ESPERANZA - JAMIE HERNANDEZ

My partner is deep in the Love and Rockets game. She’s working her way through the whole giant series, starting with the Xamie stuff, and I believe she’s somewhere past half way. Hard to tell. Like American Splendor, part of L&R’s cache is it’s sheer size. The three brothers have been working on this thing since ‘81. The downside to creating such a huge work is that it can be intimidating to start, which has been my experience with it. That being said, my partner recommended this volume, saying it contained her favorite single issue she’s read so far, so I picked it up. Like all great soap-operas, you can read this two ways. As part of the decades+ L&R universe (how my partner experienced it) or as a stand-alone (what I did). It is still comprehensible under my method but the gap in your understanding is palpable while reading it. I only have the vaguest notions about the plots, characters, and themes of L&R, and even that is L&R broadly, not the Xamie-verse specifically, so I could tell that certain panels and revelations would hit harder if I fully understood their context. K8 kept looking over my shoulder and trying to give me context but there’s too much there to summarize. That being said, I did enjoy this. Typically, these books are pretty realistic. Xamie does a great job using more cartoonish drafting styles when people are fighting or emotions are otherwise heightened. There’s an extended section that focuses on elementary school children which is drawn in a more cartoon-y, Peanuts-adjacent style. For the rest of the book, it is interesting that Xamie doesn’t ever shade in skin tone, everyone is the color of the background, which occasionally makes it jarring when the dialogue revels someone’s race. But the layout and blocking within the panels is God-level and so easy to read. As far as plot, Xamie continues to dominate the Bechdel test. For a male cartoonist, I believe him to be unpassed in terms of how many women his comics forefront. I think you could probably complain about frogmouth/Viv being a violent, chaotic version of the Manic, Pixie Dreamgirl, especially in the sense that we are typically following men who are infatuated with her rather than Viv herself, but there are enough other female characters with less-stereotypical qualities to more than make up for it. It is interesting that my partner picked this one as the highlight of the series so far since she based that distinction on the fact that this volume includes the most surreal and horrific vignette that I’ve ever seen in a L&R story. It features some grotesque body-horror stuff that reminds me of Charles Burns and would seem out of place in the hands of a lesser writer but Xamie manages to pull it off. I could see myself reading all of these one day but in the meantime I think I’ll focus on less massive comics. 81 Rockets.

REALLY THE BLUES - MEZZ MEZZROW

As a YT guy, who primarily listens to rap music, this book has been on my radar for a long time. I finally got around to it and it turned out to be a bizarre exercise in reading around. Let me backup. REALLY THE BLUES is a memoir. Mezz Mezzrow is a minor figure in the Jazz world as an arranger and a clarinetist but he’s most famous for being a drug dealer. If you listen to older jazz, “If You’re a Viper” for instance, you occasionally hear weed being referred to as Mezz. He dealt in Harlem for years, supplying all sorts of jazz luminaries, Louis Armstrong perhaps being the most famous. Additionally, Mezz is YT. I’m interested in all of that, the social history of drugs (specifically pot and opium, though heroin and cocaine also make appearances), the early 20th century criminal underworld (this is nice companion to Iceberg Slim who often writes about roughly the same era and scene), race relations in the north, the history of jazz and American popular music broadly, prison culture, etc. Sadly, you have to sort of read around the book for this stuff. Primarily, Mezz is interested in what he considers “true Jazz,” aka New Orleans style Jazz from the first couple decades of its existence. I am not interested in Mezz’s opinions on Jazz or why the newer style is no good, I’m not really interested in his Jazz career, I’m interested in the stuff around it. It is funny that, even 100+ years ago, YT men were deciding what was “authentic” in a Black art. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Mezz record but poking around online, it seems like his reputation is negative to mixed, as a Jazz player. Some people think he’s bad, others think he’s middling. Either way, his drug dealing and general involvement in the scene is more interesting than his music. Maybe a modern equivalent would be someone like Desto Dubb, if Dubb was YT. That being said, there were lots of really interesting, historically engaging sections. It’s interesting that he grew up on Division and Western in Chicago, near-ish to where I used to live in an area that is now called Ukrainian Village. Strangely, he goes to Austin High School on the Westside which, apparently, was both all-YT and jazz obsessed at the time. Austin, both the school and neighborhood, are 100% Black and quite poor at this point. The first moment of racial awareness, one he comes back to, takes place in Juvie where a race war breaks out between transplanted Southern YTs and Blacks in Chicago. Mezz tells us that “punks” or sex-slaves were common and unremarkable in jail but a Black kid named Big Six had a YT punk which cause a huge riot in which Mezz took the black kids’ side. He notices that all the YT inmates are actual criminals and mostly bad but the Black inmates are merely victims of racism so, in general, much easier to deal with. Eventually, and famously, he gets Riker’s in NYC to classify him as “Negro” so he can be in the Black section of the jail. Also, all the jails in the book have jazz bands, which is strange from my 2020 vantage point. It’s funny that he gets high at the zoo (same) and meets lots of displaced Russian princes in NYC. It includes sections about seeing swastikas in NYC in the mid-30’s, stuff about how Black people supported, vaguely, the Japanese (as a colored race) before Pearl Harbor (a particular interest of mine), there’s strange stuff about how when he first got to Harlem, all the gangsters were YT but then that changed over. At first Mezz had a YT wife who lived in the, then-YT, Bronx while he went to sell pot in Harlem all day. Eventually, he divorces and marries a Black woman. Amazingly, he claims to have coined the phrase “jam session” which is a weird flex. It’s also funny to track the evolution of the term “hipster” which shows up in this book several times and changes meaning over Mezz’s life. I also found out Fats Waller and I have the same shoe size. All pretty amazing stuff, the book just needed a crueler editor that would have given us more details w/r/t the scene and less about the jazz itself. ‘47 hot jazzes.

ADDENDUM: This takes place slightly before but in the same general scene as the Iceberg Slim novels. As such, the characters have amazing, evocative street names. While there are the Slimian pimps and gangsters, most of these characters were Jazzmen and/or drug-dealers:

-Yellow

-Big Six

-Red Tell

-Big Izzy

-Nick the Greek

-Bon Bons

-Monkey Pollack

-Dead-eyed Dick

-Yiddle

-Slick

-Louie the Wop

-Legs Diamond

-Dirty Dan

-Poppa-Stoppa

-Little Fats

-Tip/Tap/Toe (dance trio)

-Too Sweet

-Zutty

-Snake-Hips (two different Snakes-Hips)

-Big Green

-A-Number-One

-Bumble-Bee Slim

NICKNAMES FOR WEED:

