BLACK MARXISM: THE MAKING OF THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION - CEDRIC J. ROBINSON

Goddamn, this book is good. It’s pretty famous, and I just got around to reading it, and I’d say it basically lives up to the hype. Robinson is pretty clear about what he’s trying to do. He wants to highlight a Black Radical tradition within and outside of European Marxism, explain the strands and sources of this radicalism and then deep-dive into a few authors, Du Bois, James and Wright, who exemplify the tradition. The whole book is incredible, though I liked the first sections slightly better. Robinson is clear about the relationship between European civilization and Capitalism and the ways in which the Black Radical Tradition stands apart from Marx and others YT critics. To me, the most interesting and challenging part of this section had to do with Robinson’s attempts to talk about a uniquely African form of resistance which is, as I understand it, more interested in rebuilding society along their lines than it is a direct, violent overthrow. He cites the low number of YT deaths in many slave uprisings (we get a really great long list of slave uprisings), the alternate forms of resistance like work-strikes (Christmas rebellion, Nongqawuse’s cattle-killing rebellion amongst the Xhosa, etc.) and the ways that non-European thought were preserved in Black communities across the New World. Here’s my favorite quote from the book: “The Black Radical Tradition cast doubt on the extent to which capitalism penetrated and re-formed social life and on its ability to create entirely new categories of human experience stripped bare of the historical consciousness embedded in culture.” Robinson thinks deeply and intelligently about the class-position of Blacks in the United States and across the world. He’s really good about including non-USAmerican Black thinkers as well. Additionally, he includes the thinking of non-Black leftists on Black issues. This is especially interesting in his discussion of nationalism vs. proletarian internationalism. I did not know that Lenin himself pushed hard for the CPUSA to recruit Blacks and to add an independent “Negro Soviet Republic” in the South. These issues of Black nationalism vs integration still come up constantly in the BLM groups I march with and we could all stand to read this book and get smarter on the issue. There is really smart stuff about how actual, successful revolutions, and here he adds Mexico to Russia as the 2 successful revolutions of the early 20th century, are not actually started by an revolutionary vanguard of educated rebels but rather peasants who built their revolutionary mindset in the midst of revolution, not the other way around. The insight about how capitalism and Marxist communism are products of “Western Civilization” and thus incomplete will stay with me for a long time. The idea that we need to look outside of this frame for critiques is vital. The back half of the book, which focused on the 3 authors was also very good, I especially liked the Du Bois part (he’s such a fucking genius). Robinson is smart to include the class background of the writers when he’s discussing their work. I would have liked a segment on Black Radical Thought in the 60’s-80’s, especially the way that various groups including the Panthers integrated Maoism but the book was already long enough, I suppose. In our current situation, where issues of power and economics and $, as well as any sort of historic frame, is often (I would argue purposefully) left out of discussion of race this book is beyond vital. I beg leftists to read it. 1533 Marxisms.

