AMERICAN WAR MACHINE - PETER DALE SCOTT

“In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Agency and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA” - Dennis Dayle

So perhaps I’ll never get off my CIA bullshit. Oh well. I will say that reading this stuff constantly makes reading the news very insane, especially when former CIA officers are allowed to go on TV and uncritically war-monger. This book is quite excellent and is a good companion piece to GHOST WARS which is, basically, the normie version of this book. All the Afghanistan fuckery with none of the stuff about our involvement with the drug trade. Actually, that’s a bit misleading, this book traces drug profits used to back up parastate activities from the end (or, to be technical, slightly before) of WWII up through the Obama administration. Scott paints a compelling picture, the gist is that wars and counter-insurgencies and all that cost money, lots of money, and to finance these activities various groups have attached themselves to drug smuggling, which is, perhaps, the third largest commodity in the world, after arms and oil. The CIA has been central to this nexus of drugs and insurgency since their founding. People probably know about the (completely true) accusation that the CIA helped Nicaraguan Contras smuggle drugs, specifically cocaine and specifically the cocaine that fueled the Crack epidemic, as well as the stories about heroin coming back in servicemen’s coffins during Vietnam but Scott makes a compelling case that these weren’t weird aberrations, they’re the two most visible parts of a large pattern. It starts with helping the KMT sell opium to finance their war against Mao, then migrated into South East Asia where they helped groups in Laos and Thailand finance their anti-communist wars/death squads. This blueprint is repeated in Latin America, with both the aforementioned Contras as well as with Bolivia, Colombian and Cuban gangsters/right-wingers. He goes on to point out how this works in Afghanistan, where the US has been propping up opium growers for literal decades, first as part of Operation Cyclone then as part of the even more direct Operation Mosquito which was a plan to addict Red Army troops to heroin then as part of the plan to “stabilize” the country after the 2001 invasion, with basically all of the major dope movers being protected US intelligence assets. High ranking Russian and Pakistani officers charge that literal US planes fly some of the dope out, though  There’s all sorts of amazing threads about 9/11 and Khashoggi (Adnan, not Jamal), the connection between Mexican Cartels and US intelligence (a subject I’m quite interested in), the concept of “Deep Events” like JFK’s assassination or 9/11, the connection between far-right politics and organzied crime, and all sorts of related matters. Scott sums it up nicely when he reports that the US doesn’t want to eradicate drugs, they just want to alter the market share and make sure that their preferred goons keep the dope$. 1947 US planes full of heroin. 

THE MAN WITHOUT TALENT - YOSHIHARU TSUGE

Yet another spur-of-the-moment library grab. This one comes with an effusive back quote from none other than Chris Ware, and I’m always interested in getting more into Japanese comics. I knew nothing about Tsuge and because of the “reverse” layout of translated Japanese comics, the essay about it was at the end. At first I thought the story was about some sad asshole, like many Ware books, though the main character in this is a bit meaner than most Ware protagonists. The main character is poor, disreputable and overwhelmed by life. He attempts of sell rocks that he finds on the riverbank on the riverbank itself. Several characters point out that people won’t by rocks they can find on the ground for free which does seem to be true. They guy goes through a number of other schemes to get rich all the while disappointing his wife and child. He mentions comics throughout the story so at first it was hard for me to tell if this was supposed to be autobiographical. The essay at the end places the comic within the tradition of Shishōsetsu, which means I-novel and are indeed autobiographical comics, typically about sad men who lead quiet lives. It reminded me of the American Splendor stuff. Tsuge does apparently share biographic details with the character in this story, though he himself did not sell rocks on the riverbank. It’s also interesting that he has a family and kids, which gives his struggles another edge. Despite how rough things get, he doesn’t seem to take the idea of abandoning them very seriously. There’s also lots of interesting tension between the modern world and different characters’ ideas about Japan. We get some cool digressions about haiku artists. I’m glad I read this, it’s a bit baffling to me that someone’s primary interests in comics would revolve around sad mean drifting through life, but to each their own, I suppose. 87 stones

CUSTER DIED FOR YOUR SINS - VINE DELORIA, JR.

