NIGHTWOOD -DJUNA BARNES

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I read this based on the high recommendations and praise that Death Is Just Around The Corner constantly heaping on the book. Additionally, Williams Burroughs, my problematic fav, is also a big fan, which is impressive given that it’s a book by and about lesbians and huge, typically, a huge misogynist. There’s also a T. S. Elliot intro (more on that later) where he goes on about how much he likes it as well. It seems like one of those books that works best read many times over a lifetime. The language is the main draw; it’s amazingly written full of all sorts of bizarre, wonderful sentences, “we all carry about with us the house of death - the skeleton” or “a man is another person - a woman is yourself.” That second one brings us to the major theme of the book, lesbianism. In fact, the depiction the book gives of early 20th century gay and specifically lesbian life is what the book is most known for now. Which is somewhat flattening, given how well it’s written. The plot, such as it is, involves a strange, unknowable, “boy-like” woman who enchants and beguiles 2 other women and a husband. She is flighty and strange, and will literally just walk out the door and not come back and these various other people in her life go insane trying to be in love with her. But the book itself is mostly long speeches about art and the nature of love or nights or the differences between French and Italian priests, etc. There’s so much squeezed I can easily understand why people would become obsessed and reread. I liked it much more towards the end, after I caught the vibe, I’m sure a reread would open up the whole thing to me. The only thing I’d hold against it is the long passages, especially towards the beginning, about The Jew and his wiley ways. Obviously, the T. S. Eliot thing should have been a red-flag and if this did allow me to reflect on the “Wandering Jew” stereotype and how, as an anti-nationalist fairy-tale, I sort of consider it something to strive for, but either way, thumbs down to her weird mid-century antisemitism. Otherwise wonderful though, an amazing depiction of anguish. 36 Nights

CASTE: THE ORIGINS OF OUR DISCONTENTS - ISABEL WILKERSON

The library is now back open, sort of. You can’t go inside but you can “order” books online and pick them up. I was availing myself of this service when I noticed they had a bunch of “Peak Picks,” CASTE among them. I’m a big WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS booster and I heard Wilerson on Fresh Air talking about this book so I figured I’d knock it out real quick. The premise is simple, think about racial hierarchy as a version of a caste system, but Wilkerson manages to spin it off into some really interesting areas. When discussing or considering race it can be really hard to see the problems and contours of a system one was born into and which pervades every aspect of modern life, the classic fish/water problem. Wilkerson is able to see this system in a new light by re-framing it using a “foreign” set of concepts. She’ll tell anecdotes about racism she’s experienced in Amerika and use “upper-caste” instead of YT to get our attention and get us thinking about this in a new way. I found it pretty powerful and useful. I wouldn’t say I needed convincing that Amerika is racist to the bone, but seeing this as a caste issue helped. Especially in terms of the psychology of those involved and the quasi-religious feelings folks have towards their caste. When I lived in India I would occasionally be drinking and hanging out with large groups of Indians and, due to the insane heat, most of us would have our shirts off. I didn’t live in India long enough, nor was/am I smart enough, to have gotten a good handle of the caste system as exists in modern India. I could never tell what caste someone was by their name or the way they looked/spoke, like South Asians seemed to be able too. However, when me and my Indian friends would hang out shirtless, I could tell who was a Brahim because they’d be wearing a Janeu, a thread that upper-caste men wear around their torso. This was always interesting to me since these men were not devout Hindus in other ways. Most obviously since we were drinking alcohol most of these hang-out sessions.But it was a part of their culture that they kept, even if they’d tell you they didn’t harbor prejudice against lower-caste people. I found it fruitful to consider what the YT equivalent was to this. Additionally, Wikerson is so smart and erudite, she’s able to toss out intriguing ideas left and right. To take one example of many, she noted how Black immigrants to Amerika, Afrikans, Caribbeans and whatnot, cling onto ethnic markers like an accent to differentiate themselves from American Blacks. This is the opposite of what happens to YT immigrants, who rush to shed their “Polishness” or “Irishness” and integrate into a higher caste. The opposite dynamic is at play with Black immigrants. She’s also got a great anecdote about a black man in Alabama in the 20s who married a YT woman and was almost lynched until the town discovered that his wife was Sicilian and thus hardly YT at all. It’s also interesting to read about Supreme Court cases in 22-23 wherein a Japanese man sued claiming that he was white, in terms of skin color, and an upper-caste South Asian man sued saying that he was literally Aryan and thus should count as YT. It should come as no surprise that the court ruled against both of these men. If I was allowed to ask for more, I would’ve liked more about the history of Caste in India, its origins, how strong a hold it had in certain areas and certain epochs, what colonialism did to the caste system, how the other Indian religions reacted to it, etc. The stuff about the Dalit-rights movement was very interesting to me. Likewise, I would have liked an exploration of a Latin America caste system, ideally Brazil, since they were so focused on these tiny mini-castes (Octoroon, Mulato, etc.), a feature in the Indian Caste system. Amerika, of course, has the opposite approach, the famous one drop rule. I would have liked to see this systems compared at length, Wilkerson touches on them but briefly. Elsewhere, the Nazi stuff was best when it highlighted how much the Germans took from Amerika when they were building their caste system. The stuff about them studying Jim Crow was pretty remarkable. However, without the space to do a deep dive into Jewish history in Europe, it wasn’t as interesting to me since their system didn’t last that long. Irregardless, this book was really helpful in thinking about race. 5 Castes.

BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE - STEVEN PINKER

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Allow me to coin a new phrase for a phenomena I encounter not infrequently: The Napoleon Dynamite Predicament. Basically, it occurs when there is a new, popular object (book, movie, TV show, Broadway Musical) that, as soon as I hear about it, I’m sure is not for me. After a trailer, or a 15 second explanation, I’m totally convinced I will hate this thing and loose some respect for the people who are insisting on how good it is and how much I’ll like it. Then, after careful avoidance, I do encounter the object and have exactly the experience I thought I’d have, namely, I hate it. Then people don’t think you gave it a fair chance since you had a bad attitude going in and you’re mad at them for insisting you engage with something you know you’ll dislike. It’s a whole cycle and the reason I won’t watch Hamilton. Anyway, that brings us to BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE, a book I remember being very popular when it came out a few years ago. I heard about the premise, who wrote it, and who was effusively praising it and I filled it right under, “not for me.” However, fate has intervened. One of the positives of this nightmare quarantine season is that I’m much more in touch with some buddies of mine from High School who I now Zoom every other week or so. Recently, one of them was espousing a lot of ideology I consider crypto-Western chauvinist, borderline racist and historically ill-informed. We discussed a few of these and his love of BAooN kept coming up and was, to my eyes anyway, clearly the source of this thinking. I decided to read it so we could discuss it and I could try to get my friend into some smarter shit. I got teased at 2 used bookstores trying to buy this thing, which, now, having read it, is totally understandable. I’m sure you’ve heard of the premise of this book, violence is down, the world is better now than ever, but it turned out I had a few misunderstandings about what the book is about. I thought it was about how much more violence there was in early human history and how, since the end of WWII, there’s been a huge decline in violence around the world. Well, it turns out that he doesn’t spend very long on the early history stuff and he claims violence has been falling, rapidly and steadily, since the mid 18th century, a date he’s chosen since he credits the Enlightenment with these developments. I’m pretty into early human history so I was pretty excited to engage with a provocative thesis but Pinker finks out. By “violence” he means “murder” and by “early history” he means these 20 studies of contemporary Hunter/Gatherer tribes. He extrapolated a murder-rate from these studies and, lo and behold, they’re higher than the modern West. Case closed. This highlights the main problem with the book, he never defines anything. He never says what “violence” is and when he needs to place it on the chart, he replaces violence with a stat for murder and handwaves away any objections by saying that Murder is correlated with other forms of violent crime. Obviously, this misses the whole picture. Pinker almost realizes this himself when he, briefly, talks about slavery and how it “often” involved violence. That’s a very silly idea, the entire arrangement is violent. The slave is under violent control every minute they are a slave, not just when/if they’re murdered by their master. Same with being a colony (as you can probably guess, there’s a lot of colonialism apologia in this) or minority member of an aparthied society (which is how he can claim that South Africa underwent a period of “decivilization”in the early 90s. If you’re wondering, of course he doesn’t define “civilization”), or any subaltern group, Pinker doesn’t have the intellectual curiosity to investigate what that would be like and how “violence” forms these relationships. To him, violence is murder, and only murders that are captured in statistics so something like literal continents of genocide don’t factor in. The war stuff is equally silly. He defines war in a way to say there were only 4 after WWII since it only counts if two major powers are fighting each other and it also doesn’t count if they use proxies. Certainly he’s “right” by this metric but it is mostly about how the nature of war has changed, not that there is less of it. Maybe there is, but he certainly doesn’t prove it in this book. The whole paints a very wrong picture of world history where everybody everywhere is in a state of Hobbesian chaos until some time in the middle 18th century when wise Europeans invent the Enlightenment. Slowly, through the power of the ideas and their rationality alone, the world has pacified and despite a blip in the early/mid part of the 20th century, this mindset has permeated the world and placed us on a “rational elevator” to greater peace and prosperity. Silly whig history nonsense. There’s a bizarre but predictable, I suppose, subplot wherein Pinker tries to prove that Marxism is not only not an Enlightenment project and is responsible for most 20th century genocides, it’s also, at least in part, behind anti-communist purges, like in, say, Indonesia. This is coupled with long sections about how “Market Pricing” is the highest level of moral and logical thinking. Amazing. I wrote 13 pages in response to this, so if anyone who is reading this (no one reads this) thinks this is a smart and good book full of fascinating ideas, please reach out to me to chat before you embarrass yourself. I’ll be nice, I swear. I’ll leave you with an image that stayed with me the whole time I read this. Pinker, like so many of our fake-smart quasi-scientist pseudo-celebrities, was caught up in the whole Epstein thing. He had many dinners with the man (who he, in a cowardly manner, denounced only afterwards) and actually helped Dershowitz (leveraging his status as a Harvard Prof) get Epstein off in his original 2008 trial. There is some ambiguity as to exactly how connected Pinker was but I couldn’t help but imagine him, on a plane headed to Little St. James, sitting next to an underage sex slave. She’s looking out the window, she's scared but he can’t tell. He’s breathlessly telling her how much better the world is now. “Violence is down! People are so much smarter and more rational than they were. Can you imagine how’d they’d’ve treated you a few centuries ago? My god, what a time to be alive.” He babbles jubilantly as she stares out the window while the plane begins to descend. 1 better angel.

