THE ORDER OF TIME - CARLO ROVELLI

This one’s a real brain-fucker. It makes sense that Rovelli makes reference to both mushrooms and LSD, he certainly gave me a ton to think about the next time I’m in one of those zones. If you’ve followed this “blog” (which I don’t think anyone is) you might have noticed I’m something of a “time guy.” I generally eschew pop-physics stuff because I’m dumb and it typically is a little woo-woo for me, but I am always interested in the latest theories about how time works and what it is and the implications of all that. This is one of the best of these sorts of books I’ve ever read, it doesn’t pretend to explain the math or anything like that to you (which I always resent since clearly the “real math” involved is much to complicated for me to have an opinion about whether or not it’s “right”), it merely lays out the current high-end theoretical physics thinking on the subject then goes into some speculation and finally, seeks to rectify one of the biggest questions about time that authors of this sort of book typically ignore. It’s pithy and pretty poetic, and manages to not oversimplify, nor to get bogged down in the weeds. I'll do my best to sum up what I understood from the book. The first big idea to wrap one’s head around is the non-universality of time, how there is no “present” between us and stars light years away, ”Notion of “the present” refers to things close to us, not far away,” and, ”There is a present that is near to us, but nothing that is “present” in a far-off galaxy. The present is a localized rather than global phenomenon” are how he puts it in the book. Or, even more profoundly, “The world is like a collection of interrelated points of view. To speak of the world “seen from outside” makes not sense, because there is no “outside” to the world.” From there we learn all sorts of bizarre things about time, such as the idea of a Planck time, which lasts roughly 10^-44 seconds and is the most granular unit of time, “below this the notion of time does not exist - even in its most basic meaning,” which is pretty insane idea and not one I think I’ve fully wrapped my head around. Basically, on the most fundamental level, there isn't’ space or time, or even things, there is merely a collection of quantum events happening at insane speeds constantly, creating a sort of “spinfoam” that our brains build reality out of. “In the elementary grammar of the world, there is neither space nor time - only process that transform physical quantities from one to another, from which it is possible to calculate probabilities and relationships.” This is all well and good, if very far-out. If you think about the fact that the earth spins you can begin to understand how the world could function in a way that is at odds with our perception. The second part of the book is even more far-out and tries to explain why time feels the way it does to us. He brings up the point that the law of entropy is the only fundamental law of physics that uses a notion of time (in that heat can’t go from cold to hot so the causal chain only works one way in time) and the flow of time that we experience is really the result of this increase in entropy: “The directionality of time is therefore real but perspectival: the entropy of the world, in relation to us (sic) increases with our thermal time. We see the occurrence of things ordered in this variable, which we simply call “time” and the growth of entropy distinguishes the past from the future for us and leads to the unfolding of the cosmos...This is what we are listening to when we listen to the passing of time.” I won’t pretend I can understand this stuff fully or even substantially, but I do like thinking about it. There certainly is something weird going on with time, if you think about it for a while, it doesn’t make a ton of sense. I’m glad he managed to find a middle way between “what we experience is real” and “we live in a block universe with no past/present/future.” He manages to do away with the present as previously understood and instead fleshes out another paradigm, ”What causes events to happen in the world, what writes history, is the irresistible mixing of all things, going from a few ordered configurations to the countless disordered ones. The entire universe is like a mountain that collapses in slow motion. Like a structure that very gradually crumbles.” He sort of gets his Wittgenstein on towards the end of the book, writing, “when we cannot formulate a problem with precision, it is often not because the problem is profound: it’s because the problem is false.” but he manages to explore all these problems-without-precision with a ton of insight. If you’re into this shit, pick it up and get your mind blown. An infinite number of presents, pasts and futures

