-Gods

MY WORK IS NOT YET DONE - THOMAS LIGOTTI

Man, when you hear the phrase “corporate horror” and the name Thomas Ligotti together, one can’t help but be excited. My brother recommended this to me. I believe he called it a novel, which is wrong. It’s 3 stories, basically a novella and two short stories, that all center around corporations and business and involve cosmic horror. I have only limited experience in the sort of Dilbert-style office shenanigans psychosexual, sadomasochistic power-games that such a setting inevitably engenders but I do share Ligotti’s loathing of meetings. Actually, that’s a huge overstatement, I don’t loathe anything as much as Ligotti loathes everything. I was a touch disappointed that he chose to go the obvious route and centers around a laid-off employee (an angry middle-aged YT guy) committing a mass shooting. Obviously, galactic horror intervenes and everything gets all cosmic and Lovecraft-y but the bones are pretty basic. It involves a lot of punishing enemies with thematically resonate torments; I’ll bet Se7en is Ligotti’s favorite movie. The title story is, like I said, a novella and takes up almost all of the book. The other two short stories at the end are both good but not top Ligotti. The middle story is about a evil yellow smog in a thinly veiled Detroit called, “Murder City”. Over the past few days I’ve really been listening to a lot of Rio Da Yung OG, who’s from Flint, along with a lot of other current Michigan rappers so I’m very in the headspace to consume art about how murderous Detroit is. Rio’s work is equally pessimistic but could certainly use a cosmic element. The final story is quite short and the most experimental, both in terms of form, it’s classifieds and memos and press releases that you have to piece together, and content. It centers around a company called Oneiricon, which is something like GloboChem from Mr. Show, that merges with everything on Earth until all that is left is to merge with the Nightmare Network. A pretty great Ligotti image, second only to “The Great Black Swine Which Wallows in a Great River of Blackness, that to us looks like sunrises and skyscrapers, like all the knotted events of the pas and the unraveling of these knots in the future” which might be peak Ligotti. So the highs in this book were pretty high but overall it fell short of my expectations. Following an aggrieved business-drone as he seeks violent revenge isn’t something I’m very interested in; there’s no shortage of that particular narrative and Ligotti doesn’t do something radical enough to not get tossed in with the rest. He might just be a victim of his own success, those first 2 short story collections are the best horror available. 3 mass shootings.

LEAVING RICHARD’S VALLEY - MICHEAL DEFORGE

Unsurprisingly, the Seattle Public Library has a pretty hip and current comix selection. I have to assume that the job to buy comix for the SPL is a very coveted and hard to get job. Very prestigious. Therefore, I ran into this when I was wandering around the library during a rainy lunch. I work downtown now and I like to meander around aimlessly on my lunch break, tho the climate in Seattle can complicate that during the DarkWetCold. Irregardless, I’ve made my way through most of the DeForge but didn’t even know about this, the newest joint. DeForge is amazing, top 10 living and creating for sure. He also worked on AdventureTime so he’s approaching young god status. This book definitely adds to his legacy. Initially, I was drawn to DeForge because of the art and the colors. His style is so unique and specific, and it seemed to me to arrive basically fully formed. The stories were always crazy and far-out, which I love, but not the most important part. This book flips that. The art is still unique and specific, it is certainly DeForge and DeForge alone, it’s more paired back and simple than his other work. Fewer big splash panels, all the characters are drawn simply, almost abstractly (raccoons are drawn as large hearts, there are large sections drawn on mostly black panels, etc.) and most shocking, there is no color. I understand that this was published a daily comic, almost all of them are four panel strips that wouldn't be out of place in a newspaper, so coloring them all, especially in the lush and thoughtful and innovative way that DeForge colors, isn’t really feasible. That all being said, he makes up for it with this with a deeper commitment to plot and character and theme. The book is about a group of animals, squirrels and spiders and racoons, etc., who live in a sort of silvian paradise lead by a beautiful shirtless human named Richard. There’s all sorts of weird cult-y rules and traditions. As you can probably gather from the title, some of the animals run afoul of the rules and are banished. They then try to start a new life in Toronto proper (towards the end of the book it’s made clear that we’re in Toronto and the valley of the title is somewhere in Hyde Park) where they deal with modern life. Like most DeForge it’s mostly whimsical and fun, though this book is more connected to real world issues than his early stuff. There’s great stuff about Gentrification (DeForge really does well drawing those “proposed use” billboards that we also have in Seattle to signify a condo is coming), art (specifically noise music, which is also very Seattle), religions and cults, friendship and revenge. Made me wish I did more cartooning and it made me hope that DeForge goes back to color. 6 Valleys. 