THEOLOGUS AUTODIDACTUS - IBN AL-NAFIS & A TRUE HISTORY - LUCIAN trans. FRANCIS HICKES

THEOLOGUS AUTODIDACTUS - IBN AL-NAFIS Part one in a series of 2 short “novels” (both were written before the concept of a “novel” had really been invented) that purport to be the earliest examples of Sci-Fi. There’s, apparently, a Japanese novel called THE TALE OF THE BAMBOO CUTTER that is also often mentioned when discussing early Sci-Fi but I couldn't find a copy so it’ll have to wait. TA was written in Egypt by Ibn al-Nafis sometimes around 1270. He’s mostly famous as a doctor, he apparently described pulmonary circulation before anyone else. The novel itself only really contains sci-fi elements at the beginning and the end. The story concerns Kamil, a man who is spontaneously generated in a cave by the lapping water of the tides. Allah gives him breath and he comes into being as a 11 or 12 year old. Kamil studies the plants and animals and nature around him on the island. You can tell the book was written by a doctor, the first thing Kamil thinks to do is to dissect animals to figure out how they, and by extension, he, works. Eventually, a group shipwrecks on his deserted island and they end up taking him to civilization. The bulk of the book consists of segments where Kamil, using only his logic and reason, elucidates the tenets of Islam. I’ve seen and I’m pretty familiar with the Christian version of this, the sort of Thomas Aquanis, logic-proves-what-I-believe-in school of theology, so it was very interesting to see the Islamic version. As the useful notes point out, the Islamic world was very obsessed, as YT Europe would come to be, with ancient Greece. The emphasis of logic and the idea that you can, from a position as a feral child, reason your way to the truth of Islam (or Christianity, or the Enlightenment), is very Platonic to me. Additionally, there is a fun part where he’s speculating as to what sort of person would be the final and most perfect prophet and reasons that he would have less than average compulsions and desires around food, but a healthy and manly appreciation for “perfumes and women” then we get a long translator's note about how there is indeed a tradition in Islam that credits Muhammad (PBUH) with a healthy love of perfume and sex. The book passes back into a sort of quasi-sci-fi in the final sections where Kamil reasons out how the world will end. Apparently the lateral movement of the sun will cease so the hot parts of the world will get too hot and the reverse for the cold parts. Society breaks down, lesbianism becomes commonplace and the world dissolves into chaos. Not quite sci-fi from where I’m sitting, more in the tradition of something like THE REVELATION OF SAINT JOHN. Though it does involve the sun, so in that sense, it presages Gene Wolfe and his sun-focused sci-fi. Finally, there’s several really fascinating passages about the sorts of people al-Nasif considers barbarians. He often contrasts people living in what we’d now consider sub-Saharan Africa (which he refers to as Sudan which I believe is the Arabic for “land of the blacks” and includes much more than modern Sudan) with the people living to his north, aka Scandinavians and Russians. It’s very interesting to get the Islamic take on it. He basically says it’s too hot in Sudan, the people there are slow and unmotivated. On the other hand, the northerners are scary boat people. Not quite numerous and smart enough to be a true threat, but a group of people to keep an eye on, for sure. 1268 self-generated men.

A TRUE HISTORY - LUCIAN trans. FRANCIS HICKES Another entry into the “early sci-fi” or “proto-sci-fi” mini-genre. I believe there’s also a Japanese book called, THE TALE OF THE BAMBOO CUTTER that is sometimes brought up in this discussion so I’ll have to get my hands on that one two. This novel is from the 2nd century AD and is less a philosophical pamphlet, like TA, it’s much more a crazy story. It’s sort of a bizarro ODYSSEY, in fact it features cameos from Odysseus and company, in the sense that it’s about a voyage blown off course and all the wild shit they run into. There’s fish in a wine river that get you drunk. There are flower-women who you, obviously, want to fuck but shouldn’t. They, the Greek sailors, get involved in war between the forces of the moon and the sun. A conflict in which both sides’ armies are made up of human/animal hybrids and are riding on things like giant fleas. They also get involved with a mini-sided war while living in a whale’s belly Pinocchio-style. And a third between the heroes that live in the Greek version of Heaven (Achilles, Plato, etc.) and the denizens of Greek hell (Ajax, Busyris, etc.). These Greeks seem to get into a lot of multi-sided, raging wars, for whatever reason. We find out in the later case that Plato lives his afterlife under exactly the system he spelled out in THE REPUBLIC, and that Socrates fights bravely in battle and is rewarded with space to build the Necracademia. In the whale episode, they end up escaping by starting a fire in the whale’s belly, which is exactly what happens to Raven in a Tlingit myth immortalized on a totem pole downtown. There’s an island with 2 temples, one to that which is true, and one to that which is false. All good stuff. It’s interesting that both this text and TA take up the question, in both cases quite literally and frankly, of whether or not there will be homosexual sex in heaven. You’ll be shocked to learn that they come up with very different answers. I’m not sure where the line is between fantasy and sci-fi. I would certainly put this more in the “fantasy” camp but it’s quite good. Lots of great Greek names and sexy Greek hi-jinks. 125 Giant Whales.