THE SECRET TO SUPERHUMAN STRENGTH - ALISON BECHDEL

I got lucky and was able to get a quick, no-holds, peak-pick, copy of this from the library. As you can imagine, a Bechdel book goes quick in Seattle. Reading this one, I was struck by the similarities and differences she has from David Sederis. I bring it up because they’re both young boomers/Gen. Jones queer folks who write about their lives and got amazingly popular, quickly, decades into their careers. Bechdel did Dykes to Watch Out For, which I was familiar with before FUN HOME because I went to college in Asheville (and, thus, was surrounded by dykes) but I think it’s pretty fair to say that they both became famous beyond their wildest expectations later in life. Both of them take their lives and the lives of their families, especially their parents, as their subject matter. Both of them have charted the monumental changes in gay life during their lifetimes and how that’s effected them. Both have, essentially, the same audience, ie NPR people. But while Sedaris writes short, pithy stories that typically are about one thing or one theme (a job he had at one point, or about learning French, etc.), and come off like the world’s greatest diary entries, Bechdel is doing something different. While Sedaris’ stories seems effortless, as if you’ve run into the most interesting person at a party who’s got the best anecdotes, Bechdel foregrounds the labor that goes into her stories. Her breakthrough and follow up, FUN HOME and ARE YOU MY MOTHER? Are focused on the life of and her relationship to her father and mother, respectively and they not only tell the story of their child/parent dynamic and history, Bechdel also folds in all sorts of allusions and parallel digressions that play off the main story. In FUN HOME there’s lots of Greek mythology and Camus and Joyce; in ARE YOU MY MOTHER there’s a whole lot of psychology, Wolfe, Mozart, etc. TSTSS ostensibly follows Bechdel’s history with fitness and her body but manages to fold in a lot of stuff about the transcendentalists and Jack Kerouac. Normally, I’m pretty allergic to Kerouac stuff (he’s the worst beat) and the “the beats are the 20th century transcendentalist” is played out as criticism, but Bechedel is so controlled and plotted that it works. There’s not too much of this stuff, it resonates when it has to then moves back into the background, and Bechdel being a lesbian prevents some of the more non-critical hagiography and misogyny that crops up when discussion the beats. Like in all of Bechdel’s work, her quest to document the ostensible subject, here it’s fitness, blooms into a broader autobiography and resonates with other aspects of her life. Here she is describing polyamory, which she gets into in her 40’s: “A sort of reverse weightlifting in which the object was to let go: of the ego, of duality, of attachment altogether.” It’s quite amazing how well-crafted this work is and how everything ties back in and relates to itself. The most interesting question with Bechdel before was, “what will she do when she runs out of parents?” She’d written 2 amazing, all-timer graphic novels, can she do this when she doesn’t have a parent as the subject? The answer is yes, Bechdel is still in her prime, still making these auto-biographical graphic novels at the highest level. I’m still interested in what she’ll bring to it next. 60 boflexes