-Muggles

-Golden-Leaf

-Muta

-Gunja

-Gerfa

THE DEVIL’S CHESSBOARD: ALLEN DULLES, THE C.I.A., AND THE RISE OF AMERICA’S SECRET GOVERNMENT - DAVID TALBOLT

This was quite a week to finish this book. For posterity, I’m writing this a few days after what I’m hoping will be remembered as Fash Wednesday where the Trump/Q folks stormed the capitol. To quote Death is Just Around the Corner, “CIA-backed nazis?! In MY rotunda?!” This book makes a good companion with the KGB book I finished a month or so ago, especially since both authors are slanted pretty heavily against their subjects. Which is good. I would not like to read a CIA or KGB book written from the point of view that these are honorable institutions that have done good things. That being said, I found many parts of this book disappointing. I think this is largely because I’m more interested in the CIA as a whole rather than just Dulles and his tenure. Obviously, Dulles is pretty much the major force behind the CIA taking on a charter to conduct secret wars around the world from the time of their creation out of the OSS in ‘47 until right this moment. Actually, before ‘47 truthfully, since one of the books most interesting aspects has to do with the war years and Dulles efforts to first negotiate a conditional surrender with various Nazis he was personally fond of and then his efforts to install these same Nazis into positions of authority in post war Germany (we get lots of very interesting Gehlen stuff) or to help move them to more agreeable locals in South America. Additionally, I learned both Dulles’ wife and mistress (who went on vacations together and were friends) were patients of Carl Jung in Switzerland. Small world. We then get a tour of the early CIA “greatest hits” including the Guatemalan coup, the Iranian Coup and their role in killing Lumumba. All important stuff but things I’m pretty familiar with and none of these chapters offered a ton of new information but would be good for a CIA novice. The last third or so of the book is Kennedy assassination stuff, which wasn’t what I bargained for. As a non-boomer I’m not terribly interested in the Kennedy assassination, though, because this obsession typically overlaps with obsessions of mine, I’ve read a fair amount about it at this point (same with Manson stuff) and while this recounting is interesting and through, I still think the aforementioned Death Is Just Around The Corner podcast has the best deep-dive if you really want to go down the CIA/JFK rabbit hole. Either way, it is hard to watch the Zapruder film now and now see a front shot. Who knows? Surprisingly, there was some MKULTRA info I was unaware of (since it wasn’t Sidney Gottlieb), specifically the idea of “psychic driving” and subproject 68. I wish this book had focused more on the CIA generally and less about Dulles. It stops before the Chilean coup, to give an example of something I’d like to know more about. Either way, it’s good interesting stuff. If you’re surprised about a group of Right-Wing goons, duped by stupid propaganda yet still dangerous, storming a capital to violently protest a democratic election they disagree with the outcome of, perhaps you should look into this and consider that perhaps this is the a instance of chickens coming home to roost that would surprise even Malcom X in it’s on-the-nose-ness. ‘47 literal Nazis paid with American tax money.

SELECTED POEMS - TCHIYAYA U TAM'SI

Before I get to the content of the book I’d like to note that this is the oldest book I’ve ever checked out of the Seattle Public Library and came with the card-catalog pocket I remember from elementary school and this old, double-mermaid logo for the SPL. Someone checked this out in ‘71, when some of the poems in this volume would have been fairly new. So onto the poems themselves, I got my hands on this due to a combined desire to read more African poetry generally and wanting to follow up some of the suggestions and illusions Johnson dropped in MI REVALUESHANARY FREN. This did not disappoint. Tam’si is Congolese and from the class of Africans who grew up during the end of colonialism (he knew Lumumba apparently) and was educated and later largely lived in France. The poems themselves are translated from French, not Kikongo or one of the other Congolese languages. As he himself writes, “I take pity on those who read me: / I speak their languages-here in Europe- / Thus: / It’s raining” I struggle not to make my poetry reviews simply a long list of quotes and pulled out lines that really struck me. Rest assured, this book is full of them. It’s very, for lack of a better term, surreal and strange. It focuses more on arresting images and weirdness than coherence. I don’t have a deep background in French poetry but it did strike me as Rimbaud-esq. Formally, there are both long cycles and sections that are written as dialog. The longer cycles contains lots of recurring images, especially around the sea and Christianity and it’s legacy in the Congo. These poems contain both the only poetic reference to Antsirabe I think I’ve ever seen as well as the phrase, “the pale king” decades before DFW. I was particularly taken by a section about Emmett Till, especially the idea of a francophone African writing about an American teenager which includes the section: “They / Killed him under water / as they baptise hereabouts / in such Christian fashion / never with a mother’s name” Occasionally he gets pithy and aphoristic, as in “Nothing is closer to a cry than music” which is one of my favorite poetic modes. Occasionally the strangeness and surreality felt overdone and confusing on purpose, but overall I was left wanting more. As a weird aside, I found out that Tam’si died on the exact day, April 22, 1988, that I was born. 1960 Hearts of Darkness.

THE VEIL AND THE MALE ELITE: A FEMINIST INTERPRETATION OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN ISLAM - FATIMA MERNISSI

Got into this based on both an interest in the veil itself as well as a desire to read more criticism/history/theory/nonfiction stuff from Global South (3rd world, developing world, to list the terms in order of my affinity for them) authors. Mernissi is Moroccan and, to her immense credit, still teaches in her home nation. She’s very fucking smart about this stuff and has the great gift of concision and structure. This book could easily have devolved into a long, long exploration of the life of the prophet (pbuh) and the debates and ramifications that still surround his choices in the early days of Islam. Islam, as a culture, is obviously very book focused, Mernissi points out that the first word of the first Sura that was revealed (which isn’t the first Sura in the current Koran, a fact I only mention because the order of the Suras is a major issue the book explores) was Iqra which means “read,” so, unlike with Christ, there are dozens of accounts of these early days as well as centuries of commentary and tradition that Mernissi manages to cut through and offers both clear analysis and useful insights. I would say the first chapter, The Muslims and Time, is the highlight and could be read by itself (tho the book is short, you should just read the whole thing). It basically points out how the modern West has captured the idea of a future (in a process that I would call Capitalist Realism) so subaltern groups like, and especially, muslims must look backwards into their history, for a golden, timeless era that they can use as a utopian vision in the present, a process she calls “chronopolitics.” Again, this part is my favorite, it’s the most broad but seemed to most applicable to my understanding of Islam and modern Islamic culture. Mernissi then delves back into Islamic history to show how the same male elite that call for, and murderously enforce, a supposed “true Islam” are also totally ignorant of actual history. Early Islamic history and pre-Islamic Arabic history is something I have an interest in but not much understanding. Mernissi, however, paints what is, to me, a compelling narrative that Muhammed (pbuh) was trying to build a Umma without distinction between members. That he was attempting to build a religion where one’s connection with the divine as well as the world and the right way to live was equal to everyone else's. There’s no clergy in Islam, the prayers can and are done by one’s self anywhere in the world, the Koran (unlike, say, the Bible) is written in a language people speak and are encouraged to learn if they don’t. However, Mernissi claims that pre-Islamic attitudes, Jahiliyya, especially towards women, made the veil a compromise that Muhammad (pbuh) found necessary. But, to Mernissi, it is a compromise that betrays the true essence of Islam, the idea that you’d need anything besides your reason and the Koran to live a life pleasing to Allah. “The hijab reintroduced the idea that the street was under control of the sufaha (lit. fools and/or hypocrites), those who did not restrain their desires and who needed a tribal chieftain to keep them under control.” This, to me, suggests a sort of anarcho-Islam that I’m into. There’s also a lot about pre-Islamic sexual politics (spoiler alert: bad) including the fact that there is a word, ta’arrud which means “taking up a position along a woman’s path to urge her to fornicate” as well as the life of the prophet (pbuh) w/r/t his wives and the various types of “marriages” and sexual arrangements that existed before Islam. Again, I don’t know enough about Islamic history or culture to truly evaluate her conclusions, I do find them persuasive and incredibly well argued, but that doesn’t seem to stop her critics. Her conclusion contains an anecdote about being interrupted at an Islamic conference (by a man, of course) and being challenged on the history she highlights. She relays how she rattled off a long list of sources in Arabic before being told the man challenging her did not, in fact, speak/read Arabic, he just had a gut reaction against her argument for equality. Always important to learn more about Islam. 300 Idols in the Kaaba 

THE SWORD AND THE SHIELD: THE MITROKHIN ARCHIVE AND THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE KGB - CHRISTOPHER ANDREW & VASILI MITROKHIN