RUSTY BROWN - CHRIS WARE

So much despair. So much YT male sorrow. This book is about the shape and weight of two bricks, taped together. It’s understandably, given its beauty and price, in not a small amount of  demand with the Seattle Public Library system. It’s made up of a few comics, some of which I own and treasure, stitched together, and purport to only be half of some larger work, since it ends with INTERMISSION. It follows a handful of characters, who initially meet in a 70s Omaha religious school, across a few decades. It gets bleak. We get a sad teacher/sci-fi writer/father of the titular Rusty Brown (who doesn’t feature too much in this but is in other Ware stuff and also ends up sad). We get a sad bully. Ware doesn’t spare himself from his bleak cold (it appears to only ever be winter in this Omaha) world, we get a character named Chris Ware who is a sad creep. The section about the bully, Jason Lint, is god-level. We see-saw back and forth between pitying him and despising him but we feel like we both understand him and understand the ways he’s lying to himself. The way it’s formatted, from a baby’s perspective to that of a dying man and death itself, is a perfect jewel. Ware’s exploration of how trauma is passed down and how this doesn’t let people off the hook is something I’ll think about for years. Ware’s style is on full display. We get his distinctive formatting and drawing. We get tiny, meticulously rendered panels, novel lay-outs and these panels where everything is represented so cleanly and economically. The cumulative effect makes lives seem very preordained and neat, even, and maybe especially, when they seem meaningless, or like they’re falling apart. One feels like Dr. Manhattan reading this stuff. The last section is the most surprising and was the most rewarding. Earlier I wrote about how this book is really distilled YT male misery. That wasn’t fair. For what I believe is the first time in his work (and I’ve read a reasonable amount of the Chris Ware stuff) Ware centers a Black woman, Joanne Cole. Cole also faces incredible sorrows (there’s some plot about a missing daughter that gets sort of dropped right at the end and will presumably be picked up after the INTERMISSION) but she’s resilient in a way the other characters aren’t. She has hobbies she sticks with. She doesn’t ever exploit those around her the way everyone else does. Ware’s meticulous layouts allow the range of racial aggression, from micro to macro, historical to personal, to be very present but not the point. The formatting allows for us to feel their cumulative weight over time, how it would feel when all of this adds up. Joanne’s story also gives crucial background that helps to explain the socio-economic underpinnings of the earlier sections. The YT characters are largely the beneficiaries of these forces and are oblivious to and uninterested in them. I was born in Omaha, my earliest memories are from there but I haven’t been there since we left some day in 1993. This makes a strong case to never return, lest I get stuck in the gloom vortex. An amazing work. 1 pit of despair.

TOMIE: NO USE ESCAPING - JUNJI ITO

Don’t have too much to say about this one, Ito is the fucking king. Of the three longer works I’ve read from him, Uzumaki, Gyo, and this one, I’d say I rank them in that order, best to worst. It might be more than a coincidence that my ranking lines up with the order in which I read them, but irregardless, they are all very strong and very strange and very good. Tomie is structured as a series of somewhat short stories that I assume were individual issues originally. I know very little about Manga, Anime and the cultures and fandoms that surround them, so I honestly don’t know how this would have been published originally and whether or not this is unusual. Likewise, the stories could be read in basically any order it seems, especially once you’re generally familiar with Tomie the character, only a few of them connect directly, and I don’t know how common this is either (Uzumaki and Gyo, on the other hand, were quite sequential and built on one another directly). Tomie is a beautiful teenage girl, with a small beauty mark. Men are constantly falling under her spell, bringing her the things she asks for (she’s got expensive taste) and killing on her command. However, they always end up killing and mutilating Tomie herself. So far, so Lacanian. It twists further and gets really Ito-y when you realize each shread or piece of Tomie grows back the body in an extremely gross process. I was a bit worried about how “normal” the idea of a femme fatale, especially a teenage girl, was but Ito manages to dip the story in so much body-horror and disgusting terror it could only be him. I think I’ve read all the long Ito now (except maybe one about Frankenstein?) so Manga people, let me know: what else is like this? 4 beauty marks