CALDÉ OF THE LONG SUN - GENE WOLFE

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We’re cruising right along with this Long Sun Tetralogy. I’ll have to take a break before the next and final chapter, since it’s proving elusive at the various used bookstores of Seattle. I might just have TheGiant mail it to me. Irregardless, I’m still digging this. Wolfe is the true king of sci-fi and the way he balances the whorl-building (pun intended) aspects with the “main story/plot” aspects is untouchable. I would say that compared with the NEW SUN series, the “main plot” of this series is much easier to follow and the main character is much less of a cipher. Tho this comes at the price of less overall weirdness in this series. Which is not to say that the series isn’t extremely weird. Wolfe has introduced several characters, some of whom are gods, who can possess humans and animals at will. This leads to the confusing task of trying to figure out who is speaking in a given scene and who is possessing who. We’re (both the reader and the character) are still working on how the Whorl functions and where its’ going and what the “rules” are, so to speak. We still need to see this mainframe that characters have alluded too, we still don’t know about the fliers, it still isn’t clear where this whole thing is going. Though, Wolfe is a skilled enough writer that I trust he both knows the answers to all of these questions, and he will revel them artfully. Otherwise, it is somewhat hard to review this as a stand alone. I think Wolfe does a good job with pacing, the stakes continue to be raised and the complexity of the situations deepens. The Whorl building stuff is all wonderful and keeps getting weirder and weirder. If I had 2 complaints, one would be that a lower-class sort of oaf figure keeps calling a woman he likes, “jugs” which bugs me for some reason, and I’m not sure what we’re to make of the bird that Silk keeps around. So far he doesn’t do anything, though he is in a lot of scenes. There is only one book left in the series (and then a whole other 3 books in a separate trilogy that takes places after this) and I am a touch worried about how much needs to be squeezed into the book to make this whole thing seem satisfying. But, if anyone can pull it off, it’s Wolfe. 303 Whorls

LAKE OF THE LONG SUN - GENE WOLFE

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It’s really hard to imagine what reading these as they came out was like. As with most of America, I’m also reading the Song of Ice and Fire series so I somewhat understand what it’s like to have to wait a few years between books. It’s always hard to keep the world and the rules of this world, and the characters straight in between volumes. Of course, this Wolfe stuff is on another level. Fuck Tolkien, fuck Martin, fuck Herbert, fuck whomever you like for world-building, Wolfe is the king. The universes he creates are stranger and more realized and interesting than any writer I’ve ever read. Real heads know, LeGuin is oft-quoted calling him the Sci-Fi Melville. Anyway, due to the complexity and strangeness of his worlds, I feel it would be really hard to read these books with a year plus break in-between them. I read the BotNS tetralogy back-to-back-to-back-to-back and it was still hard as fuck to follow. This book I was able to read quickly and right after I finished NIGHTSIDE and it was still a bit of a struggle to catch all the hyper-subtle world building that Wolfe engages in. This book pushes the Whorl-world forward. We now have total confirmation that they’re on a ship that seems to have been in space for 300+ years, tho it is still unclear where they are going. Additionally, it’s finally connected to BotNS; apparently Pas is Typhon from the original series and he is the one who built the ship. I might have to go back and read the Typhon sections from BotNS, I don’t remember him mentioning a world-ship. If I recall correctly, he seemed like a figure meant to recall satan from that part of the bible where Jesus is in the wilderness and gets tempted (Wolfe is heavy on the catholic stuff). I remember him offering Severaian endless riches to worship him. Petera Silk is likewise made this offer by a character is LAKE OF THE LONG SUN. Satanic tempting is a big thing for Wolfe it seems. Also, lakes. If I remember correctly, lots of BotNS is lake-based. Anyway, the “plot” wasn’t significantly pushed forward in this volume. We learned a lot more about the Whorl itself and the original set-up. I very much enjoyed the angry robot that got laid-off. I’m hoping there’s more in-the-moment plot in the next 2 volumes. I’ll try to read them somewhat quickly to not lose this Wolfe-momentum. 300 planet ships.

THE LIAR’S CLUB - MARY KARR

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Amazing. I’ve read some Karr before; I was interested in her poetry in college and her relationship with DFW back when I was reading through his work. I’ve read some of her various memoir works before but I saw this available at a used book store and figured I’d dive in and see what all the fuss was about. This is perhaps the best memoir I’ve ever read. Not in terms of how exciting or interesting the central-life was, but rather in terms of how well it’s written. Indeed, not too much goes on, plot-wise. Karr is born to a family of wild alcoholics in a poor east Texas town and reports on the dysfunction. As a quick aside, this is also the part of the country UGK is from. There is certainly no shortage of alcohol memoirs, or my-crazy-family memoirs. Karr’s writing is what sets this apart. She’s able to balance how she felt as a child, what the milieu of the shithole Texas town, the deep-traumas of her parents and family, all without getting didactic or merely lurid. The way she slowly uncovers the background of her parents, in order to give us some context for their destructive drinking deepens the emotional impact of the book. It’d be much easier and understandable if Karr had merely listed the myriad ways her parents had failed her, but she’s always able to situated it in a larger social picture. Actually, it was this social acuity that really surprised me. This book is the good version of HILLBILLY ELEGY. Like HE, it is a memoir of a writer growing up in a poor YT town and how/why people’s lives are ruined in such places. While Vance is remarkably uninterested in the actual causes, he’s content to simply tell them to work harder, Karr is more curious and actually able to diagnose why her town seems to be turning out broken men/women with shitty lives. She’s also much more honest and thoughtful about race (Vance has insane, deeply stupid theories about race-relations w/r/t rural YTs). Her dad hangs out with a group of oil-workers (like himself) one of whom, Shug, is black. “Nobody says flat out, you're just picking on Shug because he’s colored. It sometimes seems to me like we’re not supposed to notice that Shug’s colored, or that saying anything about it would be bad manners. That puzzles me because Shug’s being colored strikes me as real obvious. And usually anybody’s differences get pounced on and picked at. This silence is a lie peculiar to a man’s skin color, which makes it extra serious and extra puzzling.” Karr is able to see and comment on subtle racial dynamics without simplification or easy answers. She’s also really good at describing a phenomena I haven’t experienced personally but many of my female friends have talked with me about. When the book opens and Karr is young, 6-7, she’s very close with her wild-man, roughneck dad. He takes her to the bars, she sees him fight people, he helps her shot and is generally a lot of fun. Karr captures how he grows distant and withdrawn as she ages and goes through puberty and becomes a “woman.” Since his category for women isn’t able to expand, nor can he make an exception for his daughter, they drift apart. He can’t abide a break in the gender roles and expectations and can’t relate to his daughter as well when he sees her as a woman, not a girl. There are a few brutal rapes in the book, but otherwise, I found it really easy and quick to read. It’s hard to overstate how good and clear of a writer Karr is. I think I’ll fuck with the other 2 memoirs of her’s. 61 shots of whiskey.

NIGHTSIDE OF THE LONG SUN - GENE WOLFE

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I suppose I could go look it up, but I don’t think I reviewed the Book of the New Sun cycle, which must mean I read it over 2 years ago. Anyway, if you’re familiar with the contours and fashions of the Sci-Fi world, which I mostly am not, you’re certainly familiar with Gene Wolfe. My brother is much more into this genre than I and he insisted that BotNS slaps hard so I picked it up and it did indeed go hard. It’s quite a flex to write a tetralogy as a sequel to a tetralogy and the sheer length and commitment involved scared me off for a while. Wolfe books aren’t always the easiest to read. Wolfe’s whole thing, as I judge from BotNS, revolves around really well-crafted sentences and a really parsimonious stance w/r/t giving out information. It took a really long time to figure out how the world in BotNS works, even a little, you always have to infer because Wolfe never explain exactly what’s happening, and every time you figure something out (their school is an old spaceship, their on Earth but in the distant future, some of these people are robots, etc.) something much weirder happens. It’s a great vibe, but it takes a specific mindset. Given the fact that I’m just now, today, ending my quarantine, I had more than enough time to get into any mindset at all. The reward was the same. The world of NIGHTSIDE is called the Whorl which, I gather from both the book itself and it’s spoiler-ass back-cover, is a massive spaceship. Wolfe is god-level at slowly revealing how this world is set up and where, physically, things are from each other. Even by the end of this book, there’s a lot of things about this world I don’t understand, but I certainly get the sense that Wolfe understands them and isn’t rushing to get everything on the table. I liked the main character in this one Petera Silk, more than Severian, BotNS protagonist. Severian is the narrator in BotNS and goes to great lengths to obscure his motivations and feelings, which make him sort of empty and cipher to me. Silk isn’t the narrator so we see him more objectively and it’s easier to understand why he’s doing what he’s doing. The BotLS world, so far, is straddling a world of space-religion, since Silk is a sort of priest/sacrificer, and space-crime since the main plot of this book involves an underworld boss named Blood and takes place in slums and whorehouses and whatnot. Maybe because I’ve already made it through one tetralogy, I found this much easier going than early BotNS, though the BotNS world is even more fantastical and gothic and strange. Maybe the Whorl will get there. I look forward to learning more about their space gods. 10,000 Long Suns.

