OPERATION GLADIO - PAUL L. WILLIAMS

The CIA obsession might be coming to an end. Or a short break. Either way, I think this will be the last one for a minute and it stands firmly in the center on the tinfoil hat/Mockingbird continuum I’ve devised to rank these books. When this book gets further out, like when it suggests the CIA was involved in poisoning John Paul I, it makes one pause, but then one remembers that the Catholic Church really did engage (and “did” here is generous) in a global consipracy to rape childern over decades, in a manner that implicats up to the highest levels, and suddenly all of the accusations in this book are a lot more believable. I don’t want to rehash the whole thing here, I would say that if you’re interested in post WWII history, these stay-behind armies that the US left in Europe are a big, interesting piece that almost no one talks about. An Italian commission in the operation killed almost 500 people in two decades in Italy alone. All of that stuff is interesting, especially the stuff about a strategy of tension and quasi-governmental Right-Wing groups engaging in false flag attacks. Seems like something to keep in mind for sure. The narrative outside of Italian politics is also pretty fascinating. The CIA is justifiably famous for facilitating the trafficking of cocaine in the 80’s but would it surprise you to know they’ve been up to similar schemes with heroin and the Italian mafia starting shortly after WWII? The Vatican stuff revolves around the strange fact that it is, technically, it’s own country, which means it can create and enforce (or fail to enforce) it’s own laws, including banking laws. And if you’re at all familiar with BCCI or Castle Bank you’ll know that the CIA has an inelastic demand for “looser” banking options. The Propaganda Due is also very far out. But then you read any source you want and see people like Berlusconi on the Gelli list and suddenly Masonic stuff is making more sense. Pretty brain-melting stuff. There is also, less brain-meltingly, information about the current Pope’s involvement with Operation Condor, which I have very little trouble believing. The final piece that I’d like to highlight concerns something that is very much in the news recently. Gladio is only the Italian version of a program that extended (extends?) across Europe and, of course, one of the most active versions was the one in Turkey. Because of my interests in Kurdistan I was familiar with the CIA assisting the Grey Wolves and the Turkish government assassinate and imprison Kurdish separatists. However, I did not know that Abdullah Çatlı, an assassin and leader of the Grey Wolves, not only briefly lived in the USA (somewhere in or near Chicago) but that he travelled to Xinjiang and helped mount attacks against the Chinese during this time. I’ve read over 10 books on the CIA or closely related topics in the last year and a half and it’s just amazing how you can follow out any thread and eventually connect it back to another node of evil-doing and current trends. Like I said, I might take a bit of break from diving into this, to steal Angelton’s stolen phrase, wilderness of mirrors, but I really think the CIA and related national security/executive branch/deepstate topics are the most overlooked, underreported and vital lens through which to understand the last 60 years of world history. Please feel free to reach out to me with your CIA questions. 1940 Stay-behind armies. 