This book is pretty fucking incredible. I’m always on a quest to read more about Native America but I wanted to expand beyond historical concerns to more contemporary theoretical sorts of texts. This book came out in ‘69 so it’s not quite “contemporary” though it’s interesting to think about what’s changed since its publication. Most of the AIM actions happen after this book comes out and they do seem inspired, at least in part, by the ideas that Deloria is laying out here. Deloria is also big on “the YTs are going to kill themselves off” and the subsequent climate change discourse seems pretty in line with that sentiment. The book is a series of essays, all about Native people, policy and culture, which cover an immense amount of ground. Deloria has experience both as a college professor, so he’s deep on theory and history, as well as a politician/lawyer/activist with stints on the board of the Museum of the American Indian and as executive director of the National Congress of the American Indian, so he’s also deep on politics and real-life possibilities. He’s both ultra erudite, he seems to be able to rattle off examples from tribal traditions across the continent at will, and also very direct and purposive as a writer. I found myself marking sections left and right and I’ll end this review with a long list of quotes I really enjoyed. I was particularly taken with the stuff about anthropologists, who Deloria rightfully goes super hard on. He really succinctly pin-points the harm that’s done by the compilation of useless knowledge and the ways in which abstract thoughts can distract from material concerns. There’s great stuff about tribal leadership including talks about how both hippies misunderstood inter-tribal dynamics which doomed their movement and the way that pioneer YTs would just pick some guy they considered manipulatable to declare the “chief” of the tribe as well as how prestige and tribal politics actually worked in the past and how it works today. There’s a whole chapter on Indian humor that performs that rare trick of writing about “humor” without resorting to fantastically unhumorous cringe. There was interesting stuff about an attempt to push for recognition for smaller Eastern tribes which could lead to more communication and coordination between urban and rez Natives. Some of the other most fascinating stuff has to do with Native engagement with the Civil Rights Movement. It’s an incredible critique to read, one typically only gets the Black or YT perspective on the Civil Rights movement so to hear from a party that is intimately involved in this conflict, especially in ‘69 is really invaluable. He both has suggestions and criticism for black leaders and he highlights ways that Indians should emulate and admire the Civil Rights Movement. The BLM and Native Rights movements are both strong here in Seattle and I see the interplay between them at marches pretty regularly (I’ve been able to hear the phrase “Black Lives Matter” in both Lushootseed as well as a Siouxan Language (I’m guessing Lakota since the people speaking were from Standing Rock)) so getting Deloria’s perspective has been very useful to say the least. The book definitely left me with the sensation that I need to know more about contemporary Native issues, I have no idea what the current stance is towards the reservations, despite living near many. Does anyone know who the living Deloria is? I’d like to read their book. 1492 Federally recognized tribes

- “Turning some reservations into an economic resource rather than a homeland”

- “Indians are now equally certain Columbus brought anthropologists on his ship when he came to the New World. How else could he have made so many deductions about where he was?”

- “the anthro is usually devoted to PURE RESEARCH. Pure research is a body of knowledge absolutely devoid of useful application and incapable of meaningful digestion...The fundamental thesis of the anthropologist is that people are objects for observation, people are then considered objects for experimentation, for manipulation, and for eventual extinction. The anthropologist thus furnishes the justification for treating Indian people like so many chessmen available for anyone to play with.”

-”abstract theories create abstract action. Lumping together the variety of tribal problems and seeking the demonic principle at work which is destroying Indian people may be intellectually satisfying. But it does not change the real situation. By concentration on great abstractions, anthropologists have unintentionally removed many young Indians from the world in which problems are solved to the land of makebelieve.”

- “compilation of useless knowledge “for knowledge’s sake” should be utterly rejected by the Indian people. We should not be the objects of observation for those who do nothing to help us.”