This motherfucker was looooong. On pure page count, TSATS isn’t totally insane, it’s ~550 pages followed by copious notes, but man, does it slow down those ~550 pages. I’m quite clearly pretty obsessed with history and especially 20th century history and parapolitics but most of my reading in this area is around the US and what we’re up to, my hope was that TSATS would fill in some of the gaps w/r/t the KGB and their role in recent world history. This book itself is the product of a pretty amazing story, a KGB archivist, named Mitrokhin, defected in the 90’s and brought all these notes, files and archives with him. Eventually, the official historian (apparently a real job) of MI5, Chris Andrew, distilled these files into this book, which seeks to track the KGB (and NKVD and MGB and GPU and all the other names this agency has gone by) across it’s 74 year history. I will leave aside the critique that this book, having been written by a MI5 partisan, is itself propaganda but I will note that the tone of the book, expectedly, is very anti-Soviet. Lots of long asides about how dumb or evil or naïve these people are and how Communism has baked in contradictions that the KGB can’t overcome. He’s likewise intensely deferential to Western intelligence and uncritical of their motives, (i.e. lots of stuff about them being interested in “spreading democracy”). For instance, he bizarrely claims that “The truth about Hoover’s probably severely repressed sexuality is unlikely to be known.” I was not aware that Hoover’s tortured, closeted psyche was “unlikely to be known.” But I read things pretty constantly that have this sort of tone against the USA so it’s pretty easy for me to read past. What I was really interested in revolves around what this enemy that so much is projected on was actually capable of achieving. To me, the history of the KGB works in 2 phases, before WWII and during the Cold War. Before WWII they had the best intelligence network in the world and scored some huge, early victories. Because Communism is ideological and consciously internationalist  they’re able to recruit sympathetic leftists across the world. Stalin knows much more about the plans of Churchill and Roosevelt than vice-versa. The NKVD was quite familiar with Nazi plans before Operation Barbarossa, but in a strange irony of history, Stalin, one of the most paranoid men to ever live, decided he could trust the Germans. The Soviets also stole the MANHATTAN project discoveries very early on. The book quotes a scientist who reasons that both countries having the weapons is safer overall for the world, which does strike me as true. Though after the war, they are increasingly inept and ineffective. The book feels so long because Andrew draws out every agent that they sent over who becomes an alcoholic and basically achieves nothing. There are so, so many of these people. Even high placements and successes like Ken Philby don’t seem like they really did anything to change the tide of the Cold War. When the CIA is doing things like overthrowing governments on 3 continents and orchestrating political assassinations, the KGB doesn’t seem very formidable. The book could very much have been edited down to include only the really explosive, interesting stuff. I see the value, academically (tho, like I said, the tone was too polemic to be properly academic) of such a thorough account but a 200-300 page version would have made more sense to me and read much more smoothly. There were a couple of interesting plots and storylines that I was surprised to learn and I’m still thinking about. There’s an interesting through line where the KGB keeps trying to exacerbate race-relationships in the US by impersonating the KKK. They try to release the Hoover-sexuality stuff by writing a letter as the KKK to different papers and they sent threatening letters to various Civil Rights organizations. They discussed, in project PANDORA, bombing Black churches in NYC and blaming the American Jewish Defense League. The book posses an intriguing alternate history where Henry Wallace stays FDR’s VP and becomes president since Harry Dexter Wallace and Laurence Duggan, who Wallace would have put at Treasury and State, respectively, were KGB-connected the texture and position of the Cold War would have been very different from the very beginning. I think the Wallace-as-president thing is one of the bigger “what if’s?” of the 20th century, and I really do think we’d be living in a much, much better world if this had happened, so I don’t view this with as much horror as Andrew does. They had plans to sneak agents into the US over the Mexican and Canadan borders to destroy infrastructure as well as Special Forces unit Alpha that assassinated Amin and were, apparently, were ordered by Communist hard-liners to kill Yeltsin. There were lots of honeytraps with both male and female “swallows,” which is a great term, as well as lots of fake abortions for black-mail reasons. They also had lots and lots of Nazi files so accusing someone of having been a Nazi was very popular. While this book doesn’t focus on the period, the KGB was most fearsome in its NKVD iteration and never seemed particularly effective (and certainly not compared to the CIA) outside of Russia and even the KGB seemed to spend a lot of time during the Cold War hunting down and killing defectors, rather than other countries Presidents. The stuff about them planting fake news in other countries papers is, of course, quite prescient these days. India was apparently the main source for this, they infiltrated dozens of papers and got thousands of stories they wanted published a year. Compared to, say, killing Patrice Lumumba,  this doesn't seem all that James Bond-y but it’s good to get a more rounded sense of the history. There’s nothing about a KGB-equivalent to MKULTRA which surprised me. I suppose all that Mancherian Candidate stuff really was Sidney Gottlieb’s paranoia.  Needed an editor but useful irregardless. 1917 Secret Polices

MI REVALUESHANARY FREN - LINTON KWESI JOHNSON

In 2016 when Bob Dylan won the Nobel prize for literature, I was disappointed. To be clear, I love Bob Dylan, he’s maybe my favorite YTguy Boomer thing and I share the love with my dad (a YT boomer) but still, I was disappointed for 2 reasons. First, and more simply, it’s basically impossible to make any money at all writing literature and literature is so marginal to culture at large that it basically only, somewhat, penetrates the mainstream news once a year when they announce the winner of the only lit award anyone has heard of. And to give that shine to Bob Dylan, who recently sold his catalog for something like $300 million, is a tragic waste. But more pedantically, I was upset because, to me, Dylan doesn’t make literature. Literature, in my view, is words who were artistically placed primarily to be read. This cuts out things like scripts or song lyrics, which are certainly still art, just not literature. You could argue that Shakespeare is now literature since it is primarily consumed by reading instead of viewing the plays but, to use my favorite phrase, that’s the exception that proves the rule. Johnson, like all the best poets, complicates this. His poetry is written in style that seeks an approximation of Jamaican speech. I’m not going to dive into the creole/pidgin/dialect delineation debate, I’ll merely add that it’s unfamiliarity made me read it out-loud in two senses. First, literally out-loud, as well as “out-loud” in my head, in the sense that I’d have to mentally sound out the word phonetically using what little I know about Jamaican orthography, and then try to “translate” it to terms more familiar to me. The book itself comes with a CD of him reading the poems, which adds yet more layers and ways to approach, you can both read along or listen to him declaim poems that aren’t in the book. His reading, of course, unlocked a myriad of rhythms and rhymes I missed when only reading. So the whole idea of whether this is meant as literature, as I define it, or something primarily spoken and thus performed is complex and unclear. Either way, it’s a really cool experience, though I will admit that it occasionally was hard to parse on the what-does-this-word-mean level. However, Johnson’s commitment to replicating this aspect of life and culture leads to really amazing sections, in terms of just rhythm and feel, that would be impossible if he didn’t have such a mastery over his technique:

him seh:

mi haffi pick a packit

tek a wallit from a jackit

mi haffi dhu it real crabit

an if a lackit mi haffi pap it

an if a safe me haffi crack it

ar cap it wid mi hatchit

Johnson doesn’t let this technique dictate the subject matter of the poetry either. The work was much more politically focused and engaged than most of the poetry I’m used to. Here’s his description of the end of the Soviet Union:

well awrite

soh Garby gi di people dem glashnas

an it poze di Stallinist dem plenty prablem

soh Garby leggo peristrika pan dem

Otherwise, the poetry largely focuses on the struggles and injustices facing Jamaicans, and immigrants more broadly, in the UK during the 70’s-90’s. Having gone to so many protests these last months where we chant an endless list of names it was horrifying and revealing to see Johnson engaged in the same sort of exercise but listing UK names unknown, but eliciting a disgustingly familiar feeling, to me. Same all over Babylon I suppose. Even at its darkest these poems are defiant and hopeful which was a welcomed break from the more pessimistic fair I’m more typically drawn to. There’s a poem in here called “More Time” which makes the same argument as Wilde’s “The Soul of the Man Under Socialism” but in a much more mellifluous way. Gonna have to check out more Johnson. 39 dub poems