THE JAKARTA METHOD - VINCENT BEVINS

I’ve been waiting for this one for a while. I believe I heard this guy talking on the radio or something like that a few months ago (maybe a year) and I’ve been waiting ever since to get this book from the library. I almost bought a copy because the wait was too long. It did not disappoint, if anything, the book is too short and ends too soon. I’d read a book at least double this size about all the anti-communist mass-murders the USA has sponsored. Or, perhaps it is best to think of this as part of a real history of the Cold War, which is typically depicted as the US triumphing over evil communism merely through our god-ordained superiority and moral rigor. We basically had only to sit back, continue to be the Greatest Nation On Earth™, and nature, or nature's god, took care of the evil doers. Obviously, this isn’t true, we spent the time between the end of WWII and 1991 soaking the earth with blood. This is another of those topics that I’ve read around for years and I’m still putting pieces together. This is a big-ass piece. Bevins is wise to not focus solely on Indonesia itself. He does go into depth about the immediate, material conditions of the ‘65 coup but the book isn’t an Indonesian history tome. Likewise, he’s not myopic about the killing itself, despite its vastness and insanity (the movie The Act of Killing goes into this part of the story much more deeply and disturbingly). What he does do well is talk about how all of these Cold War mass-killings are related and orchestrated by the USA. He shows convincing links between what happened in Indonesia and what happened in South America, under Operation Condor. He points out that the Brazilians and Chileans and others not only took inspiration from Jakarta, they spray-painted threats on city walls that threatened leftists with a “Brazilian Jakarta,” a threat that they very much made good on. An appendix for the book lists the dozens of countries the USA encouraged, aided and orchestrated mass killing programs for communists and leftists. There is another strain, about how the world was supposed to change after the end of colonialism. How in the mid-20th century, literally billions of people were liberated from direct colonial control and how these people carried with them hopes and aspirations for a more just and equitable world. The US had other ideas though, and through programs like these made sure that no 3rd world country actually built a world outside of American influence. The contrasts Bevins highlights between how the USA treated European countries vs how they treated global south/brown countries is, predictably, deeply depressing. Bevins is a mainstream journalist, he works for the Washington Post and the LA Times so the book stays within the realm of the totally provable, a welcomed change from the other CIA books I’ve read that will, without warning, stray into conjecture and “conspiracy theory” (to use a term invented by the CIA itself). I feel like we can and should have a series of books like this, well-researched deep dives into the more occluded episodes of this era. As an American, it’s a chilling read, we really are the baddies. 65 massacres.

THE MAKING OF NEW WORLD SLAVERY: FROM THE BAROQUE TO THE MODERN, 1492-1800 - ROBIN BLACKBURN

This is the one. I’ve been hoping for something like this for a long time and finally found it. You might have noticed I’ve been on a bit of a kick over the last 2 years, or so, reading about the Atlantic Slave trade and the early colonization of the New World. Off the top of my head, THE MANY-HEADED HYDRA, SLAVE SHIP, BARRACOON, SUN MOON AND WITCHES, FIST FULL OF SHELLS, 5TH SUN, FEAR OF THE BLACK BODY, all deal with this topic from some angle or another, and they work best considered in relation to one another, all telling the same story dozens of different ways. This book, TMONWS, is the best overall history I’ve encountered and offers what I’ve always wanted, a grand view of the whole process. This book took forever to read, I must have renewed it from the library 3-4 times. It also had me stopping and marking passages to write down almost constantly. The picture that emerges is fascinating. Blackburn is an economist and leftist so he highlights the way that Atlantic Slavery began in the era of feudalism and ended during the rise industrial capitalism, and how the changes in this system mirror and contribute to this rise. The book structures itself as a straightforward history at first. It covers slavery in general, especially in Europe, before this era, then goes through the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French and English versions and permutations of this trade. The parts where he takes a step back to compare them were some of the most fascinating to me, “The English perception of racial difference had a sharper edge to it than the Spanish or the Portuguese, especially where people of color were concerned. The Iberians were