HOW TO DO NOTHING: RESISTING THE ATTENTION ECONOMY - JENNY ODELL

AVAILABLE

  Another one printed off a pdf at work. Even before our libraries closed indefinitely the backlog for this title was in the hundreds. I think I was number 211 or something. For whatever reason this book really took off a few months ago, she got on NPR a few times, the ultimate kingmaker in the SPL ecosystem, and now since I’m trapped inside I decided to print it off and read it. I can see why it’s so popular. It’s anti-social media but written from inside the tech world (Odell has always written about and worked in the tech field), it’s environmentally conscious, it’s breezy chapters fly by. It touches on a lot of themes that I’ve been interested in for years and years. In highschool I was obsessed (to an extent I still am) with a book called “DOING NOTHING: A HISTORY OF LOAFER, LOUNGERS, SLACKERS AND BUMS which covers the same ground but is less polemic and more historical. They both cover the classics like Bartleby, Diogenes, etc. DOING NOTHING does a better job talking about the nuance of “doing nothing” and how people have used “doing nothing” to resist the darker aspects of progress.  It’s also, notably, pre-internet/attention economy, which Odell is focused on. Odell is from Cupertino (more on that later) and has worked at Facebook and spent her whole life, professional and otherwise, in the tech field. Or more specifically, the social/information tech world, which has blown up in the course of her lifetime. I’m less interested in the mechanics of how these apps are designed for maximum addictiveness, and frankly, less concerned with the sorts of rich-tech people who feel like they’re spending too much time online or on social media and want a way to reconnect with themselves. Odell does do a good job pointing out how much of the industry that has sprung up around helping people disconnect or to do a “tech-fast” is a capitalist trick to get more productivity when you, of course, return to work. The worst example of this is the trend to microdose LSD to be more creative at your job. Nothing is sadder to me than taking LSD to work more. And Odell is correct that the people who tell you how busy they are all the time inevitably have a bullshit job and are insanely tedious. BULLSHIT JOBS by Graeber actually gets at this dynamic better and is another book that HTDN is adjacent to but worse than. The most clarifying thing about the book to me was something Odell elided and overlooked. Since I was younger, but especially since moving to Seattle, I’ve been interested in bioregionalism. Seattle is located in Cascadia, the Amerikan biogregion with the biggest fanbase (and perhaps the only one with its own name), and I’m generally for any effort to break-up Amerika, but there was always something about the idea that bothered me and Odell helped me put her finger on it. She writes about how she lives in Oakland but is from Cupertino and allows the concept of bioregionalism to speak of herself as a “local” of the area. She makes a similar point when discussing the importance of knowing what tribal land you stand on (another Seattle specialty) since Cupertino and Oakland are again part of the same tribal lands. This sort of emphasis is interesting to consider but erases so much it comes off as YT nonsense. Oakland is truly West Coast Boston in terms of who they allow to be “from Oakland”. These issues are interesting and thorny and we’re going to have to solve them if we’re going to deal with the larger environmental issues that Odell wants to tackle, we can’t elide issues of class and race when we’re talking about them. It makes all of this seem more and more like a rich person problem which I don’t think is Odell intention. I just wish the book focused more on people more broadly, rather than just educated Bay-area YTs in the technology field. Also, it’s very strange that both Odell and Jon Franzen have both written about bird-watching as an emblematic activity for an engaged life. Nothing.

MOCKERIES AND METAMORPHOSES OF AN AZTEC GOD: TEZCATLIPOCA, “LORD OF THE SMOKING MIRROR” - GUILHEM OLIVER trans. MICHEAL BESSON

Very technical. I suppose I did buy an out-of-print book, translated from Spanish, about a less popular Mesoamerican God but long portions of this were boarding on too dry to read. Oliver gets deep in it, spending pages and pages evaluating different pieces of archaeological evidence, reviewing all of the 500 years of commentary, and passing judgement over whether or not the persona depicted is Tezcatlipoca. As he puts it, “due to the “elasticity” of pre-Colombian deities, their ability to change shape and become astral, human, animal, vegetal, mineral, entities and step easily over these boundaries we assign these categories; and their capacity to fuse with other gods, dividing into 2, sometimes 3 or 4 different entities.” aka this work can be tricky. Tezcatlipoca is also worshiped not just by the people who are historically called the Aztecs (but who are actually more accurately called the “Mexica”) but also by groups across what is now Mexico and central America for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. In the most provocative section of the book, Oliver highlights a connection that other scholars have apparently noticed, “Tezcatlipoca is supposed to have inherited his warlike character and his invisible and unfathomable nature from the Great Spirit of the North American Plains Indians.” I find such a connection very interesting and exciting but it speaks to how all over the place and how many holes there are in pre-Colombian religious studies. I like to imagine that the Mediterranean world was whipped out in a manner similar to the ancient Mexicans and then think about how one would piece together the aspects of Jupiter or even how you tell that Zeus and Jupiter are the same deity. But difficulty aside, this book is full of interesting insights and speculation about Aztec spirituality. I was especially interested in Toxcatl, the month of celebration for Tezcatlipoca, which culminates in the sacrifice of Tezcatlipoca’s ixiptla (a human who has been living as Tezcatlipoca for a year). The idea of a god being the sacrifice to itself reminds me of Chhinnamasta. Likewise, many of Tezcatlipoca’s aspects seem, to me, to be preserved in Santa Muerte. But that’s probably a theory for another time. I’m very sympathetic to the idea that the universe/fate is cruel and this should be reflected in the gods themselves. Tezcatlipoca both revels fates as well as mocks man for their misfortune. I find this much more in keeping with lived reality than the ideas in mainstream Christianity (tho, Gnosticism has some demiurge/Tezcatlipoca crossover it seems). Tezcatlipoca is also a sort of Shiva/Kali energy given his association with the ends of eras and cycles and ages. He was apparently behind the many prophetic dreams and events that overtook the Mexica before Cortez’s arrival. I think I would have preferred more of the high-minded theory and speculation and less on the nitty gritty of who this god is on such-and-such page of this-or-that codex but I’m glad to take it. Excellent god. 2 Death.