PROGRAMMED TO KILL: THE POLITICS OF SERIAL MURDER - DAVID MCGOWAN

I’m on quite a roll with these CIA books and these last two, this one and GHOST WARS, seem to represent the two bumpers of the discourse. By that I mean that GW was, as I mentioned in the review, the most mainstream and widely accepted and fully within the discourse while this book is absolutely at the other end of the spectrum. Of the dozen or so CIA books I’ve read in the past year and a half, this one and McGowan’s other joint, WEIRD SCENES IN THE VALLEY, easily the furthest out. WEIRD SCENES, as you might remember from my review, was about how various 60’s musicians and cultural figures were elaborate CIA ops, and this book expands that logic to the past 60 or so years of popular crime, especially serial killers. It’s actually a bit more elaborate than that, I’ll let McGowan break it down, “Rather than the profile of a lone predator, driven by his own internal demons, we find instead a profile of controlled assassins and controlled patsies, conditioned and programmed by a variety of intelligence fronts, including military entities, psychiatric institutions and Satanic cults.” According to McGowan, the idea of a serial killer is a cover to attribute a series of crimes to one person that were actually committed by several people, who are typically in a satanic cult of some sort, and while some of the members are sincere satanists the leaders plugged into various intelligence agencies, the CIA chief among them. This book is very big on the idea of a Satanic cult, though it remains unclear to me to what extent McGowan believes in a literal Satan. The book moves beyond just the popular serial killers, you Gacy, Bundy, and Dahmer are all here, into all sorts of True Crime events. In this way, the book reminded me of POPULAR CRIME by Bill James where James just goes through various crimes and gives his take. McGowan goes into the McMartin preschool incident, the Franklin Banking scandal, the Atlanta Child Murders, JonBenét Ramsey, The Finders and more. He certainly finds weird stuff about most of the cases. The ones involving molestation rings seem most plausible to me but that wasn’t really why I was reading this. The ostensible goal of these actions seems to be to create a climate of fear and instability, an American “years of lead” that plays into the hands of the powerful. It would be interesting to see an updated version of this that addresses the mass-shooter, who seems to be the modern version of the serial killer, an archetype that basically doesn’t exist anymore. I’d recommend this if you’re into serial killers and true crime stuff, the book is more interesting when you already know something about the case McGowan’s discussing and he always has a far-out, galaxy-brained take. In terms of wanting to know stuff about the CIA, I’m not sure this book is for that. There is some interesting Phoenix Program information but this is mostly focused on concerns I’d consider quite speculative. When you take this and GHOST WARS as the two poles you come away with a) the CIA is so incompetent they funded then were outsmarted by the people who committed 9/11 and b)the CIA so devious they created serial killers through MK-ULTRA style mind-manipulation/hypnosis and deployed them in a domestic Phoenix Program to terrorize and pacify the population. While I appreciate the general line of thinking that McGowan deploys, I would actually recommend another book, Simon Dovey’s Eye of the Chickenhawk, which covers some of these same events and networks in a much more grounded and, ultimately, more chilling.

NEO-COLONIALISM: THE LAST STAGE OF IMPERIALISM - KWAME NKRUMAH

It’s pretty easy to see why the CIA harassed, then attempted to murder, then coup’d, then drove to exile, then continued to harass and attempted, again and again to murder, this guy. “Officially” the US State Dept. cancelled $25million in aid over this book’s publication, proving Nkrumah’s point and causing actual suffering. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book by a head of state that is so good. Nkrumah manages to be right about everything that’s going on in 1965 when he wrote this book, and is really on his Cassandra shit w/r/t what has happened in Africa over the subsequent 50 years. The book is really 2 parts. The first couple of chapters and the last chapters are, in a modern context, the most interesting part of the book. They’re the broadest and most theoretical and help explain, extremely clearly, the general contours of his argument. Basically, Nkrumah argues that the extractive relationship between the richer nations and Africa as a whole, which has been going on for the last ~500 year, did not suddenly change during the mid XX century. In fact, Nkrumah would argue that neo-colonialism is worse than what it replaced, “In the days of old-fashion colonialism, the imperial power had at least to explain and justify at home the actions it was taking abroad.” This, like so much of the book, has only gotten more true. The US has bases in 40 African countries at this point and they don’t even bother to justify it. I doubt most Americans have any idea. And he’s right about his grimmest predictions, such as, “Investment under neo-colonialism increases rather than decreases the gap between rich and poor countries.” The Alston Poverty report from the UN last year proved that the 50 years of “development” that has occurred has not noticeably dropped the most dire sort of poverty, the less than $2/day category, outside of China, a country that was not subject to the same sort of neo-colonialism that Africa was. The middle section of the book, if rewritten today, would be called receipts. Actually, I very much wish that someone would go back through and do this level of analysis and break down the current extraction regime in African. Nkrumah goes through, industry by industry, say, coal or diamonds or tin, and breaks down, often including literal flowcharts, and explains who owns which mines and who owns the companies that own those companies, and how these are invariably traced back to US/European organizations, and finally how much money their extracting vs what they invest. It gets even darker than that when he ties in Lumumba and his experience taking on these forces. Again, it’s amazing that a President of a major nation had this much expertise on this particular subject, he is really much braver, smarter and more heroic than I knew, but I longed for an updated version. This level of exploitation still takes place but the contours are different and I’d like to know more about them. Finally, I was taken by his attempts to explain the mechanics of neo-colonialism on the exploiter countries, like the one I’m from, “The developed countries succeeded in exporting their internal problem and transferring the conflict between rich and poor from the national to the international stage.” I’ve been thinking about this more and more in relation to China, and their effect on labor in the US, as well. Irregardless, at least the first couple and last chapter should be required reading, I can’t believe I wasn’t shown it in college. Has a leader, of any sort in any nation, written a better book than this? 29 AFRICOM bases across Africa

That report I mentioned: https://chrgj.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Alston-Poverty-Report-FINAL.pdf