COMING UP SHORT: WORKING-CLASS ADULTHOOD IN AN AGE OF UNCERTAINTY - JENNIFER M. SILVA

I got this from the library because I was stoned and saw a quote on Twitter I thought was smart and noticed the book it was from was in the SPL system. It turned out better than I could have expected, this book is very insightful. It also happens to be quite short and easy to read in a day or so. The book is basically an academic paper fleshed out. Silva interviewed 100 working class young people about their lives and analyzed the results. She’s trying to figure out how young people, working-class young people, think of their lives now that it isn’t possible to participate in the traditional markers of adulthood, like owning a house or having a stable job or being financially comfortable. I’m a “young” person who’s too poor to have a kid so I’m pretty interested in analysis w/r/t this situation. Silva develops her ideas, at first, along very familiar lines. She charts neoliberalism and the defeat of organized labor, “Bowling Alone” style social isolation, and the world-historical wealth inequality that’s taken root here in the USA since the mid-70’s. Again, that’s pretty familiar territory for me, if you look back over this list, the recent economic history of the West is a leitmotif. Silva’s okay on this stuff. The book, thankfully, is short and not billing itself as a deep dive into macroeconomics of the last 50 years, what she is quite smart about though regards how “Neoliberalism, then reigns not only as an abstract and removed set of discourses and practices in the economic sphere but also as a lived system of meanings and values in the emotional sphere.” And it’s these lines of inquiry that Silva really nails. She’s able to put her finger on something I’ve definitely noticed over the past decade or so, what she smartly calls the “therapeutic narrative” as a way of organizing and understanding one’s life. In ages past, one would build meaning by integrating into a community and partaking in externally visible markers of adulthood and status, like having children. Now, because the economic reality precludes all that for so many, what young people instead do is build narratives of growth and overcoming adversity, like alcoholism or abuse, and allow this to structure their lives and to give it meaning. This also connects, for me, to the recent explosion of discourse around “trauma” and “working through one’s personal trauma” and bringing a “trauma informed” mindset to the world. I’m very sympathetic to this line of thinking, I feel like I see examples of it everyday in both myself and my interactions with my friends who are in the same boat, economically. Silva correctly connects this to the very atomized view of the world neoliberalism posits and reproduces. Like Thatcher said, there are only individuals. Silva is wise in showing how this dynamic operates across both gender and race lines in terms of the sorts of relationships young people engage in. There’s a consistent cultural message, which itself is a vital component to the economic regime, that trusting others is very dangerous and unwise. The message is sent over and over again that government is useless and cannot be changed, collective action is for suckers, and it only makes sense to operate at the level of the individual. Capitalist Realism, a term Silva doesn’t use, makes alternatives impossible to conceive. One must focus on oneself. Which is why the mainstream version of identity politics is so unhelpful politically. Instead of pushing for a world without the sort of cut-throat, winner-take-all Thunderdome-Capitalism, it seeks to correct 500 years of exploitation and subjugation by tinkering with and adjusting (think of shallow “representation,” or the “More!Women!Drone pilots! meme) the system as it currently stands. Since everyone, YT and Black, has internalized the messages of “you’re on your own” this approach pleases no-one and further entrenches the hell-world. I’d really recommend this to everyone. It’s short and packed and surprisingly expansive, I’ve found myself mulling the implications often since finishing it. I would quibble with her strange definition of “working class” as “someone who’s father doesn’t have a college degree,” as well as the fact that you don’t learn this is the definition she’s using in the text of the book, rather, it’s tucked in an appendix. But I think the insights stand and the book remains very useful. Finally, I felt very seen when she listed some of the ways that people have found alternate solutions to the Therapeutic Mindset problem, one couple wasn’t rich enough to reasonably have children but have instead devoted large portions of their lives to, “Cultivating their selves alongside each other, rather than anchoring their commitment in shared obligation...They are the embodiment of pure relationship.” Which is, maybe, what K8 and I are doing (though I am interested in acquiring a kid, I suppose at that point our relationship will no longer be “pure”). The other anecdote that stood out was about how someone found relief from this constant neoliberal individualizing drive in the Noise music scene in Richmond, VA. I know some people in the Noise community here in Seattle and, before the plague, always enjoyed and sought out those grimy basement shows because, as the interviewee had discovered, they do offer a brief tonic from the anxiety and anomie of modern life. 100 working-class young people.

THE CLOCK MIRAGE: OUR MYTH OF MEASURED TIME - JOSEPH MAZUR

The first, and perhaps best, course I took when I was in college, 100 years ago, was called “Thinking About Time.” It was a philosophy course and it delivered what it promised, we did spend a whole semester thinking about time, specifically the McTaggart/Mellor theories and arguments. Heady stuff for sure, I was not really convinced by any of the “analytical” arguments of these guys but it did start me on thinking about time more critically. I think time has got to be one of the most considered and pondered over concepts, and one of the few concepts that truly can be described as universal. Not to say that different cultures and traditions don’t consider time in different ways, they do and I wish this book had gone more into that, but rather they all seek to describe how time works, which seems basically impossible. Mazur’s book is not as technical and dense as the stuff I had to read in that class. Judging by both his prose style and the picture on the back cover, he’s a groove old math professor at a liberal arts college, just a little desperate to show you how “far-out” math can be. And in that vein, he does his best not to scare anyone off by diving too deep into any single aspect of his arguments. In fact, this book is much more interested in giving the reader an overview of time than it is in arguing for a specific position. The book begins with explorations of how humans have told time, history of the clock, etc., and how technology has influenced people’s ideas. It dips into the wonky relativity time stuff but, thankfully, doesn’t go super deep. I’ve read other physics books (or, more accurately, I’ve read some pop-physics books and struggled through a handful of academic articles) that purport to explain how modern physics view time and they are deeply unintuitive. I sort of understand, on a logic/math level, why time would dilate as you increase speed but the underlying assumptions, that the speed of light is the true constant and a hard limit, don’t really make sense to me. Mazur does a good job dropping this before it gets overwhelming and making it very clear that the t of physics is divorced from our actual experiences. Maybe it will be relevant when close-to-light-speed travel is feasible but until then, it’s basically “how many angles can dance on the head of a pin?” to me. The book has another long, interesting segment about how time is felt and processed in our bodies. I got to learn a lot about SCN, a region of the brain associated with time, as well as how time is felt on the cellular level. This stuff was new to me, pretty interesting and a bit more accessible than the physics stuff. I guess my only complaint is that he doesn’t quite tie it all together, he lays out all these different avenues of inquiry and understanding but doesn’t come up with a theory that ties all of this stuff together. What’s the relation between the t of physics and the way time is felt on the cellular level? Is time a way to understand change? Is it just a feature of consciousness or is it a deeper characteristic of the universe? Do the past and future exist? Does the present? I do believe these questions to be unanswerable, though I would have enjoyed him going further out on a limb to answer them. But, irregardless, I love thinking about time and this book stimulated that part of my brain. One endless present moment. 