- “in a very real sense, then, Christianity replaced living religions with magic.”

-Not wanting to be lumped together, both tribes and Blacks, Indians, “Never did the White man  man systematically exclude Indians from his schools or meeting places. Nor did the white man ever kidnap black children from their homes and take them off to a government boarding school to be educated as Whites. The White man signed no treaties with the black. Nor did he pass any amendments to the Constitution to guarantee the treaties of the Indian...the White man forbade the Black to enter his own social and economic system and at the same time force-fed the Indian what he was denying the Black. Yet the White man demanded that the black conform to white standards and insisted that the Indian don feathers and beads periodically to perform for him.” The White man presented the problem of each group in contradictory ways so that neither Black nor Indian could understand exactly where the problem existed and how to solve it.” 

-”We refused to participate in the Washington March. In our hears and minds we could not believe that Blacks wanted to be the same as Whites. And we knew that even if they did want that, the Whites would never allow it to happen. As far as we could determine, White culture, if it existed, depended primarily upon the exploitation of land, people and life itself.”

- “Culture, as Indian people understood it, was basically a life-style by which people acted.”

- “The Black needs time to develop his roots, to create his sacred places, to understand the mystery of himself and his history, to understand his purpose. These things the Indian has and is able to maintain through his tribal life.”

- “It seemed ridiculous to Indian people that hippies would refuse to incorporate prestige and social status into their tribalizations attempts. Indian society is founded on status and social prestige. This largely reduces competition to interpersonal relationships instead of allowing it to run rampant in economic circles.”

GIRAFFES ON HORSEBACK SALADS - JOSH FRANK, TIM HEIDECKER, MANUELA PERTEGA

Another library pick-up. I’d heard of this movie before, like the Kubrick Nazi movie, or the Cage Superman film or the Jorodowsky Dune movie (which itself has a documentary very similar in tone to this comic), and it is certainly in the pantheon of famously never made movies. Perhaps in the top 5 of such dream-films. The book itself is mostly background information and histories of Dali and Harpo and their intersecting lives. Frank was able to get his hands on a treatment, some sketches and a 6 page script outline from various museums and archives and, with the help of Heidecker, wrote a script for the movie that Pertega ends up illustrating. The plot is pretty basic Dali stuff, a man, who’s an aristocratic Spaniard, exiled by the Spanish Civil War, a detail that highlights Dali’s bad politics, falls in love with The Surrealist Woman, who has the ability to make situations bizarre and surreal (ie summoning flaming giraffes) through a power that is not explained. The man was supposed to be played by Harpo and the other Marx brothers, essentially, themselves. Heidecker is a weird choice for me to punch up the script. He does have an eye for bizarre and over-the-top visuals but I don’t associate his comedy with the hyper-wordy, rapid-fire wall-to-wall schtick that Groucho is famous for. Visually, this book does cool stuff, lots of splash pages and innovative panel design and whatnot but this falls a bit flat for me because of the medium. I once heard famous curmudgeon Alan Moore talk about how comics allow you to do anything at a very low price, basically whatever it costs to pay the illustrator, while a movie costs millions and millions of dollars which makes the moral stakes higher. Basically, if you make a bad comic, no biggie, but making a bad movie wastes tons of money. This comic elides that problem but in so lowering the stakes it makes it less interesting. Obviously, Dali could have done whatever he wanted in a comic, what we missed out on from the movie was the chance to see if one could translate Dali’s insane visions into celluloid, a much more unforgiving medium than comics. So it all looks great and fine but, relative to other comics, it’s not that bizarre or strange. ‘64 flaming giraffes.