POISONER IN CHIEF - STEPHEN KINZER

Another one that was a long time coming. This is basically the book that CHAOS wanted to be, an overall history of MK-ULTRA and related CIA mind-fuckery as well as a semi-biography of Sidney Gottlieb, the man who ran these programs. MK-ULTRA is one of those things that you hear about growing up, especially as you start to take acid and think about the government and spend time around conspiracy people, but it’s always and purposefully confusing and hard to tell what’s true and what’s paranoia. The whole scope, as outlined in this book, is insane. The line runs like this. After WWII the US government, through Operation Paperclip and other programs, recruited both Nazi and Imperial Japanese doctors that had preformed unethical experiments (giving folks at Treblinka mescaline then interrogating and murdering them, preforming waking vivisection, testing bioweapons on people) most notably, famous Nazi Kurt Blome and Shiro Ishii the guy who ran unit 731. From there it moves to Operations Bluebird and Artichoke, a program wherein American intelligence people drugged then interrogated then killed Nazis and Japanese soldiers. This lead to MK-ULTRA which, eventually, yielded the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual, used in Vietnam, and the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, used by right-wing military dictators in Latin America. These same extreme techniques get revived post 9/11, though we’ll probably have to wait 40 years or so to find out exactly what was going on in those interrogations. Turns out the more lurid stuff, the LSD drug stuff, doesn’t work or at least not the way they wanted it to. “Brainwashing was largely a process of isolating a human being, keeping him out of contact, putting him under long stress in relationship to interviewing and interrogation. They could produce any change that may, without having to resort to any kind of esoteric means.” according the CIA psychologist John Gittinger. Between that and sleep deprivation, they ended up not even needing the totally insane methods they developed. They gave LSD to folks for weeks at a time while playing message-filled tapes in total sensory isolation. They injected people with LSD every day for 15 months. They drugged each other so often there are concerns from other, non MK-ULTRA employees, that Gottlieb would spike the punch at the holiday party. Beyond the psychedelic drug stuff, Gottlieb also deployed his knowledge of chemistry to other nefarious ends. He builds devices to kill Castro, he creates poison for Zhou Enlai, he travels to Africa to train a CIA station chief in how to use the poison he created to kill Lumumba. He creates suicide pills for agents on secret missions. It is fucking crazy and it certainly makes you wonder what we don’t know (maybe that Chavez conspiracy deserves a second look), especially since Gottlieb wisely destroyed everything he could when it looked like there might be the slightest suggestion of oversight. Most of the stuff we know about concerns operations in the USA (Midnight Climax, etc) while I’m sure the evilest shit when down in secret prison abroad, which Gottlieb would visit. Like all good conspiracies, the secondary characters are so strange and keep popping up in such strange places it’s hard not to build a web in your mind that connects everything. There’s the famous magician John Mulholland, who creates a manual about how to use sleight-of-hand to surreptitiously drug people. George Hunter White, the drug-addict cop who framed and destroyed Billie Holiday. Jolly West, who features more in CHAOS, who killed an elephant with LSD, worked with Jack Ruby and Patty Hearst, and was around the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. Whitey Bulger, the famous criminal, was given LSD by IV without his knowledge for 15 months in an Atlanta prison. When he heard about MK-ULTRA in the 70’s he finally figures out what happened to him and vowed to kill the doctor who’d given it to him. It’s also amazing how many moments in counter-culture history the CIA affected. That famous Life article about Maria Sabina? CIA funded. The study that introduced Ken Kessey to acid? CIA funded. The study that introduced Ginsberg to acid? CIA. At one point in the early 50’s the CIA bought and then controlled all of the world’s acid. So much of this was done to counter a perceived Soviet effort to create powerful psych-weapons, and how much of this the USSR was actually doing seems unanswered to me. Perhaps there’s another book about this. Additionally, this book doesn’t go too much into the Frank Olsen stuff, especially w/r/t the US using bio-weapons in the Korean War. Though, for all that stuff, Wormwood does exist. I wonder if reading this book will affect me the next time I take acid (which I try to do every few years or so)? You think of LSD as this groovy accident that the CIA just happened to be interested in during one of their more paranoid moments, Not something that is basically a failed bioweapon. I wonder what book like this I’m going to be reading in 40 years about what the CIA is up to now. My guesses, obviously the rendition stuff, I’m sure they’ve tortured and killed those people. Like I said before, this has got me thinking about Chavez and other possible assassinations. Tho the big one is certainly Epstein, I’m guessing we’ll have to wait about a half century on that stuff. Irregardless, this book was amazing, our government is insane. This is what happens when no one ever gets in trouble for this shit. All these guys live long lives and die with their reputations intact. 25 mind-melting trips.