RED ISLAND HOUSE - ANDREA LEE

My mom reads more popular fiction than I do and when this book started to pick up popular acclaim (there was a section in the New Yorker and Lee is doing the interview/podcast rounds) she picked it up then mailed it to me. As you might expect, I’m a bit of a completest w/r/t Madagascar stuff. Well, the stuff in English, the much more voluminous French collection of writings about Madagascar remains largely off limits to me. I’ve read a lot of history and non-fiction and poetry about Madagascar or written by Malagasy people, but this is the first novel I’ve come across. It’s been a while since I’ve read/reviewed a novel with a “plot” so spoiler warning. The book follows a Black American academic, named Shay, who marries an Italian man who owns a hotel/beach house on Naratrany, where the family goes for vacations a few times a year. Naratrany is the author’s pseudonym for Nosy Be, which is strange because everything else in the book is called by its real Malagasy name. She visits the island, and by island, I do mean her small part of Nosy Be, there is very little about any other part of Madagascar, for weeks/months at a time over decades as her family grows up, interacts with the various Malagasy people and the other Europeans on the island, then grows apart. The crux of the book is the slow realization by the narrator of how the island actually works and her role in it. I’ve lived in Madagascar, not the tourist spots (I never visited Nosy Be, which is the largest and fancies and most European of the Madagascar vacation beaches, but I visited several others), and what I found most interesting about the book was now naïve the narrator was. We’re supposed to believe that a Black lady, who grew up in Oakland, and professionally teaches African-American literature, would not immediately see through and be disgusted by the dynamics between the Malagasy and Europeans on Naratrany. Nosy Be exists in the French and Italian imagination much like Thailand (another place where I’ve personally seen this exact dynamic) or the Philippines exists in the British or American psyches, as sex-tourism spots, as places where people are paying to have sex with children. Lee elides this fact a few times in the book, talking about how the girls are young or “hardly 20” or “the age of his granddaughter” but, I can assure you, these girls are in their mid-teens and tourists quite famously and frequently fuck kids younger than that. For example, when I lived on Mada, it was big news that a French man and an Italian man were lynched and burned to death on a Nosy Be beach for exactly this behavior with young boys, Lee doesn’t fictionalize this instance, though it did happen the same year of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue shoot, a real-life event she does fictionalize. The reason she skips this, I think, is because it would make her narrator seem less sympathetic and more clueless. Shay is trying to portray the situation as more complex and nuanced than it really is, mostly to protect herself from feeling guilty. Shay, the main character frequently wonders about the morality of what she’s doing which I found interesting since it all strikes me as very clear. She’s abetting her husband owning a special child-rape house for himself and his buddies in the third world (the husband knocks up a teenager at the end of the book when he’s in his 70s). She runs a hotel in a third world country that is both extracting value out of Madagascar and, as is mentioned several times, will not hire Malagasy people for the high up positions. There is a long chapter about one of the main workers in the house dying and how she, the narrator, feels they’re sisters despite the fact that this Malagasy woman is so poor she asks for a tin roof as a gift and that Shay has never seen this woman’s house. She chalks up to a Malagasy thing, which is not true. If you’re friends with a Malagasy person, they will invite you to their house. Shay is suffering from the common American affliction of mistaking people who work for you for friends. Even towards the end of the book when Shay’s children are teens and they tell her that it’s fucked up for their parents to have this colonial holding, likening it to a “barracoon of slaves,” she dismisses them as spoiled. She also pretty consistently talks about the various ethnic groups of Madagascar in terms she would object to if, say, a YT French person had written them, for example, “Not Sakalava or Antandroy, but some other tribe bred to the point of divine symmetry of feature,” or the multiple references to the “Sakalava bubble-butt.” I’m not sure the author intended this but the book is a real case study on the ability for people to lie to themselves or never consider that they might be the bad guy. This would be old news if it was YT guy in Madagascar, it’s interesting that a Black Woman would be so naïve and blind. I kept thinking about academics I’ve met who say all the right things in their writing and teaching but are total abusive exploitive pieces of shit in real life. It’s a really good portrait of a person like that who has really strong feelings in the abstract but when they’re faced with actual exploitation or evil, especially when it implicates them or their loved ones and/or benefits them, they manage to obfuscate or talk about how complex the issues are or otherwise find some excuse for not rocking the boat. Beyond that, my biggest problem with the book is that I never understood why the husband and wife tolerate each other at all. The first chapter yadda-yaddas over their courtship and tells us that they like each other because they’re opposite but in all the rest of the book the husband seems to have no redeeming qualities so I didn’t really understand why they were together. Maybe it was another example of Shay’s aloofness and inability to do the right thing. If this is the only exposure people have to Madagascar I would say they will not a get a good idea of what the country is about, but as a portrait of a certain type of inadvertently evil liberal, it’s pretty insightful. 1960 red islands