SWEET JONES: PIMP C’S TRILL LIFE STORY - JULIA BEVERLY

It’s amazing to me that this book isn’t more famous. There are really no equivalents which is surprising given how long and how totally hip-hop has been one of, if not the, most important branch of pop music. At this point we have a number of hip-hop autobiographies, some great (Prodigy’s), some boring (~50% of the Gucci Mane book, Rick Ross’ book, I assume), and a number of critical or theoretical hip-hop books, mostly embarrassing (DFW’s) but some a great (Holler if You Hear Me), and even a great general history (Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop) but I’m not sure there’s another biography of a major rap star that’s this extensive and researched. SWEET JONES is a 700 page behemoth of a biography and excavation of UGK’s Pimp C, that, due to its magisterial length, manages to touch on nearly everything important or interesting in Hip-Hop, especially Southern Hip-Hop. I think one could expect a book called Pimp C’s Trill Life Story to be mostly about UGK’s career, but no. The book is packed with stories about Rap-a-Lot and J. Prince, No Limit Records, Cash Money Records, The Dungeon Family, DJ Screw, the circa 2006 explosion in Houston Hip-Hop (think Paul Wall and Mike Jones), Three 6 Mafia and Memphis at large, the lurid Big Lurch stuff, Too $hort, the politics between the Southern and NYC Hip-Hop scenes, and that’s just the stuff directly within Hip-Hop. The book also dives into the Texas Judicial system and explains why “There’s never a good time to be arrested, but Chad’s timing was particularly bad.” before going on to brush up on the New Jim Crow stuff to explain the political conditions of Pimp C’s famous mid-career stint in jail. There’s stuff about crime, lots of a material about the mechanics of drug-dealing as well as the stories of the actual pimps who come into Pimp C’s orbit (there’s a section where Too $hort explains why they both had to turn down women seeking to choose up, since neither was interested in “hustling backwards”), Freaknik, as well as the history of making it rain (a B.M.F., who also get lots of screen-time, invention) and stuff about drug culture. While it certainly blew up during his life, the syrup sippin’ phenomena has only become more mainstream since this book came out and the topic gets the best treatment I’ve ever seen at multiple points in the book. Fascinatingly, Beverly reports that Three 6 and UGK consciously choose to feature Activas, the most famous (and now discontinued thanks to Bieber) purple version of the syrup, in videos and in songs because it was the most photogenic especially when mixed with soda (the “traditional” texas manner, pioneered by people like Townes Van Zandt, involves drinking it straight or mixed with cheap wine). Most of the members of Three 6 and UGK, including Pimp C, preferred the Robitussan version, which was yellow and nick-named “snot” which made it less prime-time friendly. There’s also much more PCP smoking than I realized. It’s certainly in the music but I didn’t put together how much the scene around DJ Screw linked syrup, PCP and weed. They definitely thought of it as a package deal but it’s hard to imagine Drake making a song about smoking fry on a private plane (to be clear, if you’re reading this Drake, please make such a song). And even while all this peripheral stuff is so interesting and engaging Beverly also really digs into Chad himself and offers a great biography on a personal level. There’s a deep dive into his relationship with his mom (who tell Beverly she prefers the Pimp C persona and has a bizarre, and I would argue, unhealthy, relationship with the various women in Chad’s life), all sorts of stuff about him and Bun B, as deep dives into his various contradictions. At the same time Pimp was going off about the need for Southern artists to come together and squash beefs and get money together, he’d get on the radio and tell people Atlanta wasn’t the south or that someone was lying in a song about the real price of cocaine. It was interesting to hear that he was a big BEHOLD PALE HORSE and was very into (often quite homophobic) conspiracy theories about the rap business and world at large (his mom was convinced he was murdered). He’s a fascinating guy but this book is more interesting than the subject itself. I want like 5 more of these books. It’s insane that there aren't a dozen of these 700 page deep dives on more famous rappers and their milieus. To give you a taste of how extensive this research was, Beverly tracks down and includes a picture of the kid who went to high school with Pimp that, apparently, coined the word “trill.” Where is the Tupac version of this? Why isn’t there one of these about Ghostface? Lil’ Wayne? Kanye? Snoop? Figures that are much more famous than Pimp C. Maybe someday. Part of what makes this book unique is Beverly’s proximity to the subject. She ran OZONE magazine throughout most of UGK’s career and was able to meet and mingle with Pimp dozens of times before he died and clearly has a longstanding, trusting relationship with some of the key people involved. Occasionally, she goes out of her way to justify herself and her position which I found unneeded and distracting, the sheer heft of the book speaks for itself. Anyway, if you’re interested in any of the topics I listed above, I’d really suggest you read this. 1 underground king.