MIDNIGHT’S FURIES - NISID HAJARI

AVAILABLE This book taught me that the word, “goonda” which is a sub-continent specific word, apparently from the Hindi for “rascal,” meaning something like hired thug or goon. Interestingly, “thug” itself comes from India. It’s an interesting and useful term (there seems to be a lot of “goonda spotting” w/r/t these recent uprisings) but perhaps the most upbeat thing I learned from this book. Otherwise, the book is sort of in the model of KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST, WE WISH TO INFORM YOU THAT TOMORROW WE WILL BE KILLED WITH OUR FAMILIES, or EMPIRE OF THE SUMMER MOON, which are basically long lists of atrocities and the background that serves to make them all atrocious. While I have reservations about this genre as a whole, and specific quibbles with some of the books I listed, MIDNIGHT’S FURIES does manage to keep from being a harrowing slog. It mostly achieves this through brevity and concision. The amount of background you could do about the India/Pakistan partition is endless. 100+ lifetimes of scholarship. Why are East Bengal and West Punjab Islamic while the middle section of the country is largely non-islamic? What’s going on with Hyderabad? What’s the historical relation between Sikhs and Muslims? How did the British conquer such a large piece of territory? How did they rule it and how did the people living on the subcontinent resist this rule until they finally gained independence? Again, I think you could write a dozen 500 page books for each one of these topics and MIDNIGHT’S FURIES really helps itself by sidestepping them and just getting into the period around partition. We don’t even get a deep background about what someone as central as Ghandi’s life and activism was like before ~1945. This trade-off does allow Hajair to go deep on the events of those few years. I definitely knew that Muslims fled India to Pakistan and vice-versa for Hindu Pakistanis but I did not know the scale of the slaughter that caused this. I didn’t realize that multiple cities experienced multiple, multi-day rampages that left literally thousands dead. Choking-the-rivers-with-corpses, blackening-the-sky-with-carrion-birds, Brugel level shit. I lived in India for a little over a year, spending time in both Kolkata as well as Hyderabad and, despite these pogroms being within living memory, life did continue. I did meet Muslims and Hindus and Christians and Sikhs in all of these places and the was amazed at the time about how little animosity I was sensing. Which was not at all zero, I grew up in the South and I would still hear people making anti-islamic or anti-hindu or anti-whatever statements and expressing such sentiments, but it seemed on the level of racial tensions in the USA. And despite how horrendous the history of the US, it’s mind bending to consider how much longer and deeper and complicated the social relations in India are. I’ve always found it helpful to think about India this way: You know how ignorant people will occasionally refer to the country of “Africa,” lumping all of Africa’s diversity into one monolith? Something akin to that did happen on the subcontinent. While India is a tenth the size of Africa, imagine Britain had knitted together all of it’s African holdings at the end of colonialism and declared it one big new country. This obviously simplifies the issue a lot and doesn’t take into account the fact that the Indian National Congress wanted a huge, united India, it does sort of highlight how this country covers these regions that have different religions and cultures and languages and histories and climates and interests and lifeways. It’s amazing India can keep it together (tho, their current president did oversee a riot/massacre of Muslim very much like the ones described in this book when he was a governor) and honestly flabbergasting when viewed from the United States, a nation that deals with similar issues. Anyway, the book was very helpful in polishing my conception of India and Pakistan. The author seems pretty pro-India, tho after finishing, it’s hard to really imagine ways to make Jinnah look great. The whole thing really seems to end in tragedy, given the current situation. I didn’t “know-know” but I guess I always knew the guy who literally drew the border flew in to India, a place he’d never been before, drew the line without visiting the region, and left to never return again. And the literal date for independence was chosen on a whim by the Viceroy. There’s certainly a version of this book that focuses more on the British end of this but I’m glad I read this one first. Whenever the plague ends, I should return to India. 1947 religious sites.

NEUROTRIBES: THE LEGACY OF AUTISM AND THE FUTURE OF NEURODIVERSITY - STEVE SILBERMAN

I should have read this years ago. When it came out in 2015 it made a splash. Lots of reviews and NPR interviews and I was certainly not uncommon to see it’s substantial girth being lugged around at coffee shops. I’ve always been interested in autism and neurodiversity generally but, honestly, I found the topic daunting and confusing. I knew some autistic kids growing up and their presentations were so different I couldn’t really wrap my head around how they all had the same condition. This belief was reinforced and deepened when I began working with kids in the foster care system who are, disproportionately and unsurprisingly, autistic. I went through lots of trainings, both formal and informal and heard that if-you've-met-one-person-with-autism-you've-met-one-person-with-autism line a lot and tried my best to get my head around how some of those “afflicted” seemed to be withdrawn and non-verbal while others talked more than any kids I’ve ever met. Why was it useful to think of these kids as having the same “thing”?  Shouldda read this book. It’s much more of a history than an overview of the current thinking. It spends much of its considerable length tracing how different doctors working at different times/places as well as on different “ends” of the high-functioning/low-functioning axis came up with different terms, all describing, roughly, the same underlying condition. We get Kanner’s Syndrome, Childhood Schizophrenia, Reactive Attachment Disorder, Symbiotic Psychosis, Asperberg’s Syndrome and others before the recent synthesis of all of this into Autism Spectrum Disorder. I worked with a lot of kids that those terms would easily apply to. The book does a good job arguing for a view of Autism that thinks of it as based in a different way of thinking, that all or most of us have some access to, that is, to some degree, “turned up” in some people. Sometimes this gives us geniuses, other-times it gives us the sorts of people who used to (and still do) die in nightmarish state-institutions. There’s very interesting parallels drawn between the blind community’s and the transgender community’s (anecdotally, I do see a lot of pro-neurodiversity signs at transgender marches/political actions) struggle for rights, especially in their emphasis on changing the environment and attitudes of “regular” people to make society more accessible, rather than trying to force the individual into society or remove them totally. As I said, the book is long, there’s lots of tangents, like the ends and outs of how RAIN MAN got made, that could have been cut to make it more digestible. However, the shift in thinking that “neurodiversity” implies, the demolishment of the hierarchical, and ultimately eugenic, idea that there’s an “ideal man” or an “ideal brain” (this is the idea that underpins racism and nationalism and fascism and a host of other terrible ideas), is major and has huge implications. It takes a long time to trace this thinking and I’m glad Sliberman took the time. I still work with autistic folks (adults now, the autistic are over-represented, and under-diagnosed, amongst the homeless) and this has definitely helped me sharpen my thinking and diversify my tactics. I’d recommend it if you interact with autistic people, or want to think critically about where they fall on the neurodiversity spectrum. 1906 human brains.