THE LATHE OF HEAVEN - URSULA K. LEGUIN

AVAILABLE

It’s all slappers from Yay-Area Legend Ursula LeGuin. I’ve now read 3 of her novels, which, admittedly, are probably the 3 most famous, and they all go super maney. I would say this is the least of the 3 (THE DISPOSSESSED and THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS) but, taken together, this is as strong a series of novels as exists in 20th century sci-fi. The plot concerns a man whose dreams become reality, but only he notices. Every time he wakes up, it is in a new reality, only he remember the previous worlds. Eventually a psychiatrist figures out what is going on and tries to use a machine he’s created, along with hypnotism, to manipulate the dreams to both build utopia and, of course, for personal aggrandizement. It really reminds me of STALKER, the greatest Russian Movie, in that it constantly interrogates the nature of desires and what it would really mean to get what you want. This book would also make a wonderful movie (addendum: I just looked it up and there was, apparently, a movie made 1980 as well as another version in 2002). It is perhaps the most film-able of the LeGuin (though I personally prefer to see a TLHOD). The book takes place in Portland (which becomes the Earth Capital in several of the timelines) and features a lot of Mt. Hood (the volcano erupts in several timelines). Always good to see the PNW getting some fictional shine. LeGuin is also frequently background environmental issues, which feels really ahead of its time. She also chooses to at least address issues of race and prominently feature non-YT characters. Basically none of the other YT sci-fi people do this, no one is more woke (a joke, what I actually mean is no one is more engaged in the real world that most people actually live in). There are aliens in this book towards the end that speak gnomically and seem to be sort of space-hippies. They really reminded me of the aliens in FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS. Like most LeGuin, there’s lots of Daoism. Lots of characters learning that they must not fight against a natural flow. Lots of talk about balance and the eternity of nature. Lots of Lao Tzu and Zhuang Zhou (the king) quotes. i’m pretty partial to “Heaven and Earth are not Humane.”. Excellent. Do I need to read WIZARD OF EARTHSEA next? 1 Lathe

ZEN AND THE BIRDS OF APPETITE - THOMAS MERTON

AVAILABLE

The pandemic lockdown continues, the libraries remain closed, so I’ve had to dip into the stash of books I actually own. ZATBOA is actually a book of my dad’s, no surprise, that I copped the last time I was in NC. The receipt in the book makes it clear he bought it in ‘96. It’s been a while since I’ve read a book of Christian theology and it was interesting to dust off the ol’ Christian thinking muscles. It’s amazing how not for me this book is. I’m trying to put myself in the mindset of someone who would have read this book when it came out. It was published in ‘68, so basic non-Christian religious ideas (like, say, dharma, or meditation) were not commonly known by YT amerikans. Likewise, the level of Christian chauvinism was, somehow, even more extreme that it is now so Merton spends a lot of time trying to convince us that Buddhism, Zen specifically, is to be considered the equal, in terms of spiritual insight, to Christianity. This comes off as extremely strange these days, the idea of a Catholic priest being both a font of spiritual insight as well as a big-hearted world citizen, sensitive to other religions, seems like it’s from another planet. Merton is really interested in taking some of the practices and insights of Zen and using them as non-specific spiritual tools. He claims more than once that Zen (and by this I think he actually means Zazen, the practice of sitting, not Zen as a whole) can be removed from Buddhism and used as a sort of universal tool for spiritual growth. In some ways, he was ahead of his time. This has largely happened. Mindfulness and mediation and, especially, yoga are now common “spiritual” practices in the West and they’ve been basically completely removed from their place in non-Western religious structures. I’m not sure this is as easy as he thinks it is, or even if it is possible. I would like to know if he thinks a religious practice like communion or confession could be removed without too much trouble from their Catholic contexts and still be considered “communion” and “confession” still provide spiritual succor. He makes what I would consider the classic Perennial (one could say the error itself is perennial) Philosophy mistake of assuming all religions and religious practices points towards the same thing, despite the religions themselves saying the opposite. Take for example Merton insistence that the state of Nirvana or Zen enlightenment is the same as being a perfect vessel for God. Despite the fact that the Buddhist scholars frequently talk about emptiness and becoming a void and Christian writers are always speaking of being filled up with a personal, knowable god. It strikes me as quite a stretch to assume these writers are describing the same thing. All that said, I really enjoyed the back and forth with D. T. Suzuki, it was cool to see two masters of their respective traditions try to talk with one another, even if I disagree on how much they actually agreed on. I’m certainly prepared to believe this is due to anti-Christian bias on my part. The book also includes a really fascinating discussion on Paradise vs. Heaven. I had never considered a distinction but Merton points out Paradise is a state before a knowledge of good and evil, an innocence, while heaven is something different. That was a cool little thought cul-de-sac. It also includes this quote: “This is of course to be sought above all in the revelation of the Holy Spirit, the mysterious Gift in which God becomes one with the Believer in order to know and love Himself in the Believer.” I spent a lot of time inside of Christianity and I honestly have no idea what this is suppose to really mean nor have the mysteries of the Holy Spirit ever been described to me in these terms. Why would God want to know himself? Why would he need the Believer to do this? Likewise for God knowing himself. Very strange. 0 voids. 

TRICK BABY - ICEBERG SLIM

Let’s be controversial for a second: this book is better than PIMP. I know, I know, Iceberg Slim is basically synonymous with his debut novel/autobiography and it’s justifiably famous. PIMP is an amazing book. The lingo and vibe is unmatched, it’s a truly unbelievable historical document (while “fiction” most of the main characters are easily ID’d figures from the Chicago Black underground) and is the bedrock of so much art in the last 50 years. However, due to it’s status as a pseudo-autobiography, I’ve always felt the ending was lack-luster. In PIMP Iceberg Slim goes to prison as an older man (in his 40’s I believe) and decides he’s too old for the game and retires to be a writer (and to write the book we are now reading, like the end of THE HOBBIT). Obviously, this was great for Robert Beck, the actual person, but as an ending to the novel it’s a little lack-luster. TRICK BABY solves these problems. It’s very similar in set-up to PIMP. The framing device is that Iceberg Slim, the character from PIMP (in real life, Robert Beck’s street handle was “Cavanugh Slim”) , is in jail, considering suicide, when White Folks, the main character of TRICK BABY becomes his cellmate then, as in PIMP, he recounts his life story with an emphasis on the lurid details of street life. Unlike Iceberg, Folks is not a pimp, he’s a con-artist. He comes to Chicago, meets a bunch of older con men, like Blue, and lives the high-life as a criminal. White Folks gets his name from his YT father. He’s constantly teased and called “Trick Baby” tho we learn that his mother and father were in a long-term relationship before his YT dad couldn’t handle the 1920’s miscegenation shame anymore. TRICK BABY is lesser than PIMP during the middle sections where the older hustler explains the game (conning or pimping respectively). In PIMP this part is fascinating and profoundly bleak. In TRICK BABY this section is confusing since the scams they’re running, during the 30’s and 40’s (the narrator draft dodges WWII and continuously refers to FDR as a “fantastic cripple”) are hard to understand in detail. Often they seem to involve setting up a fake storefront, which seems impractical, or rely on the details of getting a check cashed, something I don’t know too much about.  But while the details are complicated the gist of the scams is that Blue approaches YT marks and convinces them to help him rob the YT White Folks or, if the mark is YT, White Folks convinces them to rob Blue out of money. The racism of the mark backfires, it leads them to trust someone they shouldn’t and their greed blinds them to the red-flags, and Blue and White Folks walk away. Unlike PIMP, this book has a more narratively satisfying final section. White Folks gets obsessed with a YT woman who doesn’t know his true identity. He eventually attends a party with the girl’s father and a chief of police (both YT, obviously) where the dad goes on a big rant about how the YT man has to control the Black population, not through brute force, like the ignorant police captain advocates but rather by cultivating and subverting a Black leadership class. Additionally, White Folks struggles with alcohol addiction in a way I found believable and engaging. All things considered, this book is easier to take that PIMP (mostly because the victims of the hustler are less sympathetic, both books are pretty violent and brutal) and while not as shocking and revelatory on first read, it’s more cohesive and put together as a book. I believe White Folks is the main character in another Iceberg Slim book, so when (if?) the libraries open again, I’ll have to grab that. I think I’ve now read 4 out of the 10 Iceberg Slim books. 92 long cons. As always, here’s a list of the street names from the book. I’m partial to Precious Jimmy and Trapeze Willie:

-White Folks/Trick Baby

-Old Blue

-The Memphis Kid

-St. Louis Shorty

-Dot

-Mose

-Felix the Fixer

-Nino

-The Vicksburg Kid

-Butcher Knife Brown

-Rev. Josephus

-Livin’ Swell 

-One Pocket

-Precious Jimmy 

-Old Man Mule

-Dirty Red

-Sweeny the Snake

-Slew-Foot Frank

-Princess Tanja

-Helga the Swede

-Black Kate

-Buster Bang Bang

-Trapeze Willie

-Hasting Street Harvey

CHAOSMOSIS: AN ETHICO-AESTHETIC PARADIGM - FELIX GUATTARI

AVAILABLE

 Another book that’s hard to get/out of print that I downloaded then printed off. This one’s a motherfucker. I knew this going in, I’ve been fascinated by the Deluze-iverse, which, like most Amerikans I discovered through the much more accessible Foucault. I’ve been through ANTI-OEDIPUS and fucked around with 1000 PLATEAUS and THE LOGIC OF SENSE but never in a proper academic setting and, obviously, in translation. I dig the vibe. It’s very heady, boarding on nonsensical. D&G will use technical scientific vocab in a metaphorical sense. They’re given to cryptic statements and paradox. You can go paragraphs and chapters having no idea what the fuck they’re talking about. Infuriating for some, but since their whole philosophical project is against totalized meanings or transcendent consistencies, the very form of the books themselves acts as an example of what they're talking about. Deluze is the more famous of the two, for reasons that aren’t 100% clear to me (because he wrote more?) but I’ve always been more interested in Guattari. Unlike the totally academic Deluze who taught college and wrote books and was that weird French thing of a person famous for being smart. As an Amerikan I cannot relate, we basically have the opposite system. Guattari interests me because he actually did something in the real world. He ran a psychiatric hospital for decades and pioneered new methods of analysis and less fascist techniques for running such institutions. It matters a lot to me that he was engaged with actual people, purely theoretical texts are occasionally interesting but frustratingly useless to those of us who work in this field. Also, this book features heavily in Erik Davis’ HIGH WEIRDNESS. Irregardless, you get what you expect from this. Large portions were really dense and inscrutable. Moments of it were brilliant and changed the way I think about some of the work I do and the people I hang out with (esp. the psychotics and schizophrenics). Additionally, Guattari is very ahead of the curve when writing, from the late 80s, about how new modes of subjectivity would be necessary to avoid an oncoming ecological crisis. He even coins the term “Ecosophy” to describe what’s needed. We might be fucked because we didn’t take the advice when given. It’s always fun to try to read something like this, it’s like maxing out weights at the gym, you’ve got to really be stretching and squeezing intellectually/emotionally to grok what’s going on. Additionally, I’m always a fan of complication and against metanarratives or reduction. Here’s a quote of him explaining schizoanalysis: “rather than moving in the direction of reductionist modifications which simplify the complex…[schizoanalysis] will work towards its complexification, its processual enrichment, towards the consistency of its virtual lines of bifurcation and differentiation, in short towards its ontological heterogeneity.” As a quick aside, does anyone besides folks in France, actually offer this type of analysis to the public? I have the same question about Lacanian analysis, They both seem like theoretical frameworks rather than real-life tools. Too bad, I feel like I could use this type of therapy. 1000 Plateaus

THE ETHICS OF SPACE: HOMELESSNESS AND SQUATTING IN URBAN ENGLAND - STEPH GROHMANN

AVAILABLE

I didn’t read this as a traditional “book” in the sense of bound pages I paid for. Rather, somewhat in the spirit of the sort of anarchist squatting this book reports on, I printed the book from a free pdf I found online.  All and all, a nice way to read a book, perhaps not as permanent as a traditional book but I liked the size and it wasn’t hardcover. Plus, since I work at a homeless shelter, I think it would be fair to call this professional development. Actually, it is my work that drew me to this book originally and it’s my work that colored my reading. The book is basically 2 things: first, it’s an academic, anthropological treatment of the issues surrounding homelessness (in England in particular, but this part of the book is broad and applies to the work I do here in Amerika). This part is bibliographically dense and theoretically engaged. The other part of the book relays Grohmann’s personal experiences with homelessness and squatting in Bristol. She’s a Austrian Anthropology student who slowly integrates into the squatter-scene, lives at various squats and gives us some interesting tidbits about the lifestyle, eventually lives in her car before getting a more stable job and finishing the book. I found this part of the book slightly less interesting. Besides my general complaints about ethnographies (too long to get into here) this part also seems like fantasy for someone from the USA. In England, due to centuries of property laws that Grohmann gets into, it seems pretty easy to squat. Any vacant home can be squatted and it seems somewhat bureaucratically time-consuming to evict. A true golden age. This changes during the writing of the book as right-wing English politicians change the rules in the country. I know things have been different in certain parts of the USA at certain times (look at LES in the 80’s) but in my experience, Amerikan squats, especially politically engaged ones, are broken up by the police, violently and quickly. Amerikans’ love and religious veneration of private property makes squatting abhorrent. 

The theoretical parts were deeply interesting and challenging to me. The parts about the ways in which social services and homeless shelters deploy defensible architecture and distorted engagements (defined as when the government or agency exacerbates the vulnerability of poverty or subverts the poors’ own efforts to transform and change their world) rings all too true. I see the us vs. them attitude in other care-workers as well as myself. Everything in the homeless services world (and I would argue the larger do-gooder-industrial-complex) revolves around a one-way I’m-helping-you-because-you’re-helpless mindset. It’s bad but it was helpful to see a more academic treatment of this felt phenomena.  Likewise, the scholarship around “social defeat” and the ways this defeat shades into mental illness, especially psychosis. The play between social power and individual mental health is very helpful in this neoliberal, your-problems-are-yours-alone-and-probably-just-brain-chemistry-here-take-this-pill age and way of thinking about mental health. I hope people I work with read this book. 1676 Squats