BERG - ANN QUIN

This was a weird one. As always, I try to mix it up and throw some fiction into my book-diet but I was feeling like it was time for something totally new. I believe I heard about Quin from the same people who are into Djuna Barnes, and since I enjoyed the Barnes I figured I’d look into Quin. She’s got a bit of a cult following and only wrote 4 books (N. West style) before taking her own life. She seems to be in a lineage of well-respected but under-read mid-century English weirdos. The book’s plot is fairly simple and basically summed up in the first line, “A man called Berg, who changed his name to Gerb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father.” And, not unlike Hamlet (there are a few other Shakespeare references snuck in that I managed to catch), he spends the rest of the book thinking about and attempting to kill. The book is radically shrunk down, there’s basically only 4 characters, Berg/Gerb, his dad, his mom (who we only read letters from and see in memory), and his dad’s mistress who B/Gerb is also attracted to/obsessed with. Even beyond that, the book is really only one character because it’s totally in B/Gerb’s head and Quin does an amazing job of replicating what it feels like to think. The whole thing is seen through B/Gerb’s deeply personal and idiosyncratic brain. Which is to say that it isn’t linear or logical or sequential, it jumps back between observed present and memory and speculation, all without warning or rhythm. “Thoughts are switchbacks, uncontrolled.” Berg thinks at one point. In that way it reminds me of Virginia Woolf, who comes closest all all for me to capturing the experience of consciousness, except Quin’s G/Berg is a deeply troubled and insane man whose interior is a total mess. There’s a lot of stuff about identity, including a prominent ventriloquist dummy, fate and memory but the real reason to read the book is the totally unique and strange prose. I really admire the confidence that it takes to write something in this style. The confidence that it takes to really disorient the reader and to make them come to where you are, not the other way around. This is one of those books that you need to get into a bit of a trance with to grok the vibe and the rhythm and, generally, what is going on. You’ll be reading, confused, for pages, then get hit with something like, “Does memory alone dwell on detail - the fragrance of nostalgia” making the whole thing worthwhile and demonstrating that novels aren’t just plot. I’m sure it would reward a dozen rereads. It’s also quite short which makes it easier to pick it up and tear through. If I could recommend anything, I think this would have been better read in one long session (or as few sessions as possible) just because it gets so much better when you’ve really settled into B/Gerb’s brain. Each time you pick it up there’s a shocking strangeness that takes the reader out of it for the first few pages. I think I’ll keep an eye out for her other stuff, like I said, there are only 4 total sadly and I believe they’re all weird and short. RIP Quin, I wish you’d lived longer and gotten stranger still. 4 British Beaches

SURVEILLANCE VALLEY: THE SECRET MILITARY HISTORY OF THE INTERNET - YASHA LEVINE

Back on my bullshit. I thought I was taking a break from the CIA stuff but here we are. Actually, one of the things that’s most chilling about the shit in this book is how much further it goes than just the CIA. By tracing the military involvement with the Internet, Levine paints a really dark picture of some of the forces that have shaped our world, especially the last 30 years. I’ll try to outline the broader history part. Levine traces this desire to use computers to both network, coordinate and manage immense databases with technology to at least the 1890 Census which H. Hollerith (the man who founded what became IBM) helped run with primitive punch cards. Eventually, this technology would make it quite easy to, say, get a list of all the Japanese people on the West Coast. Fast forward to after WWII (the first US supercomputer ENIAC, was operational during the war but this book concentrates on the post 1945 world) and the military realizes they need to network computers together to share data and to manage the enormous military that we have after the end of WWII. The pentagon dumps money into this, usually through things like universities and private companies like the Rand Corporation, and eventually it begins to take shape around Vietnam where they develop ARPANET, which is the precursor to most of the underlying tech used by the internet today. The goal in Vietnam seemed to be two fold, first they wanted to collect data, using sensors and tips and recon, that they could manage in real time to show them movement along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It looks like the Vietcong were able to figure out ways around this pretty easily so that aspect of the project wasn’t super successful. The other thing they tried to do was to create profiles of individuals and villages and use algorithms to determine who was working with the communists and/or who was susceptible to communist influence (at which point some Phoenix Program assassins would kill them). Surprise, surprise, they did not just use that tech in Vietnam, they also immediately used it here in the US in a program called Camelot, (full name: Methods for Prediction and Influencing Social Change and Internal War Potential) and CONUS, which are basically military versions of CHAOS and COINTELPRO. This idea, of the internet as surveillance, is driven home by the business model of things like Facebook and Google, which are much more sophisticated versions of what the government was trying to do in Vietnam, namely, to create profiles of people so accurate they can predict behavior. Only, instead of hiring tons of data scientists and profilers to create these profiles, we do it ourselves. This thread is now present in things like PredPol, a company that Google bought that is based on Army tech used to identify potential insurgents in Iraq and used by the evil LAPD starting in 2012.  The second major thread has to do with the funding of these huge tech companies. We’re deep in neoliberalism, who’s paradigmatic figure is the Entrepreneur, who creates wealth and innovation out of his (tho, now we have a newer girlboss version of this) brilliant mind, apart from government oversights, regulations or interference. The truth, of course, is that we paid for all this stuff with our taxes and the government slowly sold these parts off to private companies which now, functionally, control the internet and work hand in glove with the government. To simplify, in 1986 Stephen Wolff helps expand the network of army supercomputers (first one is ENIAC from WWII) to include “civilian” supercomputers at large universities. This system is called NSFNET (National Science foundation) and the receipts are told they must fund some of this themselves by seeking out commercial clients who could use this sort of network. “With public funds the federal government created a dozen network providers out of thin air and then spun the off to the private sector, building companies that in the space of a decade would become integral parts of the media and telecommunications conglomerates we all know and use today- Verizon, Time-Warner, AT&T, Comcast.” By 1995 NSFNET was retired and the net, as we know it, was totally private. In 1996 Clinton signs the Telecommunications Act which allows large conglomerates to control everything. It doesn’t stop there. Programs like Google Earth also come out of government funding. In that case the CIA’s venture capitalist arm, In-Q-Tel, bought a company called Keyhole which was going to use satellite images to create quick 3-D models (an idea with clear military potential) which was then sold to Google. Amazon runs the CIA servers, Blue Origin and SpaceX are both basically missile companies funded by the Pentagon (which means paid for by us), the list truly goes on and on. These examples help put to bed that the tech world is full of brilliant brain-genius, super-inventors and instead that it’s simply a flashy arm of the military-industrial complex. The final big takeaway has to do with TOR and Signal. I’m not a tech-guy and I don’t pretend to really understand how that stuff works (the book does a good job explaining it) but I do remember the enthusiasm with which TOR was introduced to us, as a tool that was going to take down tyrants. Turns out the tech was created by the Navy/DARPA as a secure way to let agents check in with the government and they needed more popularity to make the cloaking effective (again, read the book for the technical explanation). They funded TOR and pushed it on activists, funding many of its loudest apostles, all the while knowing they could get around it. We’ve discovered there’s a whole branch of the CIA called the Mobile Device Branch that builds in backdoors and entries into the devices themselves, making anonymity basically impossible. Levin does a good job showing how they can toggle between using the internet as a liberatory tool in other countries, when that aligns with their goals, and here he connect efforts stretching from Radio Free Europe to more current actions like the Arab Spring activists and other the CIA gave tools and training to get around government censorship and surveillance, to using it as an almost unescapable, global panopticon when they want to. I found this book really well-written and informative. I’ve always held a distrust and suspension of computers, probably, if I’m being honest, because I find the tone the techno-utopians use to be grating and I’m bad at computer stuff. It’s good to see the proof of my suspicion that the Net itself was conceived and birthed in evil, that it started as a way to streamline the death-squads in Vietnam, and has delivered 100x on its dark promise. 1890 dark webs