LOVE POEMS OF ANCIENT EGYPT - TRANS. EZRA POUND & NOEL STOCK

 AVAILABLE

My reading has been slowed due to recent events. It’s hard to really get into a book when there’s all this stressful marching and occupying and all that going on. So I wanted to digest something smaller and easy so I decided to take on this short book of poems. It’s almost a chapbook, at only 33 pages, tho it’s very well bound and includes all of these photos of Egyptian sculpture. Those handsome photos are basically all of the background we get from this book. There’s a short intro, literally a paragraph, explaining that these poems are from various (unrelated) strips of papyrus and pottery that Boris de Rachewiltz translated into Italian in the 50’s. Despite being fragments, and originating from different sources ranging from 35000-3000+ years ago they’re presented as complete poems. Celebrity fascist Ezra Pound and Noel Stock (who I don’t know anything about) translated them from the Italian. The Ezra Pound thing is also somewhat misleading since he only translates the first poem in the book. I assume they wanted to use Pound’s name as a way to sell the book but his poem is the worst translation in the book. That maniac Pound translated part of it into Latin, which would be showing off if he actually could read hieroglyphics. The poems themselves are amazing. It’s hard to imagine 3,000+ years ago. It’s hard to imagine what people were like back then. It’s hard to imagine their lives and interests and ideas, especially the non-Pharaohs. We get lots of that here. It’s funny to imagine young Egyptians in love. Lots of the narrators of the poems seem to be young people in love. We hear about how hard love can be, the anguish. We hear about obsession and longing. I do wonder somewhat about the translation. For instance, the word “heart” is used as a symbol for love the way it is used in Western Culture broadly. I wonder if the original actually reads that way or if they were looking for a translation that made more poetic sense. Likewise, a character refers to a house covered in ivy, which I don’t believe grows in Egypt. There’s great stuff about being sad because your girlfriend parties too much and you’re jealous. Things from parents about their horny kids. It’s all wonderful and short and betrays a much different sexual ethic than we have here in modernity. Nice little break from reality. It needs more context but it was a good afternoon read. 60 strips of papyrus. 

TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS - LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

Certainly something that would have been better to read in a college setting with an expert. However, I knew the book’s reputation going in and had steeled myself to face its (intellectual) wrath. Fortunately, it wasn’t nearly as tricky and confusing as I was led to believe. Additionally, it’s only about 80 pages long and I found it helpful to just read the whole thing in one long sitting. It is formatted unlike any book I’ve read before. It is built around 7 propositions which then is each broken out into dozens of numbered statements. You end up with something like this:

4.002 Language disguises thought.

4.003 And it is not surprising at all that the deepest problems are in fact not problems at                                                                            all.

Honestly, it’s a cool format. As Wittgenstein himself says later in the book, philosophy is supposed to aim, “at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity...Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.” This book is the anti-Deluze. Wittgenstein is obsessed with intelligibility and utility. As he says in 4.116, “Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly.” He also rails against using words imprecisely, like say the way “rhizome” is used in continental philosophy. I will certainly not claim to understand large sections of the middle of the book. Wittgenstein goes deep on some questions of formal logic and it gets a little in the weeds for me. He comes up with a formula for the essential form of all sentences that is so full of Greek letters and esoteric notations that I can’t even reproduce it on the computer. I had to bring up the Wikipedia for “List of Logic Symbols” to make it through some parts. Though I think I still see the forest despite the fuzziness of certain trees. Wittgenstien’s program is to shrink philosophy down dramatically. For instance, the subject is out. 5.632: “The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world.” Likewise with aesthetics and ethics, 6.421: “It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics are transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one in the same.)” which leaves little left since he commands us in the final proposition to be silent about matters we cannot speak about. It’s a very austere, I would venture masculine,view of philosophy. That the only things to concern ourselves with are those things which we can articulate clearly and can reduce into a logical chain of symbols and whatever falls outside of this (and I would say all of the interesting questions fall outside of this) is not to be spoken of. I will agree that when you’re talking about more esoteric philosophical matters, it is annoying and childish when someone treats it like a math problem so I applaud Wittgenstien for showing how stupid that is. I have some very logically-minded friends who would enjoy this. Gotta love any book that claims it will “solve” anything, let alone something as large as philosophy. 526 logical postulates. 

LIFE OF THE PARTY - TEA HACIC-VLAHOVIC

150 This is the first book I’ve ever read written by someone I went to high school with. As a result, this was one of the strangest and most singular reading experiences I’ve had in the last few years. I spent the book balancing what I was reading with what I know about the person who wrote it. And, to be clear, Tea and we’re never super close. Certainly a friend-of-friends situation in High School. Since then I’ve seen her maybe twice, tho I believe some good friends of mine see her more often. I saw her on a few Christmas breaks when we were both in college and she was back from Milan. She had great stories about the Milan Fashion world. I’m obviously not nearly as plugged into that world as her but I’ve explored some of the edges (specifically through a male model/photographer I met in Mexico City) and I’ve always loved how self-parodic it is. Beautiful young people from around the world, surrounded by the most ghoulish rich people imaginable. Tea once told me about a party she attended that featured an indoor igloo. Sadly, that story isn’t in this book. What is in this book is very genre-confused, but in a way I found distracting rather than boundary-pushing. Technically, it is a novel. The main character’s name is Mia, not Tea, though otherwise it reads very much like a memoir. To the point where she used the real name of her high school boyfriend (an older punk dude) and the cop that worked at our high school. As a brief aside, there are some “cops are sexy” moments in the book (I counted 3) including praise of our High School cop who I, and the rest of the school, saw assault a kid, that doesn’t jive super well with the current mood. Besides the occasional talk with a pigeon and an extended fantasy sequence (my favorite part) it seems like a straight retelling of her time in Milan. Perhaps this is something of an answer to a question I’ve had about people like David Sedaris, ie memorists, who get called out for factual snafus, why don’t they just label their books “fiction.” It turns out the answer is because it really changes what I want from the book. For instance, this book has basically no characters. There are 3 characters, besides Mia, that we get to know somewhat. A gay best friend (tho all we learn is that Mia thinks he’s funny), a Devil-wears-Prada style boss (who’s main quality is that Mia admires her for being successful at throwing parties while being a woman) and a very abusive boyfriend (who also seems to have no qualities besides sadism and the fact that he’s married). If this were a novel, I’d expect it to follow and develop one of these themes. The most compelling story-line seems to be the boyfriend. What attracted her to him and vice versa? Why is he so abusive? Why does Mia stay with him? The closest the book comes to exploring this is the following, “Being nice isn’t nice at all. Being nice is the reason people have been so mean to me. Being nice makes people uncomfortable because it makes them feel pressured to be nice in return. But they don’t know how or aren’t willing to do that . So you being nice makes them feel bad. And when they feel bad they treat you badly.” and, “The thing about rape is it isn’t always the worst thing that happens to a woman. Sometimes, it’s not even the worst thing that happens to us that day.” The first quote doesn’t make sense in the context of the book. Mia is not nice and certainly not “too nice,” though it is interesting that she thinks that’s her problem. The second statement I find provocative and I wish she’d explore the issue of Mia’s sexuality and pathology but the book keeps being derailed by it’s memoir qualities, essentially a “this happened, then this happened” format, sprinkled with literal lists of party advice and playlists which is classic memoir filler material. There is also a strange 2 page rhapsody to Lady Gaga generally and “Marry the Night” in particular. I’ve never heard anyone nearly my age feel the way Tea feels about Gaga about anyone except Beyonce.  But basically, I would have liked this book to pick a lane. Either be a satirical novel about the Fashion World and Milan or a memoir about a woman growing up who feels out of place everywhere or a comic memoir of silly fashion world stuff or an exploration of the darkness and violence at the heart of heterosexuality.  Again, my favorite stuff was the most fantastical and untethered to reality, I wish the book had been more of a novel. Who will be the next Wildcat to write a book? 2006 lines of blow.