THE DREAM LIFE OF BALSO SNELL/A COOL MILLION - NATHANAEL WEST

It’s not too often I get to finish the oeuvre of a certain author. There are maybe only half a dozen authors whose entire bodies (work-wise) I’ve absorbed. Now, by making it through this short book, I’ve finished the other 50% of West’s work. I can honestly say I loved them all. MISS LONELYHEARTS is the obvious peak but now I can say with authority that each opus slaps. Jonathan Lethem claimed that West’s unwritten works are the greatest shadow corpus in American literature and it’s hard to argue when someone goes 4 for 4 with novels before they’re forty. That being said, I think I like these two earlier, and much less famous, novels more than most people would. They are very ridiculous and not “literary” in the character-driven, emotionally realistic sense. In the case of TDLOBS it’s also quite scatological. Actually, the author it most reminded me of was Pynchon, full of silly names and style-pastiche/parody; the sort of thing that’s aiming for a smart-guy-goofing-off vibe. TDLOBS is about the titular Snell climbing into the asshole of the Trojan horse and then wondering around the insides of the horse (that are apparently like a non-wooden horse’s) meeting characters that basically just rant at him and give them their weirdo small bite, Canterbury-tales style. We get pamphlets, crime journals, poems, playlettes, letters, a story about a chain of biographies of biographers, it’s a lot. We never stay with any character, even Snell, long enough for them to grow real characteristics but it’s this whiplash that makes the book fun. It’s over before it grows tedious. A COOL MILLION is likewise in a strange style. I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone who’s read a Horatio Alger book. He’s had a very unusual artistic afterlife where the actual art he produced is basically completely unread but the ideas that he championed are thoroughly part of the mainstream. Perhaps because his brand of dumb, boot-straps capitalist propaganda was eventually repackaged to more success by Ayn Rand (who I have read and is quite bad). Irregardless, Alger was a tremendously popular author during West’s brief time alive and A COOL MILLION is a send-up of the Alger myth. You get the classic setup, where a poor but hardworking boy moves to the big bright city to seek his fortune through his hard work and gumption, but then West turns it on it’s head. Instead of a hardworking everyman moving up in the world due to his industriousness, Lemuel Pitkin, the hardworking and naive main character has a series of terrible things happen to him in his pursuit of the American Dream. He’s constantly exploited and taken advantage of, the All-American Girl he’s in love with is kidnapped and sold into YTSlavery in bizarre and somewhat racist (perhaps knowingly so? The tone during these parts, which feature a sort of Fu Manchu parody, was confusing) subplot. He is physically damaged and taken apart, losing toes and eyes and limbs, as he pursues wealth. He’s guided by a sort of demonic capitalist who was the previous President of the USA who seeks to reclaim power. Like all stories about a fascist taking over Amerika, it’s almost unreadable now because it’s so on the nose. The guy even talks about making amerika great again. It’s too much. I liked the novel, tho it’s probably my least favorite of the 4 Wests. I’d’ say they go: MISS LONELYHEARTS, LOCUST, BALSO then MILLION. Maybe I should watch the movies he wrote. 37 lives cut short.

O JOSEPHINE! - JASON

One of the things I most admire about cartoonists is their ability to hone a specific style so that anything they draw looks like them. Frankly, I really wish I could do this. Jason has the obvious stylistic flourishes in that his characters tend to be BoJack style dog-men (other animals to a lesser extent) but beyond that his drawings have a cleanliness and spareness that I think of as both quietly sad and profoundly Scandinavian. I’m a huge partisan of his comic “Angst” where a character wordlessly waits for the bus.  Jason’s best stuff combines this drawing style with silly, genre-bending, sad stories. I KILLED ADOLF HITLER remains my favorite. This book, which I didn’t even know existed, was the last book I grabbed (along with a Nate West book that I’ve almost finished) before the library went into lock-down. Damn this COVID19 plague-world. No libraries. Irregardless, O Josephine is a collection of 4 short comics that are not connected. I wonder if they were published together in this manner in Norway or if this particular volume is a “collected works” so to speak. I would say I enjoyed most to least basically in the order they were presented. The title story is also the final one and my least favorite. It concerns a quasi-modern version of Napoleon and his love-life with Josephine. It was silly and funny in the way Jason can often be, but I just didn’t hit for me. The second story also takes a real person and presents a fictional autobiography, this time Leonard Cohen. I found this story much better, parts of it were almost Calvino-esq in tone. The first story involve a hike around Ireland. It’s the most realistic (I assume Jason actually went on this walk) story but I liked it much more than I thought I would, Jason is best at small moments and hiking basically only provides this sort of revelation. There’s no big reveal (except that Jason like Bruce Springsteen, a devastating blow). Finally, the second to last story is more typical Jason; it’s a genre/crime story attached to quiet, pensive characters. Jason’s style made it hard for me to tell characters apart and thus rendered the ending confusing (he’s also messing with the temporarily which doesn’t help). I had to reread the story to simply understand what had happened. It was more clear the second time but only reminded me of his better crime stuff like LEFT-BANK GANG or WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS. Not the strongest Jason but any Jason is fine right now. We’re quarantined so what can you do? 65 Blank faced animal characters.

WORSE THAN SLAVERY - DAVID OSHINKSY

I suppose one can’t complain about a book called WORSE THAN SLAVERY  being too dark but it is bleak. The book purports to be largely about Parchman Farm, the state prison in Mississippi, which is justifiably famous for being a slave plantation, but is more generally about crime and punishment in the South, particularly Mississippi. As the quote that opens the book says, “Northerners, provincials that they are, regard the South as one large Mississippi. Southerners, with their eye for distinction, place Mississippi in a class by itself” which I think is basically true, or it certainly was when I was growing up in the upper-South. Parchman might rival Angola as the most famous, operating, American prison. And while naming a slave-plantation turned state prison “Angola,'' seems unstoppable, Oshinksy digs up some facts about Parchman that are staggering. Since the prison was supposed to be a farm, and since farms have to make money, the state made sure that the Parchman not only paid for itself but turned a profit. So, due to capitalism, the system gets squeezed on two ends. First, the “convicts”are brutally driven to pick as much as possible. Here, the scare-quotes around “convict” are important. The incarcerated during this period just seem to be any black person around. Oshinksky finds half a dozen documented incidents of planters giving police a literal list of men they’d like arrested to serve as lease-labor and they pass “pig laws” to ease the process. Remember, if the YTs in Mississippi actually thought a Black man had done something bad, the man would just be lynched. So overall they produced a system where there is no interest or concern about any crime against Black person (including murder), and serious crimes (real or imagined) against YTs is punished viciously and extrajudicial leaving the Black population of Mississippi in an outrageously violent world. Secondly, the state seeks to lower the overhead of the prison in both obvious and dastardly ways. The barracks and the food and the medical care were as bad as it could possibly be while still providing enough support to keep the convicts picking at the prescribed rate. They also employed the biggest, meanest (and, apparently, often developmentally disabled) convicts to watch over the others. As in, they gave these “trustees” guns (the normal prisoners were called “gunmen” since they toiled under the gun) and promised them that they’d get a Governor’s pardon if they killed an escapee. The state shuts this program down a few times before bringing it back when various wardens argue it was essential to the functioning of the prison. It seems like fiction. 