more familiar with the Africans, more attentive to the different shades and conditions of those African or partly African descent...The English sense of private property, sharped by the rise of capitalist market relationships, was to put the accent on the slave as chattel and almost entirely to eclipse the notion that the slave was a human being.” Likewise the other systems that were tried and false starts before the system we think of as Atlantic Slavery were fascinating. It’s important to keep in mind that this system of racial chattel slavery didn’t spring up fully formed, nor was it the only option or the only thing people tried. From English attempts to build plantations in Ireland, to convict labor, to tracing the Virginian laws around indentured servitude, this book highlights all sorts of different arrangements that were tried out. Blackburn does a good job, I think, of explaining why the system of racial, chattel slavery came to dominate the region, “The racial doctrine which saw African captives a made for slavery was the work of no one social category or European nation and continued to exhibit different patterns, interpretations. The Portuguese and Spanish principal of formally confining slavery to Africans had furnished a precedent which the Dutch, English and French made far more systematic. By closing off nearly every avenue to manumission the English produced the sharpest polarization between free whites and black slaves. For most Europeans the Africans’ lack of Christianity and “savage” nature was thought to explain the need to keep them in bondage. The story of Noah’s curse, the theory that blackness constituted the symbol of this curse, furnished justification for the permanent enslavement of blacks regardless of their faith or conduct. But it did not supply legal formulations for treating slaves as property-those were furnished by residues of Roman Law, with coke as well as Bossuet invoking the jus gentium, as we have seen. Where capitalist relations had emerged the sacred aura they gave to private property cast a cloak over chattel slavery, while the biblical injunction to bring forth the fruits of the earth was harnessed to accumulation and slave planting. As the new slave systems were consolidated they thus combined the secular and the sacred, the old and the new.” There’s a strange part in the middle where he imagines alternatives based solely on free labor but also involving African labor in the form of indentured servant style contracts. This is hard but invigorating to imagine. What an amazing world that would be now. Likewise, there is a long chapter at the back that seeks to answer the question, “how much did slavery contribute to the birth/rise of capitalism?” or, “What is the relation between the birth of industrial capitalism and slavery?” Now, I would answer both of the questions with, “a lot” and “foundational” respectively, but, apparently, the critical consensus used to be otherwise. Blackburn spends a lot of time disproving these assumptions and placing slavery in it’s proper context. To simplify, it seems like he credits slavery with about 20% of the growth during this period in Britain but also finds interesting trends, like the idea that the colonies were much more interested in industrial, and this mass produced, products than their Old World counterparts, which really helped build the market and that the labor control systems, especially the idea that you were trying to maximize output from workers and could totally prescribe methods (which isn’t possible in feudalism), necessary for large-scale factory-style capitalism were pioneered in plantations. There’s so much here. Lots of intriguing information about religious movements in Africa during this time period related to the horrors of the slave-trade, lots of information about maroonage and resistance in the New World, lots of information about how this related to European relations with various indigenous groups, and, perhaps most importantly to me, lots of information about how some (not nearly enough) Europeans, at every stage, pointed out how fucked up and evil this all was. Like the best histories, TMONWS shows that history isn’t predestined, that at every stage, over the course of a lifetime, starting whenever you like, the social relations and power relations and possibilities change. And people at the time were just as aware of this as we are of our time now, and all of them were pushing and negotiating and making bargains and moral judgments about what they wanted from their lives. This book does a great job of making that fact feel true and gives the reader a birds eye view of this whole system coming into place without making it seem teleological or outside of human control. I’m sure I’ll be thinking about this book for years. I’m already using it to reevaluate what I’ve read elsewhere. Anyone who’s interested in American history needs to read this, this is where we come from. 1619 crossings.