GHOST WARS - STEVEN COLL

AVAILABLE

You might have noticed by now that I’m on a bit of a CIA kick. I’ve got a few more, at least, in the pipeline so haven’t moved on yet so perhaps it’s a bit early to assess this book’s place in that grander pantheon but I will say it is easily the most “normie” book on the CIA I’ve read yet and still, the CIA comes off very, very badly. I’ll get back to the reception of this book and the meta-narratives it feeds into later, but first I’ll sketch out what this book is about. It begins with the 1987 storming of the embassy in Islamabad and ends on September 11th with an afterword written in 2004, after the 9/11 report is released. There’s a bit about the hijackers but it mostly focuses on the events in central Asia. The book is basically a long list of terrible crimes. The CIA is in Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion and helps foment the war then works tirelessly to make sure the war goes on as long and is as bloody as possible. Afterwards, it puts weight behind the Taliban, mostly on behalf of a company called Unocal that wants to build a pipeline and they need someone, and they truly do not care who, who can make sure it’s at least stable enough to pump natural gas through. We also fund people opposed to the Taliban in a half-hearted (more on this later) attempt to “arrest” OSB. Afghanistan has been at war before I was born until exactly this minute. That part is indisputable but infuriating to see laid out so clearly. The more interesting and spooked-out threads center around the various intelligence agencies and Bin Laden. The million dollar question is how long did the organizations like the CIA, GID, ISI and other support Bin Laden. This book is much to middle of the road to really suggest that the CIA is lying about when they stopped supporting Bin Laden, though it is very interesting how many times some part of the government wants to kill Bin Laden and the CIA or George Tenet talks them out of it. Once, in ’96, it was because members of the UAE royal family were hunting with him. And yet they didn’t get invaded, in fact, they are currently waging a war with USA weapons. Strange. We, of course, get the stories about how the CIA failed to pass on the names of eventual 9/11 hijackers to the FBI despite the fact that they knew they were in the USA and some of them had met Bin Laden and were dedicated to attacking the US. A pentagon analyst quits at one point, complaining that their warnings about Al Qaeda are being ignored. There’s also an interesting through line about the larger engagement with Bin Laden has expanded the CIA’s power and what tools are at their disposal. For instance, they begin working on developing a drone as early as the 80’s (well, actually the CIA basically uses bureaucratic jiu jitsu to con the Air Force into paying for all the drone development but they (the CIA) are the main users. There’s a whole sub, sub thread about how the CIA has a reputation for cheapness) and use it first in Bosnia (where future Al Qaeda fighters were present) but armed it in the search for Bin Laden. They also got Clinton to sign off on the idea of renditions in 1995 for the same reason. They’d actually been doing renditions since, at least, the 50’s, but still, you can see a pattern. It was interesting to learn the original plot, as pitched by KSM, involved 10 planes hitting targets across the country, including, “the tallest buildings in California and Washington State.” 

Like I said, the other way to look at this book is as a post-9/11 artifact, since it was written 3 years after 9/11 and we’re coming up on the 20 year anniversary this fall. I think it could fairly be called an “official” account. Even in here, the CIA seems so irresponsibly bad at their jobs, by arming groups that say they’ll kill Americans then losing control of them, it seems hard to believe that any of them would be allowed to keep their jobs and it would be reasonable to discussion prison for negligence for some of them. The stuff we’ve learned since this book was published makes this official account seem even more lacking.  For instance, we now know that Bin Laden was hiding out in Pakistan, in a city with an enormous military college no less, which seems to invalidate all the stuff the ISI is saying about their inability to influence, find, capture or otherwise control Bin Laden. Likewise, we now know that GID agent Omar al-Bayoumi met with at least a few of the hijackers and seems to have given them material support. Likewise with the Saudi embassy in DC. Most recently, the Houthis in Yemen have released a 2000 tape of George Tenet pressuring the then-president of Yemen to release Anwar al-Awlaki, who is also involved in the attack, from jail. Who the fuck knows? I hope this anniversary inspires people to look back into the event, less from a “there were no planes, it was missiles surrounded by holograms” or “The towers were brought down with thermite” angle and more from a “which elements from which countries, including our own, seem to have supported this” position. The real takeaway is that the USA puppetmasterd decades of war and devastation in Afghanistan that is both ongoing and among the evilest acts in a rather competitive field of US war crimes. 911 mysterious sources of Saudi money.