THE STORY OF THE EYE - GEORGES BATAILLE

Very insane. Bataille is one of those guys that you hear about more than you actually hear from and, since I’d never read anything specifically by him, I decided to ignore the serious philosophical work and jump into this porno-novel which comes highly reviewed. Plus, this thing was only 90 pages and physically small so one could easily read it in a single, horny, sitting. It follows a pretty basic porno-novel plot. A young man starts fucking and won’t stop. He links up with some friends and travels around France and Spain, committing scandalous acts. What makes the novel most interesting is Bataille’s obsession with certain images, which are not super common in smut, and the way he keeps returning to them. He’s got a big thing for oval shaped objects which manifests itself as eyes, eggs, and testes. He’s got a big thing with liquids generally and piss specifically. “Marcelle dismally sobbing alone, louder and louder, in the makeshift pissoir that was now her prison,” is a quote that jumps to mind. He would be very pleased with the “piss is stored in the balls” meme. There’s also an obsession with death, seen in this quote, “It struck me now that death was the sole outcome of my erection.” Of course, since he’s French, his sexual subconscious is deeply Catholic and “liberté” focused. Would it surprise you to know that they rape and murder a priest? French porno cannot get out of the shadow of de Sade. I will say that this book really nails the ending. Bataille summons a truly deranged and off-the-wall image to leave you with. Normally, I don’t worry about spoilers but this book is so short and the ending is so bizarre that I’d really suggest you just read the book before reading this, but, either way, the book ends with the eye of the dead priest removed, and then used in various ways for sex before being inserted into a character’s pussy so that when she pisses it looks like the eye is crying. An image that will stay with me for a while. There’s been a lot written about this book. Sartre loves it, as does Barthes and Sontag and I’m sure dozens more French intellectuals. I read a few things they wrote but they all, of course, gloss over the more minor racial aspects of the books. First, there’s this quote, “These orgasms were as different from normal climaxes as, say, the mirth of the savage African from that of the Occidental. In fact, though the savages may sometimes laugh as modestly as whites, they have long-lasting jags, with all parts of the body in violent release, and they go whirling, willy-nilly, flailing their arms about wildly, shaking their bellies, necks and chests, and chortling and gulping horribly.” Followed by the fact that the last sentence of the book is, “We set sail towards new adventures with a crew of Negroes.” Taken together, these quotes do reveal something about “Western” ideology and sexuality. Namely, an obsession with the sexualities of the colonial Other. You can see that the author/narrator considers non-YTs so different that even the way the experience joy is different from the rational Western man. And that the only way that a Western could experience this mode of living is to give himself over to the most violent fantasies that he can dredge out of his subconscious. Obviously, this is not at all how non-Western views of sexuality actually function in the real world. This belief, and others like it, are an integral piece of the ideological support of colonialism. Western chauvinism is so deep it’s infected the darkest recesses of Western man’s desires and created a worldview where he, the Westerner, is the restrained one, even while engaging in a multi-century long pillaging and raping tour of the world. It’s an interesting paradox and one I’ll keep considering. Irregardless, a very crazy book and one I’d totally recommend. I’m not sure I’m interested in this guy’s philosophy, he seems like every edgelord I’ve ever encountered, but I do think he’s a gifted pornographer. 97 eyeballs