TONTA - JAMIE HERNANDEZ

Full confession: I haven’t really read any LOVE AND ROCKETS. I suppose I could look back through this archive but I think I’ve, maybe, read one other stand-alone in the Hernandez bros corpus. In fact, it is the sheer size of this corpus that has intimidated me into inaction w/r/t LOVE AND ROCKETS. I’m certainly aware of it’s reputation and I have no reason to doubt that its boosters are wrong, I just honestly don’t know where to start. Fortunately, my partner is a big Hernandez fan and she’s currently swimming through the Library’s collection, which is ample, the comics are a Fantographic tent-pole and Fantographics is a real source of pride for bookish/artsy Seattle, and she mentioned this one was stand-alone and good so I sat down and read it yesterday afternoon. I’ll cut to the chase, it was quite good. It first seems to concern a punk-rock girl in Southern California but then pivots to be more about a family murder drama.  The Tonta, the titular punk rock girl, stuff seemed to be the more “stand-alone” section of the book and appealed to me more. Jaime does a good job of rendering Tonta as the sort of person who laments/brags about being a loner whilst constantly being surrounded by people.  K8’s assured me LOVE AND ROCKETS is famous for retelling the same events from different perspectives and angles, Rashomon-style, and so I’m going to assume the family-murder stuff falls into this camp. As someone with no context, it was confusing. Though it was never boring, even when I struggled to understand why characters were acting the way they were, I was always compelled. I’m certainly the ten millionth person to say this but Jamie Hernandez is a god-level illustrator. Even when characters are just talking he flips the blocking and perspective almost every panel. I’m not sure how LAR is usually set up but most of this book is gridded 2x4 with excursions into double panels and slightly different arrangements but the pages flow very well and the whole thing reads really quickly. The drawing style verges more into the cartoonish (people seeing literal stars, big onamonapias) when there’s violence which I found a little surprising. Again, based on no context, I had assumed LAR was more “serious”. In that same vein, I had also assumed the series was more melodramatic and I found this book funny as often as it was dark or sad. Might have to ask K8 for more LAR recs. 80 Rockets.  

THE VISUAL DISPLAY OF QUANTITATIVE INFORMATION - EDWARD R. TUFTE

S/O to Ed Tufte for writing the same book twice. A few weeks ago, I read and reviewed ENVISIONING INFORMATION and was taken. It was a pretty amazing and interesting book and as a physical object, it is really a top-10 book. TVDOQI is very much the same book. Tufte walks you through his personal theories and rules about how data should be displayed and reprints tons of examples to comment on. This book, TVDOQI, is slightly different in that it includes a historical element. Did you know one person, named William Playfair invented the bar graph, the line graph, the pie graph and the area graph? And he was also a spy? Weird stuff. Though Tufte wisely doesn’t get bogged down in the history of graphical representation, the rest of this book is just like EI, is a series of succinct, precise bits of advice and lots of beautifully produced examples. Here’s a sampling of some of the advice:

“It is no accident, since the relational graphic- in its barest form, the scatterplot and its variants- is the greatest of all graphical designs.”

“Graphical excellence is the well-designed presentation of interesting data- a matter of substance, of statistics, and of design.”

“Graphical excellence is that which gives the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space.”

”The best graphics are about the useful and important, about life and death, about the universe. Beautiful graphics do not traffic in the trivial.” 

“And graphical excellence requires telling the truth about data.”

As you can see from the quotes, especially the last two, this book is a bit of time capsule. Written in ‘83, the book is sort of perched right at the edge of the loathsomely named “Information Age” where the amount of “data” and graphical representations of this data is orders of magnitude larger than when he wrote this. And it thinks people rightfully are suspicious of “large data '' and its ability to lie and manipulate. I guess it seems naive, sitting in 2020, to think that there is an agreed upon “truth” at the heart of a data set. Otherwise, there’s an interesting section at the front about how he, Tufte, left a lot of money on the table to design the book himself with a typesetter and thus make sure the book, as an object, was up to the standards he’s defending in the book. It turned out to be a great investment and puts this series in that rare category with 1000 PLATEAUS as books that are themselves examples of the thing the book is about. There’s also a surprising amount of Robert Venturi in the book; Tufte sees himself doing for graphics what Venturi did for architecture. He even steals his “Duck” criticism, calling out, “the We-Used-A-Computer-To-Build-A-Duck Syndrome.” Finally, he’s consistent about “data” being plural which you almost never see. You end up with sentences like, ”Aren’t data interesting?“ which are impressively pedantic. 1790 Graphs

LONG WHITE CON - ICEBERG SLIM

The quest to read all the Iceberg Slim continues. I think the man wrote only a dozen or so books and, thanks to Baby the Birdman, I’ve been able to get editions of most of them from the local library. This is the first of the Iceberg books I’ve read that features recurring characters. Specifically, Johnny O’Brien, the titular TRICK BABY, aka White Folks, is back. Actually, it’s stranger than that. Like the novel TRICK BABY, this book is a frame story, one where the first chapter is written by the character of Iceberg Slim who meets his old friend White Folks, a mix-raced con artist, and the rest of the book is White Folks’ story. This is made slightly stranger in this volume since the meat of the story is in 3rd person despite nominally being White Folk’s first-person account. Iceberg is most famous for his pimping but this book, like many of the others, focuses on con games. I would like to know how “realistic” the cons in this book are since, from my perspective in 2020, they’re pretty far out. They involve half-a-dozen people, nights spent practicing routines, disguise, fake offices and a whole fake ghost-town at one one point, seduction, sleight-of-hand, and legal corruption to work. Were people really getting swindled with such elaborate scams? One of the scams White Folks and friends run in this one is what I’d consider a reverse Scooby-Doo, by which I mean that instead of trying to convince someone a ghost-town is haunted so they can buy it for cheap, they try to convince someone a ghost-town is secretly full of cash and treasure and thus very valuable. Seems like a lot of work. This book also seems unfinished. It appears to be missing it’s last third, since it ends with White Folks’ partners being killed and without him resolving the unrequited love angle. Likewise, while this book does explore the racial dynamics of a racially ambiguous con man, TRICK BABY, was more insightful about them, even if it was at times didactic. Either way, Slim doesn’t get the respect he deserves and I’m excited I’ve still got some left. As always, I’ll leave with a list of the street names. Unlike previous books, not all of them are pimps, some are boxers or con men or whatnot, likewise, I tried not to repeat names from TRICK BABY. I need to compile a master list. ‘68 Long Cons.