SLINGER - ED DORN

This book is confusing from the title. Many editions, as well as Wikipedia itself, seem to think this book is called “GUNSLINGER” but, at least this 1975 edition thinks the work is called SLINGER. The character the book is named after is also referred to as both “The Gunslinger” and “Slinger,” as well as “Zlinger.” Nothing is easy with this one. I don’t know if I’ve ever read an epic length poem written in the last, say, 200+ years. I’d have to think about it. The pages of this book are unnumbered, which I admire, so this 200-ish page poem does follow a single story and group of characters who are on a quest. However, unlike other epic poems, like, say, the Aeneid, it’s frequently difficult to tell what’s going on. The Gunslinger, who is a demi-god, is on a quest with his joint-rolling horse and with a handful of people, who seem to rotate in-and-out, with names like “Kool Everything” and “i”, to meet (or kidnap?) Howard Hughes. But that’s just my best guess, I’d probably have to read it a half-dozen more times to get the “plot,” which clearly isn’t the point. There’s lots of strange syntactic, linguistic, typographical stuff going on. I appreciate his use of “thot” for “thought” and I’d like to think he’d be so pleased to learn that “thot” has taken on yet another meaning. He’ll use the “sh” pronunciation of “x” to rewrite words like xit (to mean “shit”) which is cool and new-to-me. Occasionally, he places certain letters in a different font (with more serif) and also in italics which was baffling. I’m not sure if they spell something out or what. Their meaning was opaque to me. As was the larger meaning for most of the poem. I would say my understanding of what was going on as well as what I was able to pull from the text weakened evenly throughout the book. The first Book of the poem was my favorite. I found it the best written and most engaging. As each part and chapter went on, I found less and less I could latch onto. Overall, the effect was interesting, it’s full of old hippy slang which I’m always on board for. Perhaps I don’t read enough long form poetry to compare it to much but it worked better for me in shorter passages that really hit hard while connective tissues between these segments weren’t engaging. I believe I would have preferred these segments removed and presented as stand-alone poems. But, this might just be my familiarity with poems in a different format rearing its ignorant head and I should broaden my idea of what a poem looks like. Hard to know. 5 Bombers rolled by a horse

BLAND FANATICS - PANKAJ MISHRA

I was initially interested in the book because I read some essays by Mishra and really appreciated that he drew from non-western theoretical sources. So, instead of Kant and Marx and Nietzsche or whatever, you’re more likely for him to allude to Tagore or Qutb or Liang Qichao or Mbembe. As someone who is himself trying to expand my base of knowledge in non-Western criticism/philosophy, I appreciated this and found it really deepened the writing. There are 16 essays in this book and they mainly revolve around liberalism and its failures. The best ones contrast the way the Western liberal world feels about it self with the reality of how they shape the world. There is a really masterful essay about Brexit (there’s actually more than one essay about Brexit but one of them is much better than the others) that shows how Britain, a country that has caused so much current misery because of how foolishly and ignorantly drew lines around the globe (~1 million dead from the Radcliffe line in less than 5 years alone), is now being undone and fucked up from their own attempt to draw a boundary between themselves and the European Union, a path they’re only pursuing because they feel nostalgic for their empire and lost without it. Mishra is great at drawing out all the ironies and contradictions and historical echoes embedded in these processes. The other thing he’s amazing at is the takedown. Mishra calls bullshit often but when he dials in on a handful of people, it’s really amazing. He’s got long passages on Obama that goes in. Same with Salman Rushdie. He’s got a pretty sharp and intelligent critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates, someone that I admire. But his most savage takedown is definitely of celebrity pseudo Jordan Peterson. I don’t think I’ll read one of his books all the way through and thus won’t review it on this site so I’ll take this moment to level my critique. Peterson is an almost folkloric figure, in the sense that his life story seems to have a clear moral. He’s a unremarkable college psych professor until he gets famous for saying that he, hypothetically, wouldn’t call a trans student by the correct pronouns. He parlayed this fame into a series of silly books that read like a dumb person’s Paglia (esp. the “chaos is female” stuff) combined with a dumb person’s Campbell (who is already a dumb person’s Jung). And after spending years conning people with his silly, “you boys all need to toughen up” act he’s convinced by his daughter to begin an all-meat diet, which, along with his natural vapidity, sends him into the exact anxiety spiral he claims to have the cure for. This, in turn, led to a Xanax addiction and him going to Russia to undergo a series of procedures that American doctors won’t do. The idea that someone with his set of beliefs being tricked by his daughter (an agent of chaos, as a woman) into almost killing himself with a dumb diet and crippling anxiety is almost too rich to be believed. His life is an allegory, one of the most “doctor, heal thyself” style stories available. Mishra also lays into him, mostly focusing on the fact that his influences are also all crypto-fascists (though, at least Eliade and Jung are engaging and original). Peterson also threaten to fight Mishra because of this essay, which is also very delightful to imagine. I work with benzo addicts all day, so his behavior is familiar. Either way, I’ll continue to keep my eye out for Mishra, he’s very clever. 16 liberals. 