CRACKLING MOUNTAIN - OSAMU DAZAI

AVAILABLE

 I’m slowed down on my reading given current world events. The main focus of the protests (so far) here in Seattle has been the East Precinct, located about 4 blocks from my house. I’ve been down there every day so far, not always for a long time, so it’s somewhat cut into my reading time. Seems like a reasonable sacrifice. Anyway, this book was given to me for my birthday by a coworker. S/o to Heaven. I’ve seen her reading some Junji Ito so our taste in Japanese literature at least somewhat overlaps. I’d never heard of Dazai but, if the internet is to be believed, he’s quite popular in Japan. In fact, there is a Ito version of one of his novels. CRACKLING MOUNTAIN is a collection of short stories. Each story is prefaced by a translator’s note that explains the circumstance around the tale. Many are based on Japanese or European myths/poems so in some ways the explanation ruins some of the surprises. The stories themselves are strange and sad. There’s a stretch towards the back, where the book hits a stride and each story is untouchable. The Sound of Hammering is an almost Ligotti-like yarn of modern life and absurdity. The Monkey’s Mound leads to a bizarre and cruel climax. The last story in the book includes the line, “In every woman dwells this cruel rabbit, while in every man a good badger always struggles against drowning.” which is certainly a lot to think about. The opening story is a series of autobiographical sketches that are so light and airy and melancholy while at the same time holding an abysmal dread since the backdrop is Japan’s lead-up to WWII. I did like the detail that grade school homework in Imperial Japan was, “to paint five watercolors and collect 10 rare insects.” Dazai himself seems to have lead a sad, bohemian life in Imperial Japan and then in the wreckage afterwards. Or at least until he killed himself. Something about it reminds me of a Japanese Daniil Kharms. The fairy-tales feature commentary within the tales themselves that highlight the impossibility of morals while the Samurai stories skewer sanctimony. More fun than I expected, I typically don’t like short story collections but this one held me. I’d like to get my hands on NO LONGER HUMAN to see what the fuss is about. Thank you Heaven. 48 washed-up Samurai

SUTTREE - CORMAC MCCARTHY

AVAILABLE

  Finally finished it. Perhaps the book with the greatest disparity between the difficulty in reading it and my ultimate enjoyment. It was difficult in the traditional way, that is hard to follow and/or understand, like, say, CHAOSMOSIS, or even super long (tho, it is around 500 pages), I found its difficulty more subtle and hard to pin down. I made a serious attempt at the book a few years ago (maybe a decade?) and thought I had only made it about half way, but upon this reading, I realized I must have gotten much further than that since a passage that really stuck out to me, wherein a rag-picker details what he would say to god, was in the final 3rd of the book. I stopped that last time for the same reason it was tricky this time. The book is both very sad and written in florid, Biblical (King James) style. The style is familiar to anyone who’s read his other stuff, esp BLOOD MERIDIAN. SUTTREE also shares a violent, bloody milieu in the same vein as BLOOD MERIDIAN. The first image of the book is the police using a hook to pull a suicide out of the river. But while BLOOD MERIDIAN is relentlessly bleak and drenched in terror, SUTTREE mines this same material for a more humorous and melancholy vibe. So people get violent beaten by police or die in a mudslide but they also fuck watermelons and shoot the shit. Perhaps I’ve over-identified with Suttree, I think it would be fair to say we have similar interests and dispositions. We share an affinity for low-lives. He’s detached and sad in a way I found very relatable, almost to the point of making the book unreadable. But I did finish it this time and it does stand up with BLOOD MERIDIAN as total classics, it’s amazing he wrote the two back to back. This is also the only book I’ve ever read so focused on Knoxville and the surrounding areas, which is an area I know from college and certainly has its own weird flavor. There’s lots of talk and trips to Asheville, including to the Grove Park Inn. Like life, the book is very episodic. Sutturee fishes and runs into people, drinks and talks with them until he gets bored or passes out then runs into them again whenever. People are constantly getting killed or going to jail. The racial politics of the milieu that Suttree lives in are also interesting, with these low-class YTs interacting, befriending but also resenting their Black neighbors. Actually, Suttree’s class is somewhat at issue in the novel. We are led to believe he’s from a prominent Southern family who, before the start of the novel, has knocked up someone at college (lots of great shots at college in the book) before abandoning them to slum it with these Knoxville subalterns who the book memorably describes as, “thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots…and other assorted and felonious debauchees“. There is a part where he goes to, solo, bury his child in the rain, which is the only part of the book I didn’t really like since it shaded into melodrama. Also, the book frequently describes several women Suttree has sex with as “child-like.” The rest of it is expertly controlled. McCarthy apparently wrote this over 20 years and it shows, it’s perfectly calibrated. McCarthy so totally took the meat of the bone that he moved from Knoxville and never set a book there again. He really nails the ending too. Or rather, the post-script. The more formal ending cribs THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV ending where a character lies sick in bed, hallucinating and having vision (INFINITE JEST pulls this trick too), which is a good way to tie everything back together at the end. However, the short section right after really brings to mind BLOOD MERIDIAN, where the last thing image is of a man laying down fences and thus destroying the material conditions for the action of the book, SUTTREE ends with Suttree leaving town, just as highways are being built right through the slum, McAnally, where most of the action takes place, destroying the world Suttree inhabited. Modern life is again displacing a violent world. I’ll be thinking about this book for the rest of my life. 51 French Broads.

THINGS PRINTED OFF AT WORK VOL. II

RADIOCARBON TESTING FOR DEMOGRAPHIC EVENTS IN WRITTEN AND ORAL HISTORY - EDINBOROUGH, ET AL -THE DEAD - JAMES JOYCE -LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE - JOHN BARTH -FRAGMENTS OF AN ANARCHIST ANTHROPOLOGY - DAVID GRAEBER -THE KEKULÉ PROBLEM - CORMAC MCCARTHY  -SETTLER SEXUALITY - K'É INFOSHOP  

RTFDEIWAOH- Short, fascinating paper nominally about testing a Tsimshian assertion of history. The Tsimshian adawx, the record of the oral traditions, recalls a major series of battles and raids carried out by the Tlingit around 1k years ago that decimated their population. The scientists took radiocarbon data from over 500 sites around the Prince Rupert sound and compared the carbon levels during the time the adawx says the war/raids were happening vs other times. And, sure enough, the story checks out. There is indeed a drop in carbon levels right when the adawx says there should be. Just to double check the technique, they ran the same test on Western Europe during the 1300s which likewise showed a drop in carbon during the Plague years. It’s a cool, clever way to check out some of the history found in oral traditions. The devaluing of oral traditions is part of a larger “Western” campaign to maintain a monopoly on “truth” and paint the parts of the world without a written tradition as lesser and untrustworthy. But doing this is both chauvinistic and stupidly limiting. I remember reading that book A FISTFUL OF SHELLS and thinking how wonderful and interesting it was that the author used griot accounts as primary, historical sources. A reevaluation of these traditions across the globe is sorely needed. A few years ago, I was talking with a Duwamish elder at an event in Seattle when he went on a rant to me about how only recently had scientist adjusted the timeline to have peoples in the Puget Sound at the end of the Ice Age when the Duwamish and Puget Sound tribes had many stories about the receding glaciers and how their ancestors received the Wedgwood rock as a reminder of this earlier age. And he was right, that rock is a glacial erratic, left by a glacier. 

THE DEAD- A classic novella/short story that I haven’t ever read. The only Joyce I’ve read is ULYSSES, which the first 80% of this story really reminded me of. It follows a man as he moves through Ireland, preparing for a Christmas feast at a party. It is amazingly well written, able to toggle between the literal scene and the larger implications of what’s going on seamlessly. Ireland is like Russia or the American South in that the writers from these places are typically obsessed with history and the sense of doom and dread that drench these places. Joyce has that line about, “history is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake,” which sums it up quite nicely. The way questions of Irish identity and how the main character is called out from being on the side of the English and the subtle ways he processes the accusation are well-drawn and don’t hit you over the head with it. But it’s really the ending that takes it beyond. And by ending I really mean the last page and a half where Gabriel, the main character, hears a story from his wife about a boy she knew who died. From there Gabriel considers the role of the dead in the lives of the living, the inevitably of death, the unknowability of our loved ones and how that mystery feeds desire, the nature of Ireland and human life generally. It’s amazing how quickly it expands out how it manages not to seem corny or forced. 

LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE- Another classic story I hadn’t read until now. I read the wikipedia about the story afterwards, and I suppose it is fair to mention that, apparently, this story is the 3rd in a trilogy of short stories in a collection of the same name. It seems I’ve missed out on the larger context of the story since all three are apparently about the same thing, just told in a different style. I’m not the biggest fan of stories about writing, it’s somewhat interesting but, for all of us who aren’t writers for a living, it’s a bit of a dead end to me. This story is reflexive and will comment on itself and talk about story structure and point out artificiality and cliches involved. However, while groundbreaking in the 60’s I’m sure, I fully grew up in the world that this story birthed, it is less than shocking to me that a story would have metatextual elements or primarily be concerned with these features. The story is a victim of its own success. 