THE CONFIDENCE-MAN - HERMAN MELVILLE

I would count MOBY DICK among my top 10 (maybe top 5) favorite novels and I also really adore BARTLEBY so you’d think I’d be a Melville guy. However, those are the only two works of his I’ve read and, frankly, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone go to bat for any of the other ones. Turns out, this is quite unfair, at least if THE CONFIDENCE-MAN is any indication. I bought this cheap copy because I was interested in the theme. I’d been thinking about Iceberg Slim and reading all this news about modern day scammers and pondering why this archetype seems so quintessentially American. Turns out, Melville wrote a whole book on exactly this subject. The book has this, I believe, unique device where it takes place on the day it was published, April Fool’s day 1856, on a steamboat headed down to New Orleans. The novel consists of the passengers walking around the boat, talking to one another and scamming. All the conversations are high-minded and about the nature of man so t’s sort of like a Thomas Mann novel but all the characters are grifting. Melville does not let up on what human interactions are confidence games at heart. He examines banking, business, charity, manners, credit, fashion, ambition, capitalism, and dozens of other topics pointing out how all of these subjects are rife with manipulation and predation. He’s got a horrifyingly precinct section where a character suggests that his charity is bringing a Wall Street Spirit to its work in Africa. There’s an interesting use of “philanthropy” to not mean “a rich guy engaging in some reputation laundering” (i.e. its current usage) but rather as the antonym of “misanthropy” and which mindset, a general trust or distrust of mankind, is more reasonable or desirable. Melville can be the darkest sort of cynic so the characters espousing philanthropy are exactly the ones you need to distrust at all costs. He also really gets at how American this mindset is. America sees itself as city on a hill attracting people from all over to work hard and get ahead which works out in real life to mean a bunch of rootless people from all over who have no obligations to anyone trying with all their might to get a rich as possible by whatever means. “When wolves are killed off, the foxes increase.” And now that we’ve truly experienced a con-man president it’s hard to argue that Melville didn’t see exactly the world we’re living in. Definitely should be read in conjunction with Iceberg Slim, the other major American writer on cons. 56 cons