THE TERRIBLE TWOS - ISHMAEL REED

A quick one day book. I was able to read this whole thing on the flight from Seattle to Kansas. Now that I’ve read all of the Pynchon, it seems like Reed is the next clear step. They have a similar style, one that is both satirical and silly while also being hyper-erudite and given to explorations of very esoteric topics on a moment's notice. Reed never wrote any long epic the way Pynchon did, his books (the ones I’ve read so far) seem like they could be excerpts of longer Pynchon books. He also focuses more on Black history and issues which has pegged him as more of a “cult” writer while Pynchon is more canonical. Obviously bullshit, Reed is just as good and interesting as Pynchon and should be read alongside. All that being said, this book is strange. It’s very Christmas focused. I mean, it’s got Santa on the cover so I should have expected as much. He uses the powerful Pynchon/Reed mindset and method (one could also crib from Dali and call it the paranoid-critical method), which involves looking into a phenomenon then blowing it out in every direction. So here the topic is Christmas and we get long looks not only at commercialism and capitalism, we also get segments about the history of Santa Clause, lots of stuff about other European versions of Santa, lots of stuff about Black Peter, the Dutch “helper” of Santa, German fairy tales, the relationship between Catholicism and St. Nicholas, the relationship between Hailie Salassie and St. Nicholas, Rastafari and its relationship to Christmas. I particularly enjoyed the model who is president in this world who travels, with Santa as his Virgil, to hell where he meets Eisenhower, Truman and N. Rockefeller who discuss their sins at length. It has the episodicness of the longer Pynchon works but I would say it ties together a bit more neatly than a lot of his stuff does. It seems like he spent a few years thinking about the implications and connections w/r/t Christmas then blasted out short, funny little novel to get all this stuff off of his mind. The man is a genius. I’ll slowly read my way through the rest of his work. Unlike Pynchon, he’s quite prolific, I’m seeing over 10 novels, plus poems and plays on his Wiki, and the man is still alive. 270 YT christmases. 

VINELAND - THOMAS PYNCHON

AVAILABLE

Well, I’ve finally done it. I’ve read all of the Pynchon novels (which is all of the Pynchon outside of a short story collection called SLOW LEARNER) and not only is he a total master with no misses, I’d now like to, someday, read all the novels back-to-back, quickly, to see how they vibe off one another. Like I said, they’re all good and now I’m able to think about them all together and bounce them off one another in different ways. For instance, where do you put VINELAND? It’s not one of the epics (ie GRAVITY’S RAINBOW, MASON & DIXON, AGAINST THE DAY) but it does share characters, or character’s families with ATD. It’s one of 3, along with BLEEDING EDGE and THE CRYING OF LOT 49, that feature a female main character. It’s probably most similar, plot wise and in location to INHERENT VICE. VINELAND certainly has the worst reputation of all the Pynchon novels and that strikes me as quite unfair, this book has everything you come to Pynchon for. There’s the zaniness and hyper-erudition you expect. We get a 2001 monolith of weed, a music fakebook written by Deluze and Guatarri, someone who fucks a car, a home-birth while the father’s high on acid, a former Nazi, anti-drug pilot named Karl Bopp, characters who travel to the Bardo, references to Godzilla and how that would effect the insurance industry, a ninja academy, an all-Black version of Star Trek, to name a few short episodes. The larger plot takes place in 1984 and is about Pynchon’s favorite subject, the 60’s, their potential and their disillusion. A girl goes looking for her mom, who was a 60’s radical who’s gone underground and who she’s (the daughter) never met. It’s Pynchon so it sprawls out to include basically everything but we largely focus on how the establishment was able to crush the revolutionary spirit of the times. The confrontation centers around a short-lived occupation of a fictional California college which renamed itself the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll. There’s a fun detail that the person they choose as their charismatic leader is basically only chosen because he’s tall. The plot zeros in on the relationship between the mom and a cop who’s trying to crush the movement and to what extent she betrays the PRRR. This twist makes the book more difficult and ambiguous than, say, INHERENT VICE since not only is the cop rape-y (of course, Pynchon writes great evil cops) it remains fluid how much the mom is culpable. All this stuff was quite interesting in light of my CHOP experiences. Nothing changes. There’s a lot of stuff about TV in the book, he creates a new class of half-living, half-dead things called Thanatoids that are connected to TV, some of it is quite insightful like this, “Whole problem ’th you folks’s generation,...nothing personal, is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out there for it—but you sure didn’t understand much about the Tube. Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just like th’ Indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970 dollars—it was way too cheap…” Which is great but the criticism actually works better w/r/t the Internet. If Pynchon was young now, young enough to have grown up with the net (he wrote a net book, BE, but it's a real web 1.0 affair) we’d be truly blessed, the “it’s watching you while you’re watching it” thing is heavy in this book and the real-life internet catches up to this paranoia. The book is fascinating also when you think about it as an autopsy of the radical 60’s, set in 1984, but written in ‘90. He’s very smart about how a total sea-change for American society didn’t take place when the hippies wanted it to, but did take place under Reagan. It’s quite an interesting vantage point and it’s also impressive he calls out the Bush/CIA drug smuggling in ‘90. Either way, a really fun book, I think I’d recommend it as a “first Pynchon.” 1984 smurfs.