MUMBO JUMBO - ISHMAEL REED

AVAILABLE

First novel and the first book I’ve bought (not got from the library) in a while. I’ve been on the lookout for this book in the used bookstores for a while. I had heard a brief synopsis of the plot somewhere and then I heard that story about Reed writing a play where Lin Manuel-Miranda is haunted by ghosts for writing Hamilton, and thought to myself, here is a man I need to know more about. Either way, I was left with the unusual feeling that I wish this was longer. This is perhaps Thomas Pynchon’ fault. This book is very much in the style of Gravity’s Rainbow or Mason & Dixon or Against The Day, though it predates all of them and Pynchon references Reed in GR. But since I read those volumes first I wanted that insane expansiveness. Reed knows so much about this time-period, the 20’s, and writes the sort of story you want to check Wikipedia about every few pages to catch the cameos and understand the mythologies, I would have been fine to read a book double this length in this world, spinning out all the strange side-stories into bizarre corners. But, you get what you get, and what’s here doesn't disappoint. The main plot revolves around the battle between a Harlem houngan and his allies against the Wallflower Order, a group committed to domination. There are plots about a multi-racial gang repatriating looted objects from museums and Cab Calloway running for president and struggle between polytheists and Atonists and Black culture being metaphorized into a virus and an attempt to create an android and on and on and on. There’s smart and interesting stuff about early 20th century urbanization and rent parties as mutual aid, as well as a long, fascinating retelling of Egyptian Mythology that involves Dionysus, Christ, Moses and Zipporah, lots of practical advice about the nature of the Loa, as well as a convincing reading of Faust as a quintessentially Western figure that I’m upset I wasn’t exposed to in a class I took in college all about Faust. All of this was great and I would have loved more of any one of them. Knights Templar stuff, speculation on Warren G. Harding’s heritage, thoughts on astrology, the history of Haiti, Black Herman, a real early 20th century Black stage magician, it’s all here. I’m going to have to check out Reed’s other stuff, this book shared a lot of my interests but I’m guessing someone as voracious and all-consuming in his knowledge, like Reed, might be onto other stuff in other books. Either way, I’d highly recommend this. 1921 Loa

THE LIMERICK - G. LEGMAN

I can’t really believe I read 1700 limericks. I’m not sure where I got the idea to read this book in particular but I do remember being shocked at how large, ~500pgs, the book is. But, limericks read fast, it’s part of their charm. Apparently, this is largely due to the fact that they’re typically written in anapestic trimeter, a meter popular with Dr. Suess, and one that’s famously easy to read. So the poems themselves breezed by rather quickly, it doesn’t take that long to read 100 limericks. This alone, the sheer act of compiling this many limericks would be strange and amazing enough, but Legman goes a step further and wrote a 70pg intro essay and compiled the limericks by broad theme. Also, all the limericks in this book are dirty. In fact, Legman argues that limericks are by definition dirty, and that a non-X-rated limerick is a novelty at best. This is one of half a dozen interesting, somewhat harebrained theories and ideas that Legman packs into his essay. He focuses on the way that the limerick is a form of folk-culture but then refines this take to point out how, since the limerick is written and often stuffed with clever references, it is a middle-class and up form of folklore. He claims it is “the only folklore of the educated” which is a pretty interesting take. He identifies the drinking song as the working class, and more popular version of the limerick and goes through the many attempts to put limericks to music. None of these tunes caught on so we’re left with the limerick as a written and fancy form. Additionally, Legman claims that the limerick is the only “fixed poetic form native to english.” I don’t know if that’s true but it’s intriguing. Legman is a bit of a manic. All of this research, keep in mind he’s also released books on dirty jokes and drinking songs and erotic ephemera, he did on his own, he’s a self-taught and self-employed academic. He also is credited with inventing the vibrating dildo and coining the phrase, “make love not war” which is doubly strange when you take into account how many pot-shots he takes at hippies in this intro. Strange guy for sure. The limerick’s themselves, as you might imagine, vary in quality. Like I said, they’re organized by theme; the oral sex section is probably the best. Maybe one or 2 limericks would stand out each chapter and I’ve copied down and posted some of my favorites. The ones that are about the news are also interesting, historically. There’s a couple but the one about FDR getting an erection during Pearl Harbor and one about Haile Selassie and Mussolini. I suppose “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” also features news limericks, but they’re never dirty. 1700 men from Nantucket