The book benefits from being about more than just Parchman. In fact, the prison itself isn’t built until about 100 pages into the book. The book is mostly about crime and punishment in the South from before the Civil War into the Civil Rights area (and mass incarceration. Tho, Mississippi prison are so famously violent still that Jay-Z is helping fund a class-action lawsuit of the type that closed down the “classic” Parchman era) and about Mississippi’s culture. Mississippi was always wild as fuck. You have to remember that besides being way down south, Mississippi was also the Western frontier for much of the period before the Civil War. As such, it was cut-off and attracted a sort of violent maniac bent on created a fortune in a lawless and through slavery. The beginning sections of the book detail how violent the delta was for YTs in this period. People were dueling all the time, Northerners would visit and they couldn’t believe how fast arguments would turn to stabbings.  Mississippi is also one of the areas where blacks outnumbered YTs, which, ask Haiti or the Spartans, created a brutal-even-by-slavery-standards version of chattel slavery that was unfathomably profitable. After the Civil War, the famous loophole in the 13th amendment meant that there still could be slaves, slavery just couldn’t be an inherited position, it became a condition of being a “criminal”. And, if your master didn’t “own” you, instead was merely “renting” you as a part of the convict lease program, the incentive that he had to not work you to death is now gone; he no longer needs you to last a long time. Apparently, much of western North Carolina’s railway was built by these folks. 

The most famous Southern (although lynching happened everywhere and were also widespread, tho they targeted different groups, in the West) racial control strategy was lynching which this book talks about at some length but is better explored in AT THE HANDS OF PERSONS UNKNOWN which functions as sort of a companion to this book. I’d suggest reading them together. Maybe along with THE NEW JIM CROW to build a sort of American crime/punishment trilogy. 

Finally, the book is filled with some truly insane and interesting facts. For example, Parchman, being totally uninterested in rehabilitation, invented the idea of the conjugal visit. You didn’t even need to be married or have a girlfriend, apparently they’d bus in local prostitutes. Likewise, there’s a very interesting part about YT criminals in Mississippi (who at first did not get conjugal visits), and about how they were celebrated and had songs written about them despite being cop-killers. Plus, the most famous one was named “Hogjaw” which is an amazing criminal name (his appellation was “The South’s Toughest Criminal”). Amazing and sad and interesting, wade into the darkness and read this book. 1 endless plantation.

THE WOMAN WHO PRETENDED TO BE WHO SHE WAS - WENDY DONIGER

Are mythologists inherently conservative? The crypto-fascism of Joseph Campbell (one needs only look at the reactions to the more recent Star Wars films, consider the nature of these criticisms and Campbell's role in the Star Wars universe to see how this dynamic is still at play) or the more recent and less “crypto” fascism of Jordan Peterson. I’d toss J.R.R. Tolkien in this category as well. Is there something about myths that are conservative? They do tell us, often, why the world is the way it is and is supposed to be, implying they cannot and should not be changed. The time of great men (and tho these people it’s always men) has passed id, all we can do now is imitate them and deliver tribute unto them.  Depressing for sure, but Doniger disproves this (or, to use a phrase I’ve never totally understood, she’s the “exception that proves the rule”). She’s the rare mythologist who expands one’s understanding of what is possible and reads myths in a way that complicates and rearranges power dynamics instead of merely reinforcing them. In fact, she’s come under fire from right wing Hindu nationalist groups who object to her commentary on Hinduism and Hindu mythology. When I lived in India, her and her books (especially the then recent THE HINDUS: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY) were a popular topic of conversation. I think she’s a fucking genius and she knows so much about so many mythological traditions that her books are overwhelming. I’ve also read THE BEDTRICK and this book before (years ago, in LA) but they certainly benefit from multiple readings. This book is about myths that involve people pretending to be other people, adopting a persona so to speak. Doniger includes Hindu myths of course, where gods and reincarnation gives ample opportunity for this sort of trickery but also includes lots of American pop culture, especially B-movies in the screwball or sex-comedy genre. “We call them mythemes when they occur in myths, cliches when they occur in B-movies,” as she puts it. It gave me a long list of old movies to watch. These sorts of stories can be hard to follow given how many double backs and alternate IDs people have. Here’s an example of the way a character in the wonderful THE AWFUL TRUTH is described: “Irene Dunne(Kentucky)-as-Irene Dunne(Hollywood)-as-Lucy-as-Jerry’s sister-as-Dixie Belle-as-Southern Belle-as-Ellen-as-an-old-friend from the South (Kentucky)” so yeah, not the easiest to understand. While Doniger is a genius, she’s an old genius. The most interesting play of persona and mask and face-becoming-mask and infinite regression in identity takes place on reality TV, which, despite the book being published in 2005, Doniger ignores. Where else are people playing versions of themselves while also taking into account the archetypes developed by previous stars. Especially when the stars people seem to gravitate to on these shows are the ones who seem most “authentically” themselves and the least like they are acting or putting on a persona. So this game where you’re trying to figure out who this person is , really, by judging the persona they’ve allowed to be filmed (plus the added obstruction of the editors who are also trying to impose narrative and character, who of course listen to fan-feedback which is now almost instant thanks to social media) and how “real” it is and what sort of individual would do create and wear this mask. It’s hard to hear the phrase, “the woman who pretended to be she she was” and not think about Kim Kardashian. Likewise, social media generally encourages this sort of thinking, where one is trying to look like a version (typically a better/happier version, though performative sorrow/depression is also rampant online) of themselves. It’s a human issue that’s as old as these Vedic myths and as new as the concept of “catfishing”. Anyway, this book reminded me that I don’t know enough about Hindu mythology and gave me lots of new movies to watch. A total success. 108 persona.

BRIARPATCH - ROSS THOMAS

I have an on-going list in my head of genre books to look for in used book stores. It gives me something to do and slowly leads to getting my hands on the better versions of these quasi-forgotten classics. And by better versions I mean the small, paperback pulp-y ones with gaudy covers, not the streamlined fancy reissues you see for people like Phillip K Dick or Iceberg Slim, both of whom are used bookstore staples. That being said, I finally found Briarpatch, which I was led to believe was one of the best Thomas novels. I read the whole thing on a pair of flights to NC (along with FEMALES and THE WAVES which is why these reviews are both late and clustered weird) and it’s the ideal sort of book for long boring chunks of time. Like all great noirs or crime stories or other genre tales, the milieu is a huge draw. Thomas does a good job, both here and in the other books of his I’ve read, putting a spin on the typical world of detectives and femme fatales and corrupt cops and whatnot by adding a international intelligence world overlay. It’s also a spy story but less 007 than classified war crimes and profiteering. So the basic plot where a devoted brother investigates the murder of his cop-sister is mixed with a larger story about Congressional investigations and overseas black-ops which is finally mixed with my favorite, and the most surprising, element: a slow history of the town (which I think is supposed to be based on OKC) and the backroom deals and shady characters who shaped the town. For instance, when we drive by buildings the book gives us the backstory of who built the building and what favors they had to call in to get it built and how their fortunes were made. And it is exactly this sort of shady dealing and favor trading that the book is showing us in the present action, all of which gives the whole book a scuzzy feel, since everything is corrupt and the result of corrupt forces, even the physical environments. Likewise, the book is always telling you what time and temperature it is, a great little trick for a book set somewhere in the Sunbelt (it’s also possible the city is Albuquerque) and area I don’t know much about. There’s a TV show based on this book coming out now that I’d like to check out, tho I believe they gender-swapped the lead. Gotta read more Ross. 71 Mansions built on ill-gotten gains.