FEARING THE BLACK BODY: THE RACIAL ORIGINS OF FAT PHOBIA - SABRIA STRINGS

It’s wonderful and a little strange when you find a book on exactly the topic you were hoping for. After reading those 2 books about beauty and ugliness as well as excerpts and online stuff about aesthetics and the human body as well as pondering and considering the topics for my entire adult life. It’s a subject that I assume fascinates basically everyone since we all have bodies and desire to be considered beautiful. However, every time I’m reading about this stuff I get annoyed that they’re avoiding race. Well, this book fixes that. I know from Nell Painter that even in its infancy, race theory was obsessed with beauty and ranking beauty and finding the “most beautiful” people. In fact, it was this quest, as helmed by Blumenbach and Meiners that left us with the silly designation of “Caucasian” for YT people. Strings does a great job showing how just as Europeans began designing and implementing a global system to enslave and annihilate they need to construct hierarchies that explain, justify and even demand the “vast machine” (to quote THE SLAVE SHIP) being put in place. It’s illuminating how quickly the Europeans connect sloth and fatness and blackness. Likewise, true Europeans were tall and pale and thin and, thanks to a dash of Protestantism, hardworking. The book gets right at it and points out how this biopower, this idea that there is an ideal body that can be achieved, that not having it is a sign of laziness and that the best “ideal bodies” are white, cuts two ways. To quote the book, it’s used to “Degrade black women and discipline white women.” (emphasis Strings’). I really enjoyed sections at the end regarding BMI and how this and other metrics were designed for/by YT bodies, and for insurance companies who are seeking to impose a very specific worldview w/r/t medicine (I see this pernicious attitude corrode actual care constantly non-stop w/r/t mental health) and how Black women do have higher BMIs on average but not the same mortality correlation. I would have liked to see this idea explored further, though that might be more a doctor thing than a social science thing. Likewise, the book focuses heavily on the ways that this regime is focused on YT women (men, of course, are not at all interested in having their bodies criticized in this way nor to have them become the site of a political project) but features fewer instances of ways that this narrative was understood and subverted by Black people. The book features a long section about the founding of Cosmo and the ways that magazine sought to champion a specific YT body; Sir Mix-a-Lot famous said, “So Cosmo said you’re fat / Well I ain’t down with that.” I would have liked more history and anthropology around how different Black aesthetic ideals were developed and propagated in the same milieu that gave us the body image, if only to offer another perspective on the main story Strings is trying to tell. Irregardless, very interesting and had me thinking. Due to the cover illustration and title, it was somewhat hard to read on the train. 1886 beautiful pale YT women.