THE MUSHROOM AT THE END OF THE WORLD - ANNA LOWENHAUPT TSING

I don’t remember why this book came onto my radar. I typically don’t read all that deeply into ecology (too depressing) and I’m not a fan of eating the non-psychedelic mushrooms (tho, I am somewhat interested in fungus/mushrooms for their biological strangeness) but this book did manage to hold my attention and deliver some deep insights. Tsing is an anthropologist and the book, basically, could be considered an anthropological study of matsuke, an apparently delicious mushroom, the human worlds this mushroom interacts with, and the ways these people both understand and alter ecology in order to get more matsuke. She places emphasis in a number of places. First, since the mushroom can’t be cultivated in a traditional sense, it must be foraged for. In the US, specifically in my neck of the woods, the PNW, this work is largely done by immigrants of SE Asian extraction. Cambodians, Hmongs, Loatians, etc. The parts about their interactions with one another, and the way the SE Asian war (which is what we should be calling the Vietnam War) distorted and changed so many lives, was very engaging to me. Likewise, the portions where Tsing investigates the edges of capitalism, how these mushrooms move back and forth between gift economies and fully alienated commodities, often crossing these boundaries several times, is really fascinating. She has really smart things to say about the idea of global supply chains in general, how they’ve allowed a company like NIKE to turn itself basically into a marketing firm, since they outsource the actual making of the shoe to companies in Asia that they have as little a relationship with as possible. For a company like that (and this is basically all companies that make consumer goods at this point), the alienation is the point and the source of the profits. These mushrooms are interesting, again, because they move back and forth across this line. The other major theme of the book concerns how the mushrooms grow, and how little they are still understood. I like her framing of mycology as a sort of anti-plantation ideology. Where you cannot maximize for a single crop a la a plantation, you have to build an ecosystem that is conducive to matsuke growth then hope for the best. The sections about how this works, practically, about the differences between Japanese, Finnish and American forestry philosophies got a bit too in the weeds for me (pun intended). She intriguingly made references to how Natives in the PNW managed the forests with controlled burns but did not go into how this worked, practically. She has a weird habit of telling you, in a sentence towards the beginning, what each chapter is about, which I found off-putting, but otherwise, this was a real tour-de-force of anthropological writing and not only had real insight about how people interact with one another and form economies, but also about how we are going to have to start thinking of the environment if we intend to avert a climate disaster. Capitalism is going to kill us. We need to find a way out. We need more books like this to suggest directions and alternatives. I’ll be getting this book as a gift for my more forest-y friends. 1953 delicate mushrooms.

WHITE FRAGILITY - ROBIN DIANGELO

188 Goddamn, this book is bad. I should come clean, I hate-read this book. Typically, I don’t finish books that I don’t like and I don’t start books that I know I won’t like ahead of time. It seems emotionally unwise to read something for the sake for getting upset. There are a few exceptions. I read HILLBILLY ELEGY knowing that I wouldn’t like it. Same with BETTER ANGLES OF OUR NATURE. In both those cases, I had already read part of the book in some magazine since those books were big events when they came out and the ideas they pushed were discussed seriously by the media. All of this is doubly true for WHITE FRAGILITY, which, as I’m sure you know, was a huge deal when it came out, clearly riding a wave of anti-racist instructional manuals (more on this later), and really picking up steam around last summer when the George Floyd and related protests really got cooking. Hell, this book is only in my house because my gf is a Seattle Public School teacher and the school district literally gave every teacher in the system (I think non-YT teachers could ask for a different title) a copy. Clearly, this thing struck a nerve. I knew it wasn’t for me, based on experts and discussions about the book, but, the book was already in my house, and it seemed to be a good pairing with BLACK MARXISM a book that takes on similar issues and manages to be better in every way and one that I thought about constantly while reading this (plus, this book is really short and reads super fast). 