THE WAVES - VIRGINIA WOOLF

It’s been a while since I’ve read a proper novel, and even longer since I’ve read a Great Novel, something squarely in the cannon. Actually, this one should be much central in the Modernist wing of said Cannon. It’s as good as The Sound and the Fury. It’s, to me, better than Ulysses. It fucks up The Wasteland and The Sun Also Rises. I have to assume that Woolf’s gender is the only reason she’s not the first name you think of when one considers literature in this period. The reason this book is so good and, frankly, so hard to review is that it gets as close as anything I’ve ever read to the experience of thinking and being with your thoughts. TO THE LIGHTHOUSE was also perfect in this regard. The way one’s interior monologue bounces back and forth between past and present as certain things remind you of other things and the way we mull things over and over in our heads is rendered closer to the real experience of being alive than anything else I’ve ever read. Like TO THE LIGHTHOUSE the “plot” is less important than the verisimilitude present in the prose itself. This book exceeds TTL by adding another layer of complexity. Instead of following a few characters throughout their lives, THE WAVES follows a group of friends as if the group was one organism. The members of the group take turns delivering monologues, sometimes, especially as they couple up, the boundaries between them blur. “We melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist.” one of them says at one point. Everyone speaks so gnomically and gorgeously I was reminded of DeLillo, who’s characters also have a strange perfect quality to their thoughts. This isn’t a complaint since Woolf is such a powerful writer and so beautiful on a sentence to sentence level that I don’t really care if it’s unrealistic that all of these folks would have such well-written interior dialogues. The theme of your friends composing your identity and shaping your life deeply resonates with me and reminds me of THE CONFERENCE OF BIRDS. And while the book is mostly timeless in its depiction of the sensation of being alive, it is also very placed in British history. The main thrust of the novel concerns the fact that all 6 of the narrators share a love of Percival, a character we hear a lot about but never from, who dies as part of the British campaign to subjugate India. The way this death changes the lives of the other 6 can’t help but be read as a commentary on the costs of Imperialism, a theme that lingers in the background. The British boarding school culture and its effect on the lives of the students and its connection to the British Empire is also explored but mostly in the  background. Again, I don’t have too much to say, the book is basically perfect and among the most beautiful I’ve ever read. I was constantly having to stop to copy down or reread sentences that were weepingly gorgeous and brilliant. Maybe I should be more aggressive with the novel reading. 1931 Waves. 

FEMALES - ANDREA LONG CHU

A trendy book. It took me a long time, like months and months, to get this one from the library. As you can imagine, trans issues are popular here in Seattle and Chu is certainly the biggest new name in this world (pop-theory). It’s easy to see why Chu got in this position. She’s smart as fuck and funny (I love the tweet: “hi i’d like to return this pikachu it’s detective”) but, most crucially, she writes in a very polemic, dramatic way. She cops to this in the book, a book that is largely a dissection and consideration of the various works of Valerie Solanas, who was nothing if not direct. Chu readily admits that her preferred genre is manifesto. This book doesn’t really fuck around. It states it’s thesis, “Everyone is female and everyone hates it.” early on and really pushes it to the limit, perhaps beyond. She’s got sort of a Fran Lebowtiz or Zizek energy where you want to hear their opinion on whatever because it’ll always be provocative and original. She’s got smart things to say about THE MATRIX  for instance. The book is really about desire; Chu theorizes females as, by definition, an object of desire, “To be female is, in every sense, to become what someone wants. At bottom, everyone is a sissy.” Even leaving behind the excellent pun, this exploration about desire and the messiness of our desires was the most interesting part to me. Chu correctly points out that most desires aren’t desired. Now this is really helpful in terms of thinking about transness and the relation between desire and gender and orientation, but even more interesting when we think about the way technology will intersect with desire in the future. Already we have the vast increase in the medical procedures available to trans folks. Outside of this book, Chu might be most famous for her “my new vagina won’t make me happy” essay. But the sex-robots are on the horizon and what that will do to our desires, especially our icky and unwanted desire, is going to be fascinating. Thinking about orientation and gender and sex makes much more sense from a prospective of “desires” where we all contain multitudes some of which might be contradictory, than from our current paradigm of “identity” where one is uncovering and broadcasting a “true” self that cannot be denied.  Chu is on the cutting edge of this thinking. I hope she ends up writing a dozen books or gets a TV show. As a final quick aside, it’s a weird quirk that Chu was born in Chapel Hill, grew up in Asheville then went to college at Duke. I wished she’d written more about North Carolina and how those locations in particular operate within NC and the South at large but it’s perhaps too niche a topic. 69 Manifestos

BY THIS SHALL YOU KNOW HIM - JESSE JACOBS BASQUIAT: A GRAPHIC NOVEL - PAOLO PARISI

Two comix I picked up to read on a flight. I’ll take the second one first. BASQUIAT, the comic, is something of a disappointment. Basquiat had an incredible, Zelig-like life. He knew everyone important in a very important time in NYC history. Currently, because macroeconomic forces have remade New York into a sort of boring cruise ship for the global hyper-wealthy, there is a lot of nostalgia (of which I am certainly guilty of as well, not this specific NYC strain but a preference for cities with a level of unpredictability and/or chaos) for this earlier NYC where hip-hop and punk rock rubbed shoulders with art and apartments were so cheap you could buy one with an 8ball and so spacious you could create art. Also, unlike nowadays, you didn’t need to work at all times to pay for the “right” to live in the city, you could fuck around and do graffiti and play in bands and go to parties that Andy Warhol was at. So the book is somewhat successful in capturing this world and mode but it undercuts this with biographical information about Basquiat. Sadly, there isn’t really much there in either category. No more Basquiat info than one could gleam off of Wikipedia, no more stuff about 80s NYC than one absorbed through cultural osmosis. Artwise, it was wise to not seek to replicate Basquiat’s unique splatter-y style. It uses some of the same bold colors but arranged in cleaner, more geometrical shapes. It’s an alright overview but doesn’t go deep enough in the copious text, it should have just been a biography, and the drawing is also not unique enough to justify it being a comic. I will give it credit for reminding me of my favorite SAM0 slogan: AN END TO MINDWASH RELIGION, BOGUS PHILOSOPHIES, NOWHERE POLITICS. 88 of the Same Old Shit

The Jesse Jacobs thing I adored. It is similar in style to Safari Honeymoon, with lots of twisty, interconnecting lines and elaborate shapes. The palate is mostly black green and this wonderful muted purple. The story concerns Gods or god-like figures creating planets and fighting with one another. It managed to be cosmic and trippy without ever being confusing or preachy. This thing really is wonderful to look at and reads quickly so you can spend most of your time with it just looking at the drawings. Keep it up Jesse Jacobs. 99 Space Cubes