DEATHS OF DESPAIR AND THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM - ANNE CASE & ANGUS DEATON

I’ve been following this “deaths of despair” trend for a few years now, I do think it speaks to something both chilling and deeply true about modern life, but this is the first full book I’ve read on the subject. Normally, I read about the subject in academic papers and magazine articles so I was excited to take a deep dive. Sadly, this could have been a long magazine piece and have been just as good, it’s flabby at 200+ pages. You probably know the basic stuff, Americans are undergoing multiple intersecting epidemics. Deaths from alcohol, drugs (specifically opioids) and suicide are very much on the raise, espeically for YT men. This book, and the dialogue around this phenomena as a whole, is, in my opinion, undercounting these despair deaths, since there are many, many people dying in suicidal accidents or eating themselves to death or otherwise dying in a way that is the result of profound despair but isn’t counted towards the total. I can overlook this, I don’t think there’s a way to get the “real” number. This book does a good job of highlighting how this is a YT man thing, how these deaths and this level of despair is par for the course for the rest of America since time immemorial. And here it’s split again, with most of these deaths of despair concentrated within the cohort of YT men w/o a college degree. There’s some interesting facts and history folded into this book. I didn’t know the first Indian to be knighted was Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, who supplied most of the Opium England was selling in the Opium wars. I did not realize that the Civil War was the real big bang for widespread morphine use (IV drugs, morphine in particular were new at the time) and that ~100k soldiers came back from that war as addicts. I did not know that China used to be the major exception to the “men kill themselves more often than women'' but now they are on the same page as everyone else. I did not know about the suicide belt in the US stretching up the Mountain West, from AZ to AK. I think Case&Denton and I agree about the problem and the scope but, boy, does being a professional economist give you fucking brainworms when it comes to solutions. There’s basic stuff, like quoting skull-measurer Charles Murray without giving the context of his longstanding charlatanism, or talking about human relationships in purely economic terms and thus ending up with PUA bullshit, like when they talk about woman waiting to have sex being endangered by the more promiscuous who “undercut the bargaining power of those who would prefer to wait.” Is this really how they think people live their lives and think about themselves? It’s like a parody of an econ professor. Likewise, C&D have to do insane logical reaches and backbends to explain how Capitalism is the solution to all the immiserating Capitalism caused. This is why we get a long chapter about US healthcare and how awful it is and how it’s literally killing people and then long, confusing explanations of various voucher programs or regulatory tweaks that they think would make things better, slightly, over a long period of time. Maybe we just shouldn’t have a capitalist healthcare market? Maybe some very, very rich people need to be less rich? But C&D go out of their way to insist that this isn’t the case, we don’t need real change, we need minor tweaks, supervised by elite economists, of course. Wish is why we get sentences like, “Upward redistribution is not an inherent feature of Capitalism - it does not have to work that way” which might align with some “theory” they have but simply is not true historically. Likewise, they can’t really understand things like dignity or the use of the word “labor” or “work”. “Many Americans believe that work is essential if one is to fully participate in life, and if a UBI reduces people’s willingness to work and takes pressure off them to find gainful employment, it will diminish their life chances.” This sentence betrays this misunderstanding. The first use of “work” in that quote refers to meaningful labor or something like a life’s work. The second use refers to “work” the way most people use it, which is to say a gig or a job you have to work to make money to not starve. For some lucky people, like economics professors, these are the same things. Most of us don’t get that. And their inability or unwillingness to understand how these things are different, how so many people in this country and the world view their relationship with their work (i.e. it's something that they have to do or they’ll die), shows the widespread blindness of economics as a professional endeavor. It’s a math problem to them, it’s real life to us. Even here where the topic revolves around the fact that our economy, which is world-historically large, is so odious and terrible that people are killing themselves in unprecedented numbers, they can’t help but prescribe a bunch of minor tweaks then rant about how anything resembling socialism is a utopian pipedream for children. Total insanity, but a good example of how someone can write a whole book on a topic, can dedicate an entire professional career to studying a topic, and still totally misperceive it because of personal ideology. Again, good on the causes and effects, bad on solutions. 1979 slow suicides.