THE YOGA SŪTRAS OF PATAÑJALI - PATAÑJALI, trans. EDWIN F. BRYANT

First, a full disclosure is in order. I did not read this book cover to cover, the way I read the rest of the books on this list. To be clear, I did read the entire Yoga Sutras, but there are only 195 of them and they are regulated to an appendix that is about 20 pages long. I also read all of the intro essays and the end essays and some of the commentary. However, this book is ~600pgs long and the vast majority of it, I’d say around 500 pages at least, is very in-depth, sutra by sutra commentary. It is actually even more impressive than that. The Yoga Sutras were written down around 400AD so, at this point, there is about 2,000 years worth of commentary. So not only does Bryant lay his explanations of the various sutras, he includes a historical overview of the different ways various religious schools and leaders have interpreted the sutras over time. To back up, a sutra (as in Kama Sutra) is a short aphorism, usually only one line long. So for each single line, we get about 5-10 pages of commentary and analysis. It’s an amazing feat of compilation and synthesis that Bryant carried out. He actually cautions against what I did, which was just read the sutras back to back like a book, without stopping to read the commentary for each one. Apparently, they’re mostly a jumping off point for sages. So a sage would recite a sutra then give a sort of sermon on the meaning embedded within. So the way I read them is not how people, historically, would have encountered this text. As for the text itself, it is very dense and psychologically rich. I got into this because of an interest in the Western version of Yoga (or Yoga-as-exercise as it is sometimes called) as a phenomena of colonialism/globalization. So I see this as part of my research into that. This book defines yoga as “the stilling of the changing states of mind.” (Yogaś citta-vritti-nirodhaḥ) a verse that has half a dozen different ways to translate including: “Yoga is the inhibition (nirodhaḥ) of the modifications (vṛtti) of the mind (citta)" from. I. K. Taimni while Swami Vivekananda translates the sutra as "Yoga is restraining the mind-stuff (Citta) from taking various forms.” The psychology and metaphysics involved are quite profound and hard, for me at least, to wrap one’s head around. The theory of mind surrounding this set of sutras posits is hard to grapple with. I have a hard time considering my citta as separate from its thoughts. I mediated fairly regularly and this is still an issue I struggle with. Most of the rest of the sutras deepen this insight and talk about the nature of what I would call “the mind” but which ancient Indian-philosophy has about 20 technical words for. Honestly, this is a better system. Having read some philosophy of mind stuff in the Western tradition, that work constantly gets bogged down in semantics and language issues (ie what do they mean by “mind” or “self” or “consciousness” or “soul” or “brain”), because they don’t have enough precise terms. The Indian tradition does not have this problem. Frankly, they have the opposite problem where there are so many precise, Sanskrit terms that it’s hard for a non-specialist like me to keep them all straight. Obviously, this is the better problem to have. Additionally, this is the first place Yoga is referred to as having 8 limbs and it is through this division that the stuff about modern, Westernized yoga becomes interesting. What people nowadays mean when they say Yoga is typically Asanas, which translate loosely to “posture” and is the third limb. In Pantajali’s scheme, asana is pretty minor. He only give it 2 sutras and the most relevant one simply states, “Posture should be steady and comfortable” since the goal of asana in this context is to prepare yourself to sit in meditation for prolonged periods of time. The idea of doing asanas to “improve” your body or, especially, to make yourself feel/look sexier, ie the goal of most modern practitioners, is exactly the opposite of what ancient sages were interested in. Yoga, to them, is about leaving behind the body and the mind (as we Westerners would conceive of it) and accessing an Absolute Truth about existence and being. It remains extremely interesting to me that this has been switched almost totally on it’s head in the last 50 years (or 200, if you want to start to clock at the 1800’s yogic revival in India rather than when it began to become popular in the West, aka the 60’s onward). Either way, this was pretty deep and engaging and tough. I would say, relative to other ancient subcontinental religious texts I’m familiar with, like the Kama Sutras or the Bhagavad Gita or the parts of the Vedas or Upanishads that I’ve read, this one was particularly dense and overwhelming. Either way, it’s given me a lot to think about w/r/t how the mind and consciousness works. 195 downward dogs.

MUTUAL AID: BUILDING SOLIDARITY DURING THIS CRISIS (AND THE NEXT) - DEAN SPADE

I got this book because I was at my buddy’s house, drinking tea, when I absent-mindedly picked it up. My buddy said that he had a big list of things to read and, since I read fast, I could take it home and go through it. I was able to read it in 2 days and during that time I had several friends ask me to borrow the book when I was done. The phrase, Mutual Aid, seems more popular that ever. I certainly see it around much more than before, though I fear that the term has been drained of its specificity and power. Spade doesn’t mention it but I believe “Mutual Aid” was coined (at minimum popularized) by Kropotkin, an anarchist I have a lot of admiration for. Spade seems to envision mutual aid as assistance to others with the larger goal of building movement to transform the world. To me, this is slightly off. To me the difference between charity and mutual aid has less to do with this secondary goal of building a large left (anti-capitalist seems like the best way to describe it but Spade doesn’t lean on this language) and more to do with the relative social positions of the people involved. Charity is a way of policing a class line since the idea is that the people receiving the charity will never be in a position to reciprocate the assistance. In this way, the people giving the charity feel that it’s more pure since the only thing they’re getting in return is the good feelings associated with munificence. Mutual aid mostly because of that first word, mutual. In this conception you see yourself as a peer of the person you are helping. You can envision and encourage scenarios where you would need aid from them. In this sense it is a gift given between peers with the understanding that it could be paid back. There’s a wonderful book called THE GIFT by Lewis Hyde that makes these points more eloquently. Basically, I would say that there could be Right-Wing mutual aid and it seems to me like Spade would disagree. But that difference is pretty theoretical and academic. This is very similar to my complaint about how people use the phrase “direct action,” for me, the more specific these terms are, the better. However, in the world of action, I think Spade and I largely agree about what sorts of projects we should be undertaking and to what ends. He does suggest you could have mutual aid projects with professional staff as well as volunteers and I struggle to even imagine how that would work. The second part of the book is largely practical about how to run mutual aid groups and deal with the interpersonal conflicts that come up. I’ve participated in lefty projects for a while now, so I’m pretty familiar with all of the techniques he’s discussion, I would actually say he left out some of the more useful and interesting like fish-bowling or straw-polling, but as a short info for a newbie, this could be good. This has a bit of the bell hooks problem where it’s speaking in a high-register and is slightly light on examples and practical advice. Having been in these spaces, I need more practical advice than something like, “use direct communication.” But this is very hard work, we need to become different sorts of people to build the world we want to live in. For the interpersonal stuff, I would recommend CONFLICT IS NOT ABUSE as a better, more through guide to this area of activism. Either way, our future lies in mutual aid, we have no choice. This is very readable and quick, I’d recommend it to new folks. 100,000+ strategies for liberation.