MARRIED TO THE MOUSE - RICHARD FOGELSONG

Should have been an article. Well, that’s not totally fair. The book is really well-written and informative and doesn’t seem overstuffed, I would just say I overestimated my interest in Municipal/Disney relations. But I had a rule, or rather a habit, of reading a book about conspiracies or the CIA or something along those lines right before I go to sleep at night. I don’t know, it’s soothing. Anyway, early into this book we find out that Disney employees a relative of OSS founder Bill Donovan who helps Disney employees get fake IDs and backgrounds as they buy land on the cheap in central Florida. It’s a tenuous connection, I know, but that meant I read this before bed over a week or so. And as a resident of Seattle, a town that is constantly fighting with our own giant mega-corporation, Amazon, which seeks to reshape the city in ways the benefit itself, there was a lot to learn. That being said, the situation in Orlando/Central Florida, is much worse than the very bad situation in Seattle. Disney pulled off a God-level finesse in their deal with Orange/Osceola counties that included rights up-to and including the ability to create their own power, including nuclear, power plants. So many areas were lining up for the right to be the East Coast DisneyLand they could get almost anything they wanted. Actually, as a quick aside, the site was almost outside of St. Louis but at a final sort of signing dinner the heir to the Budweiser company got drunk and berated Walt for not letting beer in the park and Walt was personally disgusted and looked elsewhere. But back to Florida, part of these benefits, which included ones they actually used, like the ability to issue tax-free bonds, we given based on the false pretense that EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), the strangest Disney park by a safe margin, would be an actual town where people lived in a Disney-designed Utopia. This didn’t work out because they couldn’t figure out how to get around the pesky if-people-live-here-they-get-to-vote-and-disagree problem but they used this pretense to secure the bag in perpetuity w/r/t Central Florida. They endlessly play them by refusing any sort of public transportation into or out of the park, eventually going as far as building, along with Universal, their own simulacrum downtown area. I’ve actually seen these areas and they are indeed insane. They constantly get the counties to subsidize expensive “public” works programs like building highway exits. Disney, taking a page out of (perhaps even writing, I’m not much of a business historian) corporation handbook makes sure to harp on the jobs their bringing in and the money they spend on local charity but, of course, the jobs are almost all low-wage (often so low the county/state has to provide benefits like food stamps or low-income housing) and the “charity” is in loo of taxes and provides a culture where you “don’t speak ill of the mouse” if you’re a non-profit. It’s a sad tale, there are points where DisneyWorld is really the cash cow of the whole company which was, at times, otherwise unprofitable. The various local “movers and shakers” (the book’s term) are too blinded by the “growth” to realize they’re not getting a real cut. Very interesting from a public policy perspective. Thoughtful, though never in these terms, about the growths and mutations of capitalism and space. Maybe a bit too wonky for me on the sub-committee-meetings-for-special-district-zoning kinda stuff. 1971 miles of swampland.

DARKLY - LEILA TAYLOR

I woke-shamed the Seattle Public Library into getting this. I read somewhere online (Pitchfork?) about this book and checked the SPL website for it. They didn’t have it but this was the same day I realized how to request that the library system acquire certain titles. I believe I recommended 15 or so books, but this is the only title they’ve taken me up on.I believe this is because I wrote “there are very few books of music writing/journalism by Black female writers.” I’m not even totally sure this is true, but it seemed to do the trick. That's’ a long winded way to say that this book may sound like a gimmick (a book by a Black goth girl?!) but it’s some of the best music writing I’ve ever read. And I say that as a not-real fan of Goth music (which Taylor dates from Unknown Pleasures, an album I do love).

Another quick story: recently a friend of mine who grew up in NorCal/PNW was going on his first trip down South (his gf is from Augusta) and was asking if he should spring to stay in the haunted room in this historical hotel. I let him know: it’s the South, they’re all haunted. And this haunting and the horrors associated with American History and Black History and the ways one is allowed to process these horrors in art is the main thrust of the book. Goth is, in Taylor’s words, “anachronistic romanticism, theatrical melancholy, nocturnality, campy morbidity and color black” (she also writes, “Imagine a peacock but all black”) and gets to wrestle with morbid questions about death and evil and horror in  a way that is still somewhat silly or “theatrical”. This frivolity is not extended to Black artists and Black art, which is required to display a sort of authenticity that prevents the sort of exuberance and gaudy melodrama of Goth. Taylor calls identifies a “burden of cool” that restrains the boundaries of Black art (or Black art in the YT imagination). As a sort of mirror image of Taylor (I’m a YT man interested in Black music) I think these observations are deeply true; very few things are as tedious about the “authenticity” of a rapper or blues musician. She’s from Detroit so we get lots of talk of Midwestern/Post-Industrial horror, the segments about ruin porn are amazing. She does point out that Horrorcore, a Detroit export, connects to Goth thematically, but sadly doesn’t linger too long on where the sort of horror (which she defines with at Ann Radcliff quote as, “an unambiguous display of atrocity”) shows up in other genres (tho this book did introduce me to Drexcia and M. Lamar). I loved it. 666 Black velvet gloves.

VEIL - RAFI ZAKARI

125 Total impulse pick-up at the library. I’d heard of this series before, “Object Lessons” which is sort of like the 33 ⅓ collection, but for “objects”. Short, maybe 2500 word essays about things like “The Walkman” or “The remote”, each written by a different author. I haven’t read anything else in this series, nor do I know who Rafi Zakaria is but this was pretty great. The book weaves between personal-life anecdotes from Zakaria, a Pakistani Muslim woman who often does not wear a veil or any sort of head covering. My appearance has never been policed anywhere near this level, nor did I have a great grasp on what the “rules” are for halal head-coverings. Zakaria wisely doesn't get too deep into Islamic theology and jurisprudence about this. The issue is literally 1k+ years old and someone who isn’t enmeshed in the discourse isn’t going to have the ability to really understand the purely religious angle. I will say I was interested to read that certain Islamic scholars consider the Burka, the most emblematic and toxi version of the veil to Western eyes, un-Islamic due to the fact that at the time of the Prophet, only Jewish women wore them in Mecca. Fascinating. The broader discussion of what the veil means and how it’s seen in “Western” society is more a subject I have feelings about and can consider deeply. The issues of being “seen” or not being seen and who controls public space and who is in-charge gain resonance, at least with me, when you consider the panopticon. Are these women able to avoid the often aggressive male-gaze in public, the veil acting as a visual cue that this sort of viewing is off-limits for male outsiders? Are they subjecting themselves to a patriarchal panopticon in their own homes and families? She gets into questions about whether “enlightened” Western governments are liberating or subjecting women when they ban the veil in public spaces. I would say she correctly comes down on the side of “they’re doing this because they want to control the way the public space looks and the sorts of people in it”  rather than “the veil clashes with our deeply held and sincere love/respect for women”. The final move she made, bringing in drones, the other “technology” most associated with Muslim and the Islamic world (esp. The Islamic world of the Western imagination) was the most interesting and provocative to me. The idea that the drone is also a panopticon, reading faces from the sky, identifying people and their movements anywhere in the world, dealing death, and that it is also obsessed with “unmasking” and “identifying” Muslims, who from the Orientalist days of Harems were considered mysterious and unknowable. I don’t believe the book to be “pro-veil” as much as interested in the ways the veil complicated this Western rush to have everyone identified, tracked, monitored. Very thought provoking. 632 Veils