CLAYTON. - JULIAN VOLOJ

Another comic I was able to pick up on a whim; god I love the library being open. This comic is short, I was able to read it in one sitting, and focused. It is a pretty straightforward biography of the artist Clayton Patterson and an exploration of his work. I was vaguely familiar with Patterson before this, but I am interested in the LES before it was gentrified beyond imagination, specifically because it managed to be both lower class and racial diverse, a combo that is very hard to find these days. There’s a lot of NYC nostalgia for the bad old days, you can find it from Patti Smith to Bourdain, and typically I find that stuff beyond tedious. CLAYTON. manages to balance the main character's clear love for the neighborhood with interesting digressions into his artwork, most of which is based on the neighborhood. He, of course, takes photos so he has hundreds of candid street shots, mostly of 80’s-90’s gang members. The gang-member who the book focuses on, a fella named Cochise, does appear to be a Nazi, which goes unaddressed. He has more swastikas and iron crosses than is typical, even for a YT biker type, and in the “present” day he’s wearing a “Don’t Tread on Me” hat. I would have like to know more about this aspect of his gang life. Patterson was also deeply involved in the tattoo world, and instrumental in legalizing it in NYC, so he’s also got a ton of cool pictures of old tattoos, as well as some very cool tattoos himself. Patterson was also present at the Tompkins Square Police Riot and shot hours of video of the NYPD beating the shit out of people on an old camcorder. He refused to give over the tapes, since the evil NYPD would obviously “lose” them immediately, and as a result he himself had the shit kicked out of him by cops and was frequently arrested for bullshit and tortured. Normal NYPD stuff. What’s sad is how that was really the last stand against the sort of gentrification that would destroy everything interesting  and cool about NYC. I would be surprised if the protesters that night knew how right they really were. They really did replace squats and artists and working families and basically anyone who’s not a millionaire with banks and Walgreens and the world’s most boring people. This process played out in almost all major American cities during this time (late 80’s-today, basically my lifetime) but NYC (and, I’d argue, SF) was among the hardest hit and most thoroughly desiccated. The last part that really struck me has to do with hats. Patterson is famous for hand painting and embroidering baseball caps and jackets. He made some for famous folks like Mick Jagger and for regular cool people in the LES. They have a Haitian art vibe to me, lots of stylized skulls and bones and sweeping, symmetrical line work. He claims that he basically made the baseball hat popular as an everyday wear item, and I have no idea if this is true. What resonates with me is the fact that Supreme recently released a line of clothing based on his artwork, including hats and jackets embroidered with his designs. No longer do you have to be in the know and travel down to a shady neighborhood and speak with Patterson, who was making it all himself, in person to get these hats, you can order them online from a supplier who is getting the hats made at slave-wages in Asia. Supreme is a good lens through which to view the commercialization of street art and graffiti culture and skate culture and general low-life NYC culture and having the artwork of the LES’s most famous documentarian is a fitting symbol of the decline of a once vital neighborhood. Patterson himself has moved, I believe he lives in Austria now and I’m sure his old storefront/apartment is a bank. Nice short little read about a guy I didn’t know a ton about. I’d like to know more about the LES squat scene (home of the famous C-Squat) during this time. Does anyone know the best book for that? 1979 custom hats