-Aztec Billy

-The Utah Wonder

-Speedy Jackson

-Pearl

-High Ass Marvel

-High Pockets Kate

-Sure-Shot Kid

-One Pocket

-Precious Jimmy

-Sweet Dog

-Tango

-Black Sampson

-Tear-Off Thomas

ENVISIONING INFORMATION - EDWARD R. TUFTE

I read this on the recommendation of my father. We were both complaining about PowerPoint, which in my view competes only with the car alarm for worst invention invented since my birth (my dad was born before the H-bomb so he probably can’t say the same), and he mentioned how Tufte has a theory that PowerPoint played an important role in the Challenger disaster. I read up on that, very interesting and persuasive, then decided to check out one of his books. The library had this one, but it’s one of those books it would be great to own. Not unlike how the very style and structure of something like A THOUSAND PLATEAUS offers itself as an example of what it’s getting at, ENVISIONING INFORMATION itself is laid out beautifully and flows better than almost anything I’ve ever seen. Tufte is focused on how much information one can pack into “flatland” which is his term (borrowed from that weird book about sentient triangles) for the flat page. Actually, his real obsession seems to be critiquing and tearing apart bad design. Tons of railway schedules and maps are, rather gorgeously, reprinted only to be picked over and found wanting. Like a lot of good critiques, some of Tufte’s best stuff is negative. The thing that really stuck with me was how omnivorous Tufte is when it comes to displays of information. Of course there are some really complicated railway timetables (surprise, surprise, the Japanese make the best ones) and maps, but there’s also discussions of how to notate dance (something that’s intrigued me for a while), different ways a series of Massachusetts pictographs have been reproduced over time, alternative layouts for the periodic table, how Galileo notated his discoveries, color interactions and more. There’s a very interesting segment about the Vietnam memorial, for instance. Tufte’s prose style is surprisingly gnomic and given to declarations. He’ll write things like, “Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not features of attributes of information.” Which are pithy and catchy but don’t strike me as true. He’s quick to make his point and move on, which allows this book to be so broad without being a million pages long. But the draw here, and the reason I’d love to own this book, is how beautifully the examples are reprinted and laid out. It’s one of those books you can read in an hour or so then dip into while stoned, just flipping through the charts and graphs and information displays, for years. Coffee table/art books are among my favorite type and a type of book I, someday, aspire to own hundreds of, when my nomadism settles and collecting such costly and unwieldy items is more reasonable. A boy can dream. The only other thing I’d say about this book is the strangeness of reading it now in an age of computers and phones. Tufte’s obsession about how to display information on a page, especially really complicated information, has taken on a totally new dimension now that it’s displayed digitally. Which is not to say that Tufte’s insights can’t carry over, many popular apps are appallingly designed (Instagram, an app that is supposedly centered around photography, won’t display the pictures on full screens, for instance),it just means you have to do some extrapolation to guess what he’d say about a current design issue. Either way, I’ll be keeping this book on the table for a while, until the full 3 weeks are up on the rental, and, fingers crossed, one day I’ll own it. 1948 graphs and charts. 

OPEN VEINS OF LATIN AMERICA - EDUARDO GALEANO

This is a classic I’d never gotten around to. I’ve heard about it for a while, it’s one of those lefty-classics, and always had it pitched to me as a sort of “South of the Rio Grande A PEOPLE’S HISTORY” which isn’t the worst description. It does the Zinn-thing where it recasts the last 500 years of Latin American history as less of a heroic march of progress and more of a series of unimaginably evil events and programs. Though, if you’ve read A PEOPLE’S HISTORY you might be thinking, “wait, if Zinn’s book is ~700pgs and about 1 country (and only, really over the last 250 years) and this book is about  a dozen or so countries over 500 years, is this book 1,000+ pages or a book in a dozen volumes?” The answer, thankfully, is no. Galeano does assume you know something about Latin American History. He expects you to know about the Paraguayan War and who Papa Doc is. This is a lot to ask from a gringo, our history classes are boring propaganda about the USA and basically nothing about any other part of the world, so if you’re not deep in this stuff, you’ll want Wikipedia open. I’m pretty familiar with this stuff but it was exciting to read more about, say, William Walker, the famous filibuster, or this Taft quote Galeano digs up predicting anAmerican flag on the North Pole, the South Pole and the Panama canal. It’s instructive to see all this stuff laid out in one place. He does a good job following threads over the centuries, one that, as a reader and someone who pays attention to the news, you can update in real-time as you read. This book was published in ‘70 (my edition includes a 7-years-later final chapter) so there’s the most recent 50 years of Latin American history to take into account. For example, lots of ink is spilled over the plight of Bolivia. Galeano traces Europeans’ obsession with Bolivian silver which morphed into an obsession with tin and what these obsessions did to Bolivia. How European countries sent mineral attaches to the embassies of Latin America to focus on exploitative extraction. Interesting history, but just this year, Bolivia experienced an attempted right-wing coup, facilitated in part by the OAS, which seems to have been motivated, at least in part, by a desire for Bolivia’s lithium. The same old song, a song that this book traces back to the 1500s. Likewise, the political movements in Brazil and Venezuela, as well as the “War on Drugs” which doesn’t really get going until after this is published are all issues that you can pretty clearly see the roots of. Likewise, the contemporary structure of plunder, to use an A+ phrase of Galeano, is neo-liberal in design and outlook, and neoliberalism was just a twinkle in UofChicago’s eye when the book was written but it’s instructive to see what conditions it emerges into. This would be a great book to give a high schooler who’s just starting to think about the world and who it works. Apparently Chavez gave Obama a copy (amazing troll) and Allende, who writes the intro, fled Chile with only a copy of this book so it has quite a pedigree. Galeano complains that the prose is boring and that he’d make it more engaging if he were to rewrite it. I find this strange, the book is full of phrases like, “the neon-lit center is as resplendent as ever with the squandermania of a multimillionaire class.” which already places it in the top 5th percentile of engaging and artful writing in non-fiction history but maybe Spanish language histories are more inventive with their prose? English has a long tradition of dry-as-fuck history-prose so he’s got nothing to complain about. Either way, the book and the history are troubling and upsetting. All US Americans should be required to read it. Now I’ve got to find a Brazil specific history. 1519 open veins.

BEST OF IT, ERRATIC FACTS, FLAMINGO WATCHING - KAY RYAN

BEST OF IT, ERRATIC FACTS, FLAMINGO WATCHING - KAY RYAN Recently, I’ve had a compulsion to sort of cleanse the palate from these more heavy duty non-fiction slogs (almost all of which are pretty depressing) I find myself in the middle of. In a sort of happy accident, I came across Ryan’s poetry exactly when I was in the market for such writing. I’ve now gone a bit crazy and worked my way through most of her published oeuvre. Actually, the extent to which I’ve read through her work is a bit unclear. BEST OF IT, is, as you might guess from the title, a best of/greatest hits compilation that includes the text of several other chapbooks (including ELEPHANT ROCKS, which I’ve previously reviewed) from across her career. I’m not sure if BEST OF IT contains the full texts of these books, or if it is edited down. Either way, I’ve been delightfully ensconced in her poetry for a week or so. The poems are all very short, just a page or so, and, the best of them, snap like a whip at the end. It’s very easy to digest them in short bursts when you need a break from something else. These are poems with lots of surface charm; unlike a lot of poetry by living poets, Ryan is not going to make you sweat and ponder and reread to get any pleasure out of the poems. Quite the opposite, her poems offer tons of surface charm and the best ones touch something deep. A lot of this readability comes from her use of rhyme and rhythm. Instead of using end rhymes or an established meter, the poems twist and congeal around internal rhymes and the rhythms will morph and change across a given poem. Ex:

                  ...to rhyme

Anything with hibiscus

is interdicted anytime

children or anyone weakened 

by sickness is expected

. This lead to a strange phenomena whereby the order in which I read the poems seemed to really affect my judgement of them. More specifically, it would read a few poems, think they were okay, then have a dozen or so hit hard and excite me before I’d put the book down and save the rest for later. I think this is because it takes a few poems for me to attune to Ryan’s craft and structures. I semi-proved this by just picking the book up at random and running into the same issue, where the first few poems don’t resonate as much. Irregardless, I very much enjoyed these collections. She spends a lot of time dissecting idioms and popular phrases as well as inquires into silence and disappointments, both great themes for poetry. I’ve got several pages of quotes I pulled from the poems. Examples: “Tenderness and rot/share a border” “[failure is] a dank/but less ephemeral/efflorescence than success/is in general” “action creates/a taste/for itself” and on and on. Actually, pulling the lines out of the poems does a disservice since many of them are rhyming off and answering other lines. Either way, the only complainant that I have is that there is very little Kay Ryan left for me to read. I might take a break to savor the final 3 chapbooks that exist. 2011 recombinant rhymes.