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES: A VISION OF LIFE AS PLAY AND POSSIBILITIES - JAMES P. CARSE

I’m not sure where I came across this book. Looking into it now, it does seem to have something of a cult following, so I’m a bit surprised I didn’t hear about it sooner. I definitely think it would have hit harder in college, it’s a very college-professor-y book. It seems like a book written by the Dead Poets Society guy. Carse is a life-long professor at NYU, the back of the book tells us he won that university’s Great Teacher Award, and you can certainly tell. This book is as if your humanities professor wrote one of those books that you get at graduation. It’s life advice and philosophical musings on the largest scale and it’s written in a very aphoristic style so we get sentences like “no amount of veiling can conceal the veiling itself” or, “Finite Players play within boundaries, Infinite Players play with boundaries.” The book seems to include all of Carse’s loftiest thoughts, we get digressions about gardens and sex and machines, but the premise of the book is that most (all?) human interactions can be thought of as a game. Actually, Carse would say that there are 2 types of games, the titular Finite and Infinite games. Finite games are games one can win, like sports or career advancement, while the Infinite game (the last aphorism tells us that there is only one Infinite Game) is played in order to keep playing. So it is less a game in a traditional sense, it’s rather an outlook on life that privileges play and discovery and openness. In that sense, the book is like Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The theory of social life as a game or series of games also reminded me of Erving Goffman, a sociologist I had to read in college, who uses theater as his metaphor for human society. Theater or games, the conclusions are pretty similar. The shortcoming in the book, I also lay at the feet of Cares’ job. He goes to great length to say that it only counts as a game if you can choose to play. This isn’t how the world outside of a University works. People are forced to play the Finite games of career advancement and wealth acclamation whether they want to or not. Most of us don’t get to work at our dream jobs and most jobs are much more precarious and difficult than university religions professors. Capitalism itself could be considered an Infinite Game in the sense that it only seeks to continue on. Carse tries hard to steer away from anything practical (another professorial tell) but he does, weirdly, take some shots at the USSR. He also quotes Marx so who knows. He’s particularly wrong and confused about crime and sex. As far as crime goes, he says, “But putting a coin in the pocket of the Artful Dodger will hardly convince him that he is no longer a legitimate contender for the coin in mine. The more effective policy for a society is to find ways of persuading its thieves to abandon their roles as competitors for property for the sake of becoming audience (sic) to the theater of wealth.” This is both very wrong and very telling. I like the idea that a college professor thinks first of The Artful Dodger when they consider a criminal and then thinks that people steal and rob because they haven’t been persuaded to appreciate society and wealth as theater. This is the sort of nonsense you can only write about if your life’s experiences are limited to teaching at an elite university. Likewise, regarding sex he writes, “Sexuality is the only finite game in which the winner’s prize is the defeated opponent.” He actually puts that sentence in italics to emphasize it. That’s some high-level straight guy nonsense.  The concept of life as games and games as finite or infinite is a good one. I like the term Infinite Player, which he capitalized, as well. To me it suggests an unreleased Outkast song. It’s short and pithy and constantly made me think of the song, “Look at Your Game, Girl.” Some of the aphorisms are strong but overall I got more out of thinking about the concepts of a Finite or Infinite game on my own. I’d recommend this book to teens. 1 Infinite Game

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.