REINCARNATION STORIES - KIM DEITCH

The library is back open so I’m able to do things like grab Deitch comics on the fly. Deitch is someone I’ve enjoyed for a while, he comes out of the weirdo 60’s milieu that produced R. Crumb and others, but since the early 2000’s he’s channeled that sensibility into longer, complicated graphic novels that frequently play with the space between reality and comic and creates a sort of alternate comics universe, a la Marvel. If you’ve read his other stuff, especially BOULEVARD OF BROKEN DREAMS, you should be familiar with Waldo, his Felix the Cat like cat character who is actually an ancient demon who torments comics writers. Waldo is here, as is “Kim Deitch” the character who now has even more overlap with the real Kim Deitch, to a truly disorienting degree. For instance, the book mentions dozens of real celebrities and situations in Deitich’s life, such as his time at the East Village Other and a recent bout with some sort of degenerative eye disease, but then mixes them up with fictional, parallel histories, like ones in which Deitich is beyond successful and has opened a multi-story toy museum for kids. These toy museum pages are in super bright saturated colors, which is a bit unusual for Deitch, who I associate with masterful black and white drawings. The layout of the book is also unique and master-level. There’s minimal “panels” in the book, most pages are large splash pages that are navigated by text in arrows that show you how to read it. This allows Deitch to show off his insane drafting skills that partly capture the sort of early cartoon feel of Felix the Cat or Betty Bop or Steamboat Willy but also really lean into the underground psychedelic comix look that he help invent in the 60’s. The story itself is what the title suggests. Deitch is trying to unlock the secrets of his past lives, both his human ones and the occasional monkey past life. As you can imagine, the story folds in on itself and recurs and calls back to early episodes constantly. Like I said, the demonic Waldo, who features quite heavily in his other work, shows up and adds more layers of meta-complications. The last few chapters of the book are titled things like, “Who is Jack Hoxie?” “or, “Who was Spain Rodriguez?” that seek to add in some “real” biographical details about characters who feature in his fictional narrative, even if these details are being delivered, in the Spain case, by time-travelling hyper-evolved cats from the future. Very weird stuff. I liked this as much as I’ve like any other Deitch, he’s really on a late career roll and appears to have total mastery of comix. I’m especially fond of his hyper rich color pages, I hope the next comic is all in color. 1885 past lives. 

TWO CHEERS FOR ANARCHISM - JAMES C. SCOTT

Dope little book. I’ve read AGAINST THE GRAIN as well as parts of 2 other Scott books which were quite long and pretty academic (he is a Yale professor after all) so I was expecting something long and intense so this breezy less-than-200 page ditty was a welcomed surprise. The book doesn’t seek to map out or create a broader “anarchist perspective” or solve all sorts of complicated political conundrum. Instead, it deploys what Scott calls an “Anarchist squint” to see some issues in the world differently. He doesn’t stick with a topic too long, the book itself is organized into both loose chapters as well as smaller “fragments” which are typically a few pages long and make a quick point without overstaying their welcome. He touches on some cool stuff, I particularly like the idea of “anarchist calestheics” where you ignore small stupid rules to keep up the practice of being free. There’s stuff about war deserters and playground design. There’s a particularly interesting chapter on the petit bourgeois that defends them in a way that is uncommon on the left. I’ve been thinking alot about the professional managerial class w/r/t and in relation to the small business owning class, and how this division maps onto the current political climate and Scott brings a lot to this thinking, especially with his anarchist emphasis on freedom and autonomy. Perhaps my favorite section had to do with the way we measure and collect data on complex social issues. I’ve written before about how much I hate this aspect of modern life and this book had a much more articulate explanation of this rage. I’ve been in so many organizations that do things like reduce teaching to testing data or reduce behavioral issues to a short “assessment.” As he puts it, “a measure colonizes behavior” and you end up with nonsense like the sort of “teaching to a test” approach I had to put up with in high school. Beyond that I also enjoyed his point about how, “Organizations, contrary to the usal view, do not generally precipitate protest movements. In fact, it is more correct to say that protest movements precipitate organizations, which in turn usually attempts to tame protests and turn it into institutional channels.” which has been good to keep in mind w/r/t my experiences at the CHOP. Either way, this was a pretty light and easy book I’d recommend if you’re new to the idea of anarchy. 2 Stateless people