THE SLAVE SHIP: A HUMAN HISTORY - MARCUS REDIKER

Oof. I suppose one doesn’t read a book called THE SLAVE SHIP and expect it not to be intense, but still, oof. Rediker also wrote that MANY-HEADED HYDRA book I read a while ago, which I found to be incredibly (and I say this as a very pro-pyrate person) pro-pyrate but also amazing and detailed. He clearly knows a lot about this time period (1500-1900) and location (the floating worlds atop the Atlantic and the landbased worlds they touch) so he’s the perfect person to take this subject on. Since the book focuses on what is, at heart, a business venture and thus drenched in logbooks and bureaucratese I worried about being overwhelmed with statistics and figures. In fact, the books most interesting parts focus on the Slave Trade’s role in creating the sorts of multinational corporations and ways of doing business we see everywhere today, where things like your bedsheets or phones are at the end of long, multi-continent processes, some parts of which seem evil. But Rediker sidesteps this problem with the books layout. We get chapters that mix maritime technology with history with zoology with political science with anthropology. We also get chapters that focus on single people (John Newton, Equiano) and traces their lives and shows us how living inside this vast machinery would have felt. I guess the most heartbreaking stuff is to see how even as the modern racial lines were being drawn the strong/rich in all racial categories (as a quick aside, the only aspect of the Atlantic Slave Trade we don’t spend any time with is the enslavement and shipping of Native Americans) were engaged in the most brutal sorces of exploitation. In Africa, there’s multiple accounts of the more coastal Fante, who at the time were  building empire and enslaving the inland Chamba (who the Europeans intially called the “Dunco” which was a term they learned from the Fante which actually meant “stupid person”), raising up on slave ships (the Europeans, predictibly, spend alot of time sharing gossip about which tribes and ethnic groups were most prone to insurrections on the the ships) only to end up focused on fighting the Chamba onboard. On the YT side (and this is the period where the idea of being YT and who is YT is first being created. Rediker points out that on many ships’ logs every crew member was listed as YT, despite some of them being Black Africans) Rediker points out how the economics of the triangle trade meant that you didn’t need a very large crew to go back from the New World to Europe. Since such ships only carried goods and didn’t have a prisoner that needed constant guarding, you could get by with about half of the crew. And remember, the people who didn’t make it back to England wouldn’t be paid. So captains were incentivized to leave sailors who were sick or weak leading to a situation where New World ports like Charleston and Kingston were full of “Wharfingers/Scrowbankers/Beach Honers” stranded poor sailors, often with brutal West African diseases or parasites. Otherwise, the stuff about how these ships were followed by shiver of sharks, anxious to eat the dead and living thrown overboard, which the captains exploited as a source of controlling terror, might have been the most chilling. There are terrible echoes of today towards the end of the book when British groups are seeking to outlaw the trade while others seek to make the process more humane. There were several laws passed about how many slaves could be on what size ships. There’s fascinating stuff about how African’s assumed the Europeans were cannibals and/or buying these people the sacrifice to their god while at the same time there are dozens of accounts about how these Africans are cannibals and how the slaves they (the Euorpeans) are buying are being saved from human sacrifice. A powerful metaphor, hard to tell if it’s euphemism or dysphemism. Anyway, I loved it, it fits in with my last few years interest and fascination with this time period. I’d like a book that more directly explores the link between this trade and the creation of capitalism, a topic that THE SLAVE SHIP touches on but I’d love to think more about. 2.5 billion ships. 

THE BEAUTIFUL ONES - PRINCE

We were robbed. I knew that before I read this book, but it’s all the more clear now. We knew the moment Prince died (the day before my birthday) that we were robbed a few decades of untouchable, god-level music. People like me had robbed ourselves into never seeing Prince live in-person. In terms of general vibes, the loss has been devastating. However, we’ve now learned that we were also robbed of a great Prince book. Dan Piepenbring (who, I’m just now learning, also helped Tom O’Neill write CHAOS. Get out of my head Dan), the Paris review editor and co-author of this book, met with Prince a few times about the project but Prince passed before anything substantial could be done. Piepenbring illuminates the whole processes of meeting Prince and getting the job and the conversations they had before his passing. Prince talks about how he wants this book to be a guide for musicians to avoid exploitation in the music business, and/or a book about his mom/dad, and/or an annotation of his lyrics, and/or a more traditional autobiography and/or a “guide to the brilliant community” (my favorite, he never explains what “the brilliant community” is. I assume it’s like MLK’s “beloved community” but sexier). Sadly, we get almost none of this, or, to be more generous, a mini-sampler. Prince writes 7 chapters about his early life, which are reproduced in photocopies of the literal pages Prince wrote them on, as well as typed version that includes the Prince idiosyncrasies like using 2’s and 4’s and U’s and 👁. It’s a little hard to read but it’s funny to think that Prince did this always. It’s pretty interesting too. Prince’s first kiss was with a YT girl in racist  Minnesota, his first memory is his mother winking at him, his teachers wouldn’t call him “Prince” (more racism) so they called him “Skipper”. All fascinating, Prince had a good sense of what a reader would be interested in, it’s an immortal wound that we’ll never get to read his thoughts on the heights of his career or his thoughts on his musical peers (though he does shit on Bruce Springsteen, which is wonderful). The rest is filler. It’s photos and bric-a-brac that Piepenbring found at Paisley Park. Prince is like Rasputin or Che in that he never photographs less than perfectly and many are of a young upstart Prince. It was really enduring to see that he photographed the literal “Sunset Blvd” sign, so obviously glamoured by LA. There are some interesting storyboards for Purple Rain, but the whole book can be read in a day and if you only wanted pics, I’m sure there’s no shortage of Prince photo books (to say nothing of google image). Either way, Prince is immortal. 1999 doves.