 FRAGMENTS OF AN ANARCHIST ANTHROPOLOGY- This is technically a short book, perhaps it merits its own entry in EVERY BOOK REVIEWED but I printed it off at work and read it in one long sitting so I suppose I’ve regulated it to whatever the non-fiction equivalent of a novella is (a manifesto? A screed? A proposition or position paper?). Recently, I read an interview with Graeber where the subject of Mark Fisher came up. Apparently, Graeber and Fisher did overlap with one another, teaching at some English college though Graeber says they didn’t talk in any meaningful way. I bring up Fisher since this book, though published before it, seems to answer, or at least hint at answers, for the questions that CAPITALIST REALISM highlights. Specifically, modern life (postmodern capitalism, neoliberalism, late capitalism, choose your term) posits itself as the only possible way to live, our choices are the status quo (and here they distort history into a teleology that dead ends where we are now)  or a sort of noble savage back to nature life. Anyone who’s ever had a discussion with someone who dismisses any other possible way of living (say, one where we aren’t openly calling for grandparents to die to raise the DOW) as impossible, pie-in-the-sky stuff or listened to a presidential debate is familiar with this dead end. Graeber points out that Anthropology is uniquely positioned to refute that. There are, in fact, an infinite number of ways to live and organize our lives and one another. Hundreds of these have been described and researched in the Anthro literature, it is our heritage as humans. Short little manifesto-y book but real good. Plus, there’s a short rant against “policy” that resonated deeply given my work. 

THE KEKULÉ PROBLEM - Some science writing from the great Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy has spent the past several decades working at the Sante Fe institute, which as I understand it is basically a clubhouse for smarty pants. A sort of desert version of the Institute for Advanced Research. I’m not sure if they have other humanities/arts people besides McCarthy, all the other Santa Fe stuff I’ve seen is more on the hard science end of the spectrum. Irregardless, if these nerds choose McCarthy to be their arts ambassador, they picked well. This short essay is, of course, super-humanely well-written and very engaging. It basically seeks to understand why dreams use symbols to convey meaning instead of words. You sort of need to take for granted that dreams and your subconscious are “trying to tell you something” which I’m not sure I do, but McCarthy does have a good explanation. He posits that the unconscious is so much older than language, it simply doesn’t know how to use it. The Unconscious is something that McCarthy ascribes to some animals and early man, while language itself is much more recent. Intriguing theory, good to know that McCarthy is getting to spend his last years with geniuses discussing the nature of dreams. May we all spend our twilight years such. 

SETTLER SEXUALITY - I have been hearing about the devastation faced by the Navajo/Dine (recently, I have seen it suggested that Diné is the preferred term but I do not know enough about this issue, tho of course peoples should be choosing their own autonym). I wanted to donate some masks but also wanted to find the local organization most in line with my political beliefs to focus the efforts. I found this anarchist/feminist info shop which seems like it will do the trick. They also publish their own zines so I downloaded this one about sexuality and colonialism. I would recommend it. It’s short, only a pamphlet, so I wouldn’t say it was long enough to really get into some of the issues that are most fascinating about this subject. It isn’t a book so it isn’t super in-depth, I would recommend SUN MOON AND WITCHES for a more complicated look at these issues. I would quibble with the dichotomy that the pamphlet sets up between Western and non-Western lifeways. It makes it seem like the choices are merely “The West” or “Indigenous ways” which are always better. I would say that both lifeways are one of literally thousands of possibilities when it comes to understanding gender, some of which were better (I’d agree that most is fair), some of which were worse. The issue is that The West is saying that anything else simply isn’t possible. I worry slightly about idealizing (noble savaging) pre-Columbian Amerika. Think of environmental issues, obviously most indigenous communities had a much more sophisticated view of this than Europe at the time and America now. However, some (say, the classical Maya) did not. The issue is not that everything indigenous is better, it’s that the West has stolen our ability to even have a choice. But these are slight quibbles I would recommend it for a teen. 

MOON, SUN AND WITCHES: GENDER IDEOLOGIES AND CLASS IN INCA AND COLONIAL PERU - IRENE MARSHA SILVERBLATT

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The trilogy is complete. As far back as my review of FISTFUL OF SHELLS I had anticipated a sort of gyno-historical retelling of the forces that shaped the world from the early 16th century on. FISTFUL OF SHELLS is about African society and how these changes shaped the ways that people experienced and understood the world. CALIBAN AND THE WITCH took roughly the same time period but focused on Europeans and YT new-world residents. MOON SUN AND WITCHES completes the trilogy by focusing on the group left out of the other 2 books, the indigenous people of the new world. Specifically, the peoples of the Andes. In fact, I was at first worried that the book was going to be too deep in the Andean scholarship world. I’m not as familiar with that grouping of peoples and civilizations as I am with others, even others in the Americas. However, this is more than made up for with the final few chapters that really dial in on European notions of evil/the devil and now that colored the way Europeans viewed the people they subjugated. It was interesting to read about how this notion of a demonic pact developed (since it’s basically absent from the bible and European culture before the late middle ages) and how this idea was grafted onto the Native customs, when they didn’t have an equivalent notion. We can see how the ideas developed in CALIBAN AND THE WITCH are put to use in the New World (as a quick aside, it’s true that CATW is mostly about England/Protestants while the History of the Andes is more Iberian/Catholic, but I think it’s not unreasonable to put them together. I’d love a version of this book about the effect of English colonialism on Chesapeake Bay Native life, for instance, but we get what we get) for the same purpose. Namely, to both disempower women and to lay the social groundwork for the emergence of Capitalism. MSAW is incredibly ambitious and interesting in that it doesn’t just treat Andean life as static until the Spanish show up. It begins with the Inca conquest, where we get a preview of the ways that conquest distorts society. Typically, Andean life was sorted onto male and female paths but the responsibilities rights and access to resources were equal. The Inca impose a “conquest hierarchy” that privileges men, as the war-makers, but does not strip women of power women to the extent that the Spanish would shortly afterwards. European notions of women, again, masterfully outlined in CATW, do not have any substantial role in society. Christendom regulated them to minors, they never grew into full adults. The push-back by women (called Witchcraft) as well as the betrayal of these women by the men of the Andes is heartbreaking and predictable. It’s the same story, a new economic world-view comes in, fucks everything up, and gives us the world we have today. FISTFUL OF SHELLS, CALIBAN AND THE WITCH, and MOON SUN AND WITCHES tell the same story 3 ways and should be read together, probably in High School. 1531 Quipa