SET THE NIGHT ON FIRE: L.A. IN THE SIXTIES - MIKE DAVIS & JON WEINER

Another monster book, this one clocks in at over 600 pages, but, unlike CRASHED, which I read simultaneously, this one never flags or gets dull. This is perhaps because this book is pretty micro-targeted to my interests. I’ve got a soft spot for LA (which I consider Amerika’s greatest “tier-1” city, and basically a worse version of Mexico City (which is high praise)) and, of course, I lived there for a while. I’m always interested in leftist history, though generally I’m against 60’s hagiography, and now that David Graeber is dead, Mike Davis might be my favorite living intellectual (YT man subcategory. It’s basically him, Chomsky and the other Davis), so this book was right up my alley. Basically, the only problem I have with the book is that it is pro-The Doors, who are perhaps the worst band of all time. But Davis and Weiner actually lived in LA in the 60’s so perhaps I’ll forgive them for that. The scope of this thing is unbelievable. It basically covers all leftist activities in all of Southern California (lots of San Diego stuff) from the early 60’s till about ‘74. Since Berkeley/San Fran/Oakland/The Bay is usually the focus of this sort of hippy-history, Davis/Weiner do touch on what was going on up north (as well as across the country), but they’re set in greater LA. There’s lots of city vs. valley stuff that’s very interesting. So not only do we get the “greatest hits” like the L.A. Panthers (and, of course, the US Organization), Angela Davis, the Chicano movement, the Sunset Strip riots, and the High School walk-outs, we also get a lot about more forgotten movements like Gay Liberation (even when I lived in LA, people did not know about the Black Cat), the Asian-American radicalism of Gidra, the battles over Venice, the LA Free Press, or the Women’s Self-Help clinic. Each of these subjects could and do support books by themselves, what Davis and Weiner are able to do is show the connections and resonances between the movements. For instance, the first gay pride parade, which was not only in LA, it was also the first time the word “pride” was used in this sense, there was a float that read, “in memory of those killed by pigs,” or the way the quasi-historical pan-Africanism of Ron Korenga offered inspiration and a theoretical pathway for the burgeoning Chicano movement and how they thought about race, culture and history. While there's a lot of LA specific things, like the idea of a “Contract City” and the ways that such an institution fucks with a tax base, it certainly would be possible to read this without a deep knowledge of LA. I also think you could dip into the chapters about the movements you are particularly interested in and get a lot out of it. There is just so much history in this. Here’s a short example of some of the throw-away facts I wrote down while reading: Gene Roddenberry was not only a cop, he partial based Spock on LA police chief Parker, the first Renaissance Faire took place in LA as a radio fundraiser in ‘63 and specifically aimed to recreate a “Pre-Capitalist 1580’s village, the parking lot in front of the infamous Jordan Downs was known as “the Pentagon” during the ‘64 riots, the Rand Corporation funded and spread the ideas of Game Theory, including both employing John Nash and developing the famous Prisoner’s dilemma, the first SWAT team was in LA to fight the Panthers, but their first deployment was at a peaceful anti-war march, and the TERF issues that are so prominent now were already at play during a ‘73 West Coast Lesbian Conference. I could go on with this stuff forever. I would say this wasn’t as mind-blowing as Davis’ other LA book, City of Quartz, but if you’re interested in Leftism or American history, you’ve got to read this. If you’re involved in a social movement now, I would also suggest you read it, we keep making the same mistakes and the only way out is going to be a sense of history. Mike Davis, live forever. ‘64 Doors

CRASHED: HOW A DECADE OF FINANCIAL CRISEfS CHANGED THE WORLD - ADAM TOOZE

Woof. This book turned out to be much, much longer than I thought. I’m not even sure exactly where I heard of it. Something else I was reading mentioned it as “the best” or “one of the best” accounts of the 2008 crisis, and, since that’s a subject I’m always interested in, I ordered it from the library. It turned out to be 700 pages long. I didn’t think, initially, I’d read the whole thing, I’m interested in the crash, but not that interested. However, I ended up making it through. Tooze is a historian of Europe and is famous for writing huge books I haven’t read about the economic histories of WWI and WWII. So, as you can imagine, this book takes a much more global approach to the decade. At first, I was bored and wondered if I would skip the Euro-zone chapters. Yet, the writing was clear enough and the connections were interesting enough to keep me engaged. And the amazing analysis we get at the end of the book, explaining, say the Russia/Ukraine conflict, is only made possible by showing the connections. And the big takeaway, at least for me, was how interconnected these global systems were and are. So that not only did the US government prop up the entire US economy in 2008, it engaged in things like trillions in currency swap lines to foreign central banks, that propped up the world economy at large. There’s a quote from Chinese investor and Duke trustee Gao Xiqing calling this “socialism with American characteristics” which seems cruel and apt. The other main thing to note is how thoroughly the political left gets played in these years. Bernanke, Paulson and others manage to get Obama to pull out all the stops to protect a world-economic system that has, since roughly the 70’s, benefited a very small sliver of the population. Bernanke is quoted as saying, “We might not even have an economy on Monday” to press onto Obama the seriousness of the situation. Of course, by saying “ an economy” instead of, maybe, “our carefully constructed misery machine” he’s engaging in a truly breathtaking display of Capitalist Realism. We can only inject money until we revive the system as it stands. Altering the way things work, by say, nationalizing the banks or breaking up entities too big to fail, or bailing out small home-owners (China loaned over 220 million rural folks money to buy large appliances like TVs) is impossible and unthinkable. And Obama is quoted in this book telling bankers, “my administration is the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks.” Insanity. If anyone should be spending all of their political capital defending financial capitalism and huge multinational banks, it should be the right. But the ostensible “left” in the US or Germany or France is stuck being the “adults” which here means defending a deeply unfair and cruel system while the right is able to draft off the anger this system inevitably produces. It is ludicrous that there are still free-markert “purists” or neoliberals of any stripe who are taken at all seriously. The system they’re promoting breaks constantly and requires unfathomably large injections of public money to function. This book covers over a decade and still isn’t up to date enough to cover the trillions spent trying to prop up a market that cannot survive a predictable pandemic. But they never have to live with consequences of their dumb ideas since there’s always a center-left technocrat willing to burn all the political capital they have to save this way of life. It was eye-opening and unsettling to see this play out again and again. Tooze knows so much about European politics, he made it possible to follow this dynamic over and over in Greece, Italy, Portugal, Germany, etc. It was especially enlightening to read about Eastern Europe/former Soviet Bloc countries, I simply did not know enough to connect Russia’s movements into Georgia and Ukraine with the 2008 collapse. It’s also predictable but still upsetting to see the degree of mask-off racism that’s built into the IMF. For years activists have harped on the fact that entities like the IMF are best understood as neocolonial tools and this book really highlights the way a supposedly “neutral” institution like the IMF was resisted by European countries because they associated it with, to quote our president, “shithole countries.” Sarkozy literally says, “Forget the IMF. It’s not for Europe, it’s for Burkina Faso.” Viktor Orbán is quoted as saying, “Neither the IMF nor the EU financial bodies are our bosses,” which brings into sharpest relief what this book is really getting at. To have a fluid, globally-integrated, financalized and growth-obsessed world economy, especially one that produces such stark differences between losers and winners, you must be constantly tinkering and propping up and adjusting. And this process must be beyond democratic control, since, after decades of this regime, it’s no longer really possible to feed people lines about how a booming stock-market helps all of us, or that our children will have a better life than us, or that we enjoy the quality of life of 50 years ago. Tooze points out that if you remove the bubble then the economic growth in the 2000’s is slower than the recovery period of 2008-on. So it’s been quite some time since this system has made any sense. Global warming is going to, and is already, bring all of these tension to untold levels of intensity. There’s a throw away fact in this book that China bought 10% of the arable land in Ukraine. The stark differences between the global rich and poor, an economic system that is unloved by all but is impossible to change, the ways this deadlock produces political extremism at all ends, our total inability to solve large scale problems, all of these issues are highlighted in the book and seem to be getting worse. This is some of the best history I’ve read in awhile. I wish there was a more compact version so more people would read it, but I’d really recommend you check it out. If you’re familiar with the “Giant Pool of Money” This American Life episodes, or “The Big Short,” think of this as the 201 class, where you go beyond the basics and see what the 2008 crash has meant a decade out. I’m convinced this is the account for at least the next 15 years. 2008 credit default swaps. 