BLACK ON BOTH SIDES: A RACIAL HISTORY OF TRANS IDENTITY - C. RILEY SNORTON

Not sure where I heard of this one, tho I have been meaning to read more contemporary theory as well as getting my head around the abstract implications of trans identities. I hadn’t heard of Snorton before this but this book is really good. Part of it has to do with its unique (at least to me) format, where Snorton straddles the line between history and theory. He does get deep into the philosophical and political ramifications of Black trans identities in a way that’s very theoretical, jargon-y, and far-out in the manner I expect from theory. But he also devotes tons of time to locating and highlighting forgotten Black trans ancestors. Snorton comments on cases from the mid-1800s up to one of the other victims of the Brandon Tenna (of Boys Don’t Cry “fame”) killings. There is a very intriguing story about a person referred to has Beefsteak Pete/Mary James who was a mid 19th century sex-worker that, apparently, had crafted some sort of girdle devise, possibly made out of leather or meat, that allowed men to fuck her. The story was so scandalous that the local papers reported the story in Latin. Snorton must have devoured Black papers to find these amazing trans ancestors. He finds a trans man in mid century Mississippi who is sent to a male prison for cross dressing. That guy also created his own binders and convinced the reporter of his masculinity by lighting a match off of his shoe. Snorton finds a handful of Black trans women in the Jorgensen-era that I had simply never heard of before. I’m more a history guy than a theory guy so I found these sections a bit more interesting. On the theory front, there is amazing stuff about the infamous J. Marion Sims and the ways in which Black women are brutally abused in order to create the scientific foundation of “femaleness” and how US slave law intersected with gender. There’s lots of interesting neologism like “tranifesting” or “anatomopoisesis.” Quotes like, “..ways to be trans, in which gender becomes a terrain to make space for living, a set of maneuvers with which Blacks in the New World had much practice,” make the connections that Snorton is trying to draw clear and interesting. Overall, an engaging read, I made it through much faster than I typically do with theory, I believe because he peppered in the fascinating historical stuff. I’ll leave you with a quote that manages to be something of a mission statement, “Yet theory, at its best, is nothing more than dreams/myths/histories aimed at giving expression to new ways of seeing and ways of being in the world.” 1883 New Genders

DANCING IN THE STREETS - BARBARA EHRENREICH

200

This book is part of a duo that Ehrenreich wrote about mass or collective action. The other one is called BLOOD RITES and is about war and other forms of collective violence, and while it does sound interesting I my recent reading has been a bit dark so I opted for Ehrenreich’s book about collective joy and celebration. Thankfully, the book is largely as fun and exciting as its subject but it didn’t offer a true reprieve from depressing subject matter since a big subject of the book is both a theory about how Western Culture has suppressed and continues to suppress this sort of collective celebration and carnival both in itself and as part of its colonial efforts. “The essence of the Western mind, and particularly the Western male, upper-class mind, was its ability to resist the contagious rhythm of the drums, to wall itself up in a fortress of ego and rationality against the seductive wildness of the world.” So in that sense it is in legacy with books like CALIBAN AND THE WITCH and others about the larger trends in the ways Europeans dealt with their victims all over the world. There’s lots of great anecdotes about various ecstatic cults and religious dance movements from across time and space, from Cybele to the Ghost Dance. There’s a very evo-psych explanation, that made my partner scoff when I bounced it off of her, of dance’s origins as located in synchronized movements that acted as an attempt for many people to appear as one large animal to predators. She, correctly, goes hard on Calvinism and sagely links Wahhabism and Calvinism as expressing a fundamentally similar attitude about the role of joy and pleasure. Both are religious movements based almost totally on player-hating. I would certainly agree that the modern day descendants of those religious movements are responsible for a lot of the problems we’re dealing with now. I also liked her attempts to locate these sorts of experiences in our world today. She talks about rock festivals at length but I think she could have gone more into rave and dance culture (especially places that really emphasis the group dance aspect by doing things like not putting the DJ on a stage for everyone to face) as well as the way business interest have sought to package and approximate these experiences. She also discusses protests and shouts out Seattle, 1999 WTO, specifically as a big factor in an introduction of the carnivalesque to modern protesting. The idea of how much of the protest should be an attempt to create spaces of festival vs how this festival vibe is a distraction and dilutes the deadly-serious thing we’re ostensibly here to protest is a very discussed one these days. It was, as you might imagine, a pivotal issue at the CHOP and remains an open question. Irregardless, I liked this book a lot, it read quickly, had lots of good anecdotes and the thinking was sharp. I think I’ll continue to hold off on BLOOD RITES but I’m sure I’ll get to it eventually. 1278 people dancing until it kills them. 

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

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.