NEXT LEVEL BASIC: THE DEFINITIVE BASIC BITCH HANDBOOK - STASSI SHROEDER

Last time I was in NC I became interested in the reality TV show VANDERPUMP RULES. I’m not sure entirely why, partly on the recommendation of the writer Molly Lambert, partly because I’m drawn to pop-reality TV when I’m back in North Carolina, dealing with the family. Either way, I got hooked and started watching the show here in Seattle, where it fits very nicely with the current Pandemic. I’m an essential worker with a stressful job, I don’t live the life of the people on this show but I do find watching them engaging. Almost hypnotic. The show itself is about the pathologies embedded within heterosexuality. It follows this group of aspiring famous people who happen to work at RHoBH star Lisa Vanderpump’s many WeHo restaurants (she is constantly saying she’s opened 33 restaurants in her life).  They all profess to want to be famous models/actors/musicians/dj’s but it’s clear that, like most people involved in the periphery of Hollywood, they don’t really care what form their fame takes. The show follows them as they fight with each other and sleep with one another’s partners. Typical reality TV fare though the location, in West Hollywood, lends the proceedings some interesting depth. WeHo is an affluent city (Hollywood is a neighborhood in the City of Los Angeles, West Hollywood is a separate city with its own mayor and everything, located to the west of LA proper) famous for its gay nightlife. Because of this the men on the show are trading on their looks and youth and hotness in a way that is stereotypically female. So the show is about women, Stassi first among them, trying to marry and have babies with these aging bartender hunks who are slowly realizing they won’t be able to trade on their looks for too much longer. They want their men to be hot and desired and work in this super sexualized field (bar tending at these Hollywood hot spots) but never to desire anyone but them. They want to move to the suburbs and have babies despite the economics of this being impossible. Or so it seems at first, but slowly the cast starts making real money from the show itself, allowing them to finance the types of lives that could only be aspiration as bartenders, a weird sort of extra-textual feedback that’s endemic to reality TV. The men are forever getting sad and/or full of despair, angst and alcohol then sleep with a rando to feel potent. The women are forever accusing one another of being sluts or (this comes up alot) sleeping with married men. Especially since this show is set in a very gay milieu (Pride gets its own episode each season), heterosexuality ends up looking insane. And despite the constant “Love is Love” “We’re so inclusive at Pump” etc. the only major LGBT (tho, we eventually find out a main character is bi) cast member (a trans woman) is treated badly and basically bullied off the show. All fascinating stuff. Stassi is billed as the main character early on (she does the intro voice over at the beginning of S1E1 that introduces everyone in relation to her) tho, this centrality fades over time. She’s the most maniacal about having a boyfriend and being in charge of her friend group. 

Her book, sadly, is a letdown. I did not expect too much from it. It was gifted to me by my partner, who also follows the show (but loves it less than I) and I would say my suspicions about a Stassi book were confirmed. She doesn’t understand what’s interesting about her. She thinks I want advice on being a basic bitch, which I don’t. She defines “basic” as opposed to pretentious and quality I did not find a lot of in LA but she’s obsessed with. 90% of the book is about why she shouldn’t be shamed for liking ranch dressing. What I want is autobiography stuff and stuff about the show. For instance, we do find out that when she first moved to LA, her and Jax, as 2 young hot models, got recruited by Scientology. Classic LA tale. But we get so little of this. Stassi’s dad is like a character from a Faulkner novel. He’s from New Orleans, like Stassi he sneaks liquor into restaurants in LA. He, however, smuggles his booze in a flask with a picture of his YT daughter held onto the flask with a rubber band. The Flask itself has a relief of a pistol on the side. He rails, without prompting against liberals and democrats. Her mom comes off as a real supportive attention-hungry asshole on TV but they’re hardly featured in the book. Which is a shame because it is very clear after seeing her parents on TV for about 3 minutes, why Stassi is fucked up the way she is. All of the Vanderpump cast members have nightmare parents (unsurprising) but Stassi’s come off the worst. Since I don’t keep track of the extended Vanderpump universe (twitter, interviews, Summer House, etc) I didn’t realize that Stassi’s podcast had been boycotted when she posted an Instagram with #nazichic because she owns lots of “SS” monogrammed clothing. She literally puts this in the last 3 pages of the book and just said she should be more careful and people should be nicer. A missed opportunity. 88 ranch fountains.

FIERCE FEMININE DIVINITIES OF EURASIA AND LATIN AMERICA: BABA YAGA, KALI, POMBAGIRA AND SANTA MUERTE - MAŁGORZATA OLESZKIEWICZ-PERALBA

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The tradition continues. Two traditions really, first, this one was again printed off surreptitiously at work, both because the library was closed and because this text is reasonably obscure. Secondly, I seem to be on a religious-studies kick, that this book continues. Tho it would be hard to think of a religious book more narrowly focused on my interests. I’ve made a Baba Yaga article of clothing, I have been to the main shrines to Kali and Santa Muerte (in Kolkata and Tepito, respectively) and frequently wear necklaces depicting them. Pombagira is somewhat new to me, though the book seems to think that she is basically a female Exu (a spelling I prefer to Eshu). I appreciate that most of the book seemed to be based on the authors in-person research into these deities. Novel deities, esp a figure like Santa Muerte does not have much up to date scholarship about her (esp. In English) and she’s so new that the way in which she is understood and venerated changes constantly. On the other end, the other suggests that Baba Yaga herself was once a powerful female divinity, perhaps associated with children and/or the forest, but has morphed and transformed over time into merely a monster. I do wonder if something similar will happen to S.M. The Kali section was the shortest and most disappointing. I believe this is because while the other figures are independent from a mainstream religion, either being quite new and officially denounced (Santa Muerte), or being from a marginal syncretic faith practiced by subalterns (Pombagira), or simply being so old the faith they were once a part of no longer exists (Baba Yaga), Kali is still fully within mainstream Hinduism and not marginal at all. I would wager that she is among the 5 most recognizable Hindu figures and there’s literally thousands of years of scholarship on her. It would be too much for the author to tackle that corpus in this single book, I’d only want to read such a thing from a real expert (Wendy Doniger maybe), so Oleszkiewicz-Peralba wisely gets in, highlights what she’s interested in, and gets out. The Latin American stuff, Santa Muerte and Pombagira,is the best part for sure. I’ve written a few things about S. M. and I think about her often and Oleszkiewicz-Peralba gets the closest I think to explaining her appeal and the “why now” aspect of her popularity. Mexico has undergone such a profound change since NAFTA in the 90s and then really kicked into overdrive with the 21st century drug war. And these changes have been insanely violent and rendered life very unstable. You can’t trust the law (corrupt), or the church (ditto), or politicians or even trust the idea that if you work hard and play by the rules, things will work out for you. But you can trust Santa Muerte. She doesn’t require you be a good Catholic or do they right thing, all she asks is your devotion. She’s ad hoc and ready to make a deal. This is why attempts to create “official” Santa Muerte churches have largely floundered while a shrine a poor woman put outside of her house in a bad neighborhood is the physical center of the cult. I’ve got a lot to say about this and how it dovetails with the way both Mexico and the world at large have changed in the last 20-30 years but I’ll leave that for another time. Oleszkiewicz-Peralba’s chapter about Pombagira was likewise very interesting, Pombagira is the deity I knew the least about going in. We do learn a lot about her connection with Exu but not as much as I would have liked about Brazilian syncretism and they ways African spirituality is refracted in that part of the New World. But, that is it’s own book. As for this one, I came away impressed with the breath of Oleszkiewicz-Peralba’s curiosity and knowledge. Certainly changed the way I think about some of these goddesses. 101 Death Goddesses

1-900-HANG-UPS - ROBERT REID DRAKE

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It was recently my birthday my buddy Spike sent me some books (including a gorgeous and enormous copy of Chris Ware’s BUILDING STORIES) including this slim chapbook. I don’t know the author, tho apparently they briefly lived in Asheville, but perhaps not when I was there. Or, perhaps we did meet and I’ve forgotten, I can never remember meeting anyone. It’s a very specific curse. Anyway, I don’t read as much modern poetry as I wish I did. I’ve been slowly reading through complete works of Keats and Rimbaud, mostly because it’s the quarantine and they’re all the non-Carson poetry in my house. Plus, I like the idea of someone’s complete life work in poetry fitting into a single volume. All that’s to say that I don’t have the deepest background in which to place 1-900-HOOKUPS. I will say I very much enjoyed it. It’s a dozen or so pages of prose-y poetry that, to my ear, mostly centers around hook-ups and casual sexual encounters. The vibe you get from the cover, an advertisement for a gay call in line, fulfilled in the verse, with the theme of technology and sex being updated from mid-90’s(?) chat lines to instagram posts and text messages and online art projects. At one point Drake describes reading a text message as, “the black skull whispers.” When he gets an elliptical response from a man he’s messaging he asks,“do all poets talk this way to strangers?” despite the fact that they’re texting, not talking. It not all modern technology and love and sex and strangers and excitement. Drake includes a wonderful short verse about a particularly saucy El Greco portrait, ending with the line, “Staunch Faggot standing tall, the kind of man only a brush can touch.” Plus, there’s a mention of Guilford County, shout out to NC, take your shirt off, etc. Overall, excellent. I should be reading more current chapbooks. 900 beautiful strangers.