ELEPHANT ROCKS - KAY RYAN

As is fairly clear from my EVERY BOOK REVIEWED project, I don’t read a ton of poetry. The last full book of poetry I read was back in July, and before that April. Even the Mary Karr book I read recently wasn’t poetry. Now, this is somewhat misleading since I read individual poems (magazines, online, etc.) not infrequently, and EVERY BOOK REVIEWED requires I read the entire book. But the point still stands, I’m not super plugged into poetry. I’m not even sure how I came across Ryan. I know I found the poem “Outsider Art” which ends with the wonderful lines: “We are not/ pleased the way we thought/ we would be pleased.” and heard that she eschews teaching at Ivy League schools, so I decided I liked her and wanted to read one of her books. I choose ELEPHANT ROCKS at random from the many books of her’s the library has and I read it all last night in one sitting before bed. The book is slender and the poems themselves are short and punchy. A sonnet stands out as on the longer end. And I’m very glad I got a whole chapbook, instead of scraping online for individual poems. It took me maybe 5-10 poems, read back to back, to really grok what Ryan is doing with rhythm and rhyme. For example, here’s a poem called SWEPT UP WHOLE in its entirety (italics in original):

You aren’t swept up whole, 

however it feels. You’re 

atomized. The wind passes.

You recongeal. It’s

a surprise.

Or this section of CRUSTACEAN ISLAND, my favorite of this collection:

It would not be sad like whales

with their immense and patient sieving

and the sobering modesty

of their general way of living.

Her work has more sing-song and unconventional rhyme schemes and a use of enjambment and varying line-lengths that, in my uncultured mind, recalls Lil’ Wayne, in the way that the length of line and the amount/placement of interior rhyme morphs across the poem. Poems in general are best read aloud, and these really benefit from annunciation, it highlights the twisty nature of the connections in the poems. There’s lots of animals and reworking clichés. There’s several passages about the color purple that I was into. There’s a particular poem called “Why isn’t it more marked up” which I found to be an interesting twist on pessimism. Anyway, as always, I should read more poems. 73 interior slant rhymes.

EXODUS FROM THE LONG SUN - GENE WOLFE

When I was 18, in a basement in Chicago where I got as high as I ever had been at that point in my life, my buddy Nate and I came up with the idea of a spaceship you lived on your whole life, so large that it wouldn’t be clear to the non-original generation that they were on a spaceship at all. Great idea we both thought. The next morning I looked around Wikipedia and discovered the “generational ship” or “space ark” trope was and is quite established in SciFi. Fast forward over a decade and I’ve now finished the final volume in the premiere tetralogy that centers around this sort of hypothetical ship. Also, Ave Atque Vale Nate. One can’t help but compare these 4 books to the New Sun cycle, the other tetralogy that Wolfe is famous for. Overall, I’d say that I enjoyed Long Sun more but New Sun is better. More specifically, the thing you come to Wolfe for, the thing he does best, is overlaying a plot with lofty cosmic forces and mind-bending twists and expansions of the scale. And he pulls off all of this without spelling it out for you in the text at all. For instance, you have to read New Sun pretty closely at the beginning to grok that Severian is on distant-future Earth. And the degree to which New Sun keeps pulling of this trick really does make it untouchable, in my experience, among the epic genre fiction. That being said, it is so dense and confusing I’m sure I missed a lot and will need a few rereads across my life to really get. Re-reading I’m happy to do, though I think I’ll finish URTH OF THE NEW SUN, and the BOOK OF THE SHORT SUN trilogy to round out a primary reading of the greater Solar cycle, which is all of these series taken together. Severian is also such a cold, inhuman character. On the other hand, I found the mind-bending parts of Long Sun less mind-bending, overall, but the low-level plot more enjoyable and easier to follow. The last 100 or so pages of this book really does get much grander in scope very quickly. Throughout the previous 3 volumes, and half of the 4th, the plot moves very quickly. Book 1 takes place over a day. But, after we slowly put together that they're on a ship, and their gods are a brutal tyrant and his family who have been transformed into computer programs, the plot shifts to how to get people off the ship and onto a new world. It does end up hitting some of the familiar Wolfe beats. For instance, who is writing the book and under what conditions becomes important, just like in New Sun. Wolfe’s obsession with space-prison evolves into the whole whorl itself being a sort of enormous space prison. It of course, features an evil (or, in this case, a set of evil) gnostic god(s). I still have some questions about what exactly happened at the end, questions I’m sure a second reading would help with. It’s especially tricky in this book since characters can become possessed by gods or other supernatural forces at any moment, which makes it tricky to tell who’s speaking despite knowing who’s physically talking. Irregardless, I’m very sympathetic to the idea of the world being a prison or an evil god ruling so I was very entertained over the course of the series. Like I said, there’s another trilogy and another standalone novel in the Solar Cycle that I have yet to read. I’m hoping to finish them in the next year or so then plan a grand reread. 1 Evil Whorl 

SETTLERS: THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE WHITE PROLETARIAT FROM MAYFLOWER TO MODERN - J. SAKAI

I basically got this one on title alone. Actually, it’s original title, MYTHOLOGY OF THE WHITE PROLETARIAT: A SHORT COURSE IN UNDERSTANDING BABYLON is even better. A short course in understanding Babylon is such a wonderful subtitle, it was a real mistake to drop it. Irregardless, beyond the title, this book offers a clarity and series of insights that are very useful. Race in the USA has always been tricky to talk about and explain. This situation, if anything, has gotten slightly worse recently where the most recent crop of “anti-racist” books don’t offer non-mystifying explanations, don’t explore the connection between capitalism and racism (especially in Amerika) and don’t offer solutions that will actual build a world that we want to live in. My partner is being asked to read WHITE FRAGILITY for her job, she’s a public school teacher, which I believe I”ll read soon to get more into this critique. However SETTLERS does not suffer this problem. The book is very clear about causes, effects and solutions. I’m not familiar with J. Sakai, though I gather from this book that he’s a committed Maoist/Leninist, given how frequently he points out the need for a revolutionary vanguard party. His basic thesis is that Amerikan YTs are so deeply invested in YT supremacy and colonialism that they, despite their economic reality, don’t consider themselves proles and don’t act like it. This is basically that line about all Amerikans being temporarily embarrassed millionaires pushed into book form. Likewise, and more provocatively, minorities (including Black Amerikans) are allowed advancement and some of the spoils of Amerika only when they internalize settler values and eschew a global proletariat mindset. I found this part pretty intuitive and don’t need much convincing that Amerika is a racist empire. I was fascinated by his recounting of the causes of the Civil War and the choices made afterwards. I’ve never understood what the abolitionist plan was immediately after the war, and Sakai does a good job illuminating this period. Additionally, as someone who’s pretty pro-IWW it was interesting to read his take-down. Most provocatively, Sakai chides the IWW for not linking up with Zapata and Villa, who’s peaks of power corresponded to their’s. I’d never even considered that, which I suppose proves I have a Settler’s mindset. Overall, I would recommend this to people who aren’t super familiar with Amerkian history. It mostly covers familiar grounds but does have some fresh analysis. I wish it was being brought up more in our current “anti-racism reading list” era. 1911 Settlers.