I’ll start with the literal content of the book. If you’re looking for an explanation of YTness (quick aside, she doesn’t capitalize “white” or “black” in this book, which bothered me. Another reason to use YT when you mean “White” as in race) or how YTness functions, or it’s historical construction, or the ways it influences our thinking and world, this ain’t it. We get totally ahistorical, and I would say, actively damaging statements like, “Freedom and equality- regardless of religion or class status - were radical new ideas when the United States was formed.” and, “When white Northerners saw the violence that black people - including black women and children - endured during the civil rights protests, they were appalled.” as well as some truly bizarre stuff about Jackie Robinson. She doesn’t do a good job taking apart the “I’m Italian so my ancestors weren’t YT,” or, “I’m Irish and some of my ancestors were slaves,” and the rest because she doesn’t give us a good explanation and definition of YTness. Such explanations exist, Painter’s THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE, or HOW THE IRISH BECAME WHITE, or THE MAKING OF NEW WORLD SLAVERY all give much better accounts of this process and it’s implications. What we get instead is mystification, where it seems like YTness emerged from nowhere, or from the inherent evilness of people who are now (21st century) considered YT, and all that can be done to combat it is for YT people, individually, to take DiAngelo’s class. She says as much herself, “I believe that if we white people were truly coming from these assumptions, not only would our interpersonal relationships change, but so would our institutions.” This, to me, is dangerously naïve and exactly what you’d expect from someone in DiAngelo’s position. Because of the jobs I’ve had in my life, as well as activist groups I’ve been involved with, I’ve been in a lot of the types of classes DiAngelo teaches. Hell, at my last job, I was part of the committee that hired (over my objections) a person to give this sort of workshop (WHITE FRAGILITY is basically a workshop is book form). To me these, sorts of workshops are a dodge, an HR trick. Are there microaggressions and racism at any level at any institution? Of course, I agree with almost all of the substance of DiAngelo’s argument, my issue is with her implementation. When the focus is on individual workers, and almost always the lowest-power workers, while, for example, the Board of Directors not only doesn’t need to be in the workshop but is 100% YT, these workshops are offering cover for deep, institutional racism. They let organizations off the hook for actually building a non-racist world, by pretending that an afternoon workshop and a change in interpersonal language will do the trick. To me, this is actually worse than nothing, it is offering cover to the exact forces we’ve been battling the last 500 years. The final kicker, the one action that shows me that DiAngelo isn’t serious, is somewhat personal and came this summer. DiAngelo is a Seattleite, she teaches at UW, where she is beloved. Like I said, her book sold like crazy and she has a lot of cultural capital, especially amongst the sorts of “well-meaning,” woke YT-liberal that account for a large part of Seattle. This summer, we really could have used her voice supporting the BLM protests. Hell, we could use her support now. But, not a word. Not her telling her followers to join us outside, not a suggestion that this was the right thing to do, certainly not her coming out here to join us and get gassed and beaten alongside the people she, nominally, is trying to help. “Had I been old enough, I probably would have marched in the 1960s,” she writes, despite the fact that I’ve been to marches and direct political actions here in Seattle for 4 years, never seen her. Because to her and her followers, becoming anti-racist is purely individual. It’s “doing the work” but only within, there’s no step two. Real anti-racist action, that is action that is actually trying to destroy this racist world and build a non-racist one, by definition, is not going to be sanctioned, né mandatory, by HR. It’s going to require real risk and action. I might go into this in a longer essay but this is classic neo-liberal atomization, new-left virtue signaling, and a real insight into Professional Managerial Class morals. I will say, the story about the YT woman almost dying after receiving mild-feedback in a workshop is very funny and I’m sure it’s true. Other than that though, I beg people to read different books (even the ones in the bibliography are all better, please read any of them) if they’re interested in racism and/or power as a topic and I likewise beg you to not for a second think that we’re going to be able to read or workshop our way out of the mess we’re in. 125 microaggressions. 

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.