GONE ‘TIL NOVEMBER - LIL’ WAYNE

Few careers are as strange and interesting as Lil’ Wayne’s. Lil’ Wayne himself, judging from his lyrics, interviews and album titles ( ex. I AM NOT A HUMAN BEING), is, to say the least, strange and interesting. He has a career that rockets him from inner-city New Orleans to superstardom before he can legally drive. He’s gone through large dry spells and reemerged. His style of rapping completely changed rap; there is no post-Wayne rapper who isn’t Wayne’s child.  His relationship with Baby and Ca$h Money in general is fascinating and bizarre. His persona and lifestyle alone are book worthy. He seems like a sort of Tasmanian devil, running around the world, giving and receiving oral sex with abandon, drinking swimming pools of lean and smoking weed by the acre, covering himself with tattoos (he was an early face-tattoo pioneer), croaking through interviews and never, never, ceasing to record. Sadly, this book covers none of this. There is a brief intro at the beginning explaining that he’s releasing the book because he’s pissed at Ca$h Money and wants to connect with his fans. Sadly, this would have been the perfect opportunity to write a tell-all about his whole life. For it to be what I want it to be, he’ll need to be angry at Baby when he writes it.  He spends much of his time in jail reading SCAR TISSUE by Anthony Keidis and one can’t but wish he’d written a book in that vein. Where you just go from crazy story to crazy story. But whatever, you get what you get and someday someone will write a great Wayne bio. In the meantime, this suffers because jail is boring and repetitive. Most days Wayne eats junk food and makes phone calls. He’s in the protected custody wing of Rikers so there’s not much action. At one point a guy yells at Wayne and calls him a junkie and threatens to hurt him and he’s immediately transferred out of their unit. Wayne believes he gets special treatment since he has the ability to sue. He seems correct, at one point, when a guard finds an mp3 player the warden comes to talk to Wayne personally, which I have to imagine is unusual. Otherwise, we do get a dribble of weird Wayne info. Guards bring him homemade food, but Wayne tells us his mother told him to never eat another woman’s red gravy. We learn he hates Duke. A female fan who is a lawyer but not Wayne’s lawyer bluffs her way in to visit him.  It really fucks him up when he finds out a girl he’s slept with had slept with Drake in the past. I found this very strange. I must assume there is enormous overlap between Drake and Wayne’s partners. But Wayne mostly keeps to himself so not much happens. He works on suicide watch and witnesses a prison wedding. He uses the word “yeah” a lot. It’s annoying the book is formatted to look like a fake journal to the point where they use a faux-handwriting font that is silly and hard to read. But the book is short and I assume this was a way to pad it out. The book does not go far to answer one of the deepest questions of Wayne’s career thus far (Wayne is rap’s Bob Dylan, a conversation for another post, so I assume we’re going to get many eras and epochs): what did prison do to Wayne’s rapping. Before he went in, he truly was the best rapper alive. It was insane. He would drop top 5 mixtapes constantly. He was so much better than everyone and he was producing more than anyone else. After Carter III and jail, he hasn’t gotten that back. There’s nothing in this book that suggests why. Maybe it was a natural burnout from the drugs and lifestyle (this book does not address the withdrawls he must have felt in jail or tell us how he prepared so as to avoid them) maybe jail really did mess with his head. Maybe everyone else caught up while he was in there. Either way, we get no answers here. As alway, Abolish Prison. 2007 Rikers

HOW TO MURDER YOUR LIFE - CAT MARNELL

Recently, a certified-by-the-MacArthur-folks genius, Lisa Dugaard, proposed a unique program to be piloted in Seattle. Seattle, like all of Amerika is in the throws of a overdose/drug crisis. In King County alone there are more deaths from drugs than there are days in the year. While Heroin/Fentanyl gets the coverage (2018, the most recent year we have data for, 67% of fatal overdoses involved an opiate) Seattle also has a huge meth problem. The meth problem is compounded by not having a good treatment. If you’re addicted to an opiate, you can get into Methadone/Suboxone treatment; there is no equivalent for meth (or any stimulant) addiction. Dugaard was trying to change that by suggesting a program that uses a replacement approach, giving meth addicts Ritalin prescriptions to try to mitigate some of the harm. The program didn’t get funded so we’ll never know how well this would work. Cat’s book is a convincing testament to how regular, legal access to safe drugs would reduce suffering and help addicts. That’s a really roundabout way to get at the genre of this book. It’s a memoir but it’s also a drug-tale and a party-girl diary and a first hand account of major magazines (and publishing in general) trying to switch to an internet model. In terms of the drug stuff, for a book called HOW TO MURDER YOUR LIFE her drug seems to be almost all positive. Or, put another way, her privilege (which she occasionally acknowledges, parenthetically in the book, however, I don’t think she gets how different her life is than other speed addicts and why) acts as a powerful shield from the really gnarly drug-chaos. The most obvious, and the reason I talked about that failed pilot program, is her access to legal drugs. She’s rich and YT, her dad’s a doctor and she grew up knowing how to navigate the mental health system. She has health insurance. She’s able to keep a legal, cheap stash of amphetamines, benzos and other assorted pharmacological goodies. She doesn’t have to score on the street (she goes with a friend to buy PCP in a bad neighborhood once. Nothing happens but the whole idea of going into a housing project to score, basically drug addict 101, is foreign and scary to her), she doesn't have to worry about getting bad shit, she doesn’t need to worry about getting cut off without warning. While she’s obviously still an addict, she even gets the classic “Speed Spiders' ' hallucination, her drug being sanctioned by the government and her high-status as a person spare a lot of the really bad shit. But shit really works out for Marnell. She gets into good school, due to performance-enhanced grades and connections, finds great jobs in a cool industry quickly, has her apartment and living subsidized by her parents, allowing her to live a cool NYC life, and has understanding bosses that encourage rehab and keep her job for her and are outrageously understanding. Not that she even needs this career support; as she points out in the book, she becomes more famous and in demand as she begins to let her drug use into her beauty writing. Her writing itself, I found propulsive and easy to read. Maybe too jokey at times, especially the pop-culture references that are stale as fuck. She also really overuses the word “shambolic”. As a drug-memoir, it really makes drugs seem like a great career move/lifestyle choice.  Her life doesn’t seem “murdered” it seems improved and improbably blessed by the end. So, sidestepping the drug stuff, as a general “Party Girl '' memoir, it is slightly more successful. That being said, I wish it was dishier and/or more lurid. We hear about “celebrities' ' at these parties but she doesn’t name them. We don’t get lots of crazy party stories beyond, “I went to a lot of parties and did lots of drugs during this time.” Tell me about the crazy shit you got into off these drugs. There’s something terrifying when I think about being female-bodied, attractive, young, and very high at these parties. You’re prey in a way I don’t experience and I find chilling and I wish she’d explored more. She off offhandedly mentions people trying to fuck her while she’s asleep but doesn’t talk about the experience beyond, “it happened.” But either way, it read quickly, I finished it in a day. It’s got some funny stuff about magazine writing and how lucrative it used to be before the web. A girl I went to high school with is currently writing a memoir about being a Party Girl, so I wanted to read this one first, since it’s the most famous recent example of the genre. I would smoke PCP with Cat, but I’m not sure I’d read another book of hers. 2001 dipped Newports.