SPECIAL PROBLEMS IN THE STUDY OF SUFI IDEAS - IDRIES SHAH

Hard to know if I can count this one. This book is incredibly short, a couple page intro,  25 pages of main text followed by somewhat extensive notes and a brief Rumi translation. I was expecting a more in depth exploration of Sufism, a subject I would like to know much more about. The book itself is a response to a very unique set of circumstances and a very specific complaint. The book was published in ‘66, during a period where Westerners were going through one of our periodic obsessions with the “mysterious East.” And into the same stew that included astrology, the tarot, crystals, various new age activities, meditation and buddhism, yoga and a host of other “ancient” practices these new spiritual seekers were adding in Sufism, which they perceived, generally, as an enlightened and ecstatic version of Islam. Shah’s main complaint is the cafeteria catholic style approach to the Sufi tradition. As he puts it, “Sufism... is not there for people to adopt pieces of it which appeal to them, in the order and manner which pleases them. It is there to be learnt, by its own methods and in the order and manner which the Sufi phenomenon itself requires.”You have to approach Sufism with the Sufi prescribed method, which involves a teacher and lived experience and is at odds with the Western idea that “all knowledge must surely be available in books.” Shah insists these books, even ancient texts written by Sufi scholars themselves, are not the arbitrators of Sufism, instead, “Sufi ideas are in varying degrees contained in the background and studies of up to 40 million people alive today: those connected with sufism.” Because the book is so short, and since he’s against the idea of books as authority in general, he doesn’t go into what Sufism actually is, though he does raise a number of interesting lines of inquiry. He suggests that Sufism, german coinage from 1821, has no etymology (he dismisses the popular conception that it’s related to the word for “wool” which refers to the garments of Sufi ascetics) but instead might be connected to Dhikr chanting of the letters Soad, Wao, Fa which would sound like SSSSSOOOOOFFFFF. He seems to believe that Sufism is not a branch of Islam but rather a mystical tradition that predates Islam and has influence over a vast array of cultural/religious phenomena. He quotes Ibn el-Farid as saying, “Our wine existed before what you call the grape and the vine,” which is a very interesting and far-out idea I wish he got more into. He also, as I said, credits Sufism as being the inspiration or exerting influence on a vast number of ideas. Here’s a short list: chivalry, alchemy, Guru Nanak (founder of sikhism), Hindu Vedantist teaching, Western magik and occultism, the theory of evolution, Yezidism, Gurdieff, the Troubadours, William Tell, Shakespeare, Hans Christian Anderson, Japanese Zen Buddhism, Dante, Chaucer, to name only a few. I wish the book had been longer to go into this stuff more in detail. Finally, it had good shot at the neoliberal idea that everything can be reduced to a “useful” self-help program, “People who need the psychological prop are not primarily learners, they are often in need of therapy first. Sufism is not a therapy, it is a teaching.” Shots fired. Cool book but I’m still in the market for a general Sufism book, if anyone knows a good one, I’m all ears. 1811 whirling dancers

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

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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. 

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