SLUMBERLAND - PAUL BEATTY

I won’t bury the lede, this book is quite good but not as good as THE SELLOUT, the other novel of Beatty’s I’ve read. Beatty manages that rare trick of being a poet turned novelist whose novels aren’t language-only affairs. In this sense, he’s like Bolaño, who is also a poet-turned-novelist and who also manages to write novels that have compelling plots while still conjuring interesting and poetic sentences and phrases. This novel concerns an American DJ who travels to Berlin to get a largely forgotten free-jazz genius to add the finishing touches to a perfect beat he’s cooked up. In the meantime, he works in Berlin as a jukebox sommelier at a bar that primarily serves Black men and YT women. The book focuses on race-relations, especially race-relations in Germany which is not something I think too much about, and music (and, obviously, these concerns overlap) and Beatty has a lot to say about both. Not unlike FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, you can tell the writer has a dozen music essays inside of him, all sorts of personal theories and obsessions he’s cultivated over the years, which he’s chosen to put in the mouth of a character in a fictional work, rather than writing a book of nonfiction. For instance, we learn that Ken Burn’s Boomer masterpiece “Jazz” excluded Sun Ra, which is unforgivable and totally predictable. I looked it up afterwards, and this is, apparently, true (I’m not going to watch 6 hrs of his boring-ass doc to actually confirm that). The narrator is in Berlin during the fall of the Wall which he attempts to recreate with sound. There’s some great comic set-pieces, like the protagonist’s gig at a YT power rally where he’s excited he finally gets to play his collection of rare Nazi-music 45s. There’s a self-immolation, lots of stuff about DJing, and tons of throw-away jokes, like a supercomputer, named Deep Blues, that plays jazz. In the hands of someone like Reed or Pynchon, digressions like that would have taken up pages of rambling asides, so while Beatty has some of these author’s zaniess and omnivorous interests, he’s more focused on the story at hand. I prefer Beatty writing about America directly since I don’t know/care a ton about Germany and their race issues or the nature of Berlin but damn if the man can’t write a sentence. This book was quick and fun, I wish the man would write more. Perhaps I should read some of his poems. 1989 45’s.

FAMILIAR FACE - MICHEAL DEFORGE

I wonder how long it takes DeForge to make these things because this is the second one I’ve read this month that was published in 2020 and has very “2020” themes. Can he churn them out that fast? Is he just in tune with the general vibe and was able to make something resonant in this era in advance? They’re very intricate and seem like they would take a long time, but on the other hand he seems so comfortable in his style that you also get the sense that he might easily draw indefinitely out of sheer strange joy. Either way, the trend continues w/r/t the quality of plots. Like I said in the HEAVEN NO HELL review, the art has always been there. I’m not sure there has been a time where I haven’t loved the illustration. DeForge is so imaginative and far out and consistently unique. His choice of pallet and the thin, strange shapes he conjures and relies on really do it for me. I continue to have no complaints on this front. The stories, however, are getting better, or at least, sharper, as well. This one concerns a world where some central agency has the ability to alter any aspect of the world for any reason at any time. Obviously, they couch these changes as “to improve efficiency” but in reality the changes are often ambiguous at best. Transportation, housing, and individuals' physical bodies are altered so profoundly that characters can’t identify themselves in old photographs. There’s also rentable roommates, social unarrest, a dead-end job reading but ignoring complaints and characters emerging from giant eggs. At some point it appears that a terrorist organization also gains this ability to alter the world. Against this background the main character is trying to figure out why his girlfriend left him and what she’s up to and, maybe, if she’s joined the terrorists. It was pretty page-turny (I read it in a sitting) and surprisingly relevant to real-world concerns (not a quality I typically go to DeForge for). If I had any complaint it would be that I feel he glossed over the sexual implications of the constant transfiguration. DeForge hand-waves it away with a line about how it was exhausting not sexy to figure out your partner’s new body all the time but I don’t buy it. Give me more shape-shifting sex. Otherwise, the DeForge run continues. 2020 transfigurations. 

THE SILENCE - DON DELILLO

I wanted to shift my focus slightly and give the depressing nonfiction a bit of a break to focus on some novels. Originally, I was going to take on one of the older, pre-White Noise, DeLillo, since of the 8 or 9 books of his I’ve read, they’re almost from his more popular later period. I backtracked on that plan when I looked him up in the library and noticed this small tome that, apparently, was published last year. It’s easily the shortest book of his career, it’s even shorter than Pafko at the Wall, which is just a section of UNDERWORLD. The 116 pages are padded out, the font is large and the margins seem smaller than is typical. I doubt that an author less famous that DeLillo would be able to publish this. Which is not to say it isn’t good, it’s just that the book reads like a segment or outline of a larger book. Perhaps an earlier scene from a large novel. The premise definitely seems to lend itself to a large novel. The plot revolves around a Superbowl 2022 party (where the Seahawks are playing) during which all electronics mysteriously stop working. It’s unclear why this has happened, people speculate everything from Chinese cyber-attack to sunspot, or even how widespread it is, but we only get to see this disaster through the eyes of the guests at this somewhat ritzy Superbowl party. In one sense it reminded me of BLINDNESS, which also features a disaster that happens for seemingly no reason then deals with the fallout. This book feels like it should have been that long or longer. It’s interesting to see old authors try to tackle the ways in which the internet has changed our lives. I’m also reminded here of BLEEDING EDGE. It’s all written in the classic DeLillo style, that I was going to call gnomic and aphoristic, in which every character seems to speak in a very particular, DeLillo-esque way, but, since he’s a genius, he describes it better than I could, “Half sentences, bare words, repetitions. Diana wanted to think of it as a kind of plainsong, monophonic, ritualistic, but then told herself that this is pretentious nonsense.” See, he’s even got a sense of humor about it. Overall, I’d say I was impressed by the way he conveys the confusion and swirl of modern life. He captures how alone it feels and how nothing in the world seems to make any sense. He’s currently 84 so I don’t think he has it in him to write another 400+ page novel which is what this book actually needs to be. I’d love him to flesh out a world where electronics simply stop and what that would mean for modern people. But, you get what you get. This book was a tease, but it’s a tease you can read in one sitting. I wouldn’t say it’s the first DeLillo I’d recommend but it’s impressively worthwhile for something he wrote in his 5th decade of literary fame. 2022 blank screens. 

GARNER’S QUOTATIONS - DWIGHT GARNER

I did not know the concept of a commonplace book, until this year. This is somewhat strange since it turns out I’ve been keeping one for over a decade now. You can fine a partially digitized version on this very site, here. I’m a real book guy, as you might have noticed from this website, but I’m also disorganized and move all the time. Therefore, despite how much I want one, it’s hard for me to amass a physical library. Normally, I either read a book from the library or I give away/sell my books after I finish them. That was actually the impetus for EVERY BOOK REVIEWED, a way to systematically give my books away (it is not working). I lived in Asheville for 3 years and ended up with a couple hundred books I couldn’t move so I gave them away all at once. Someday I’ll retire and own a house (lol, jk) and then I’ll be able to amass and keep books but until then I catch and release. As such, I can’t really fuck with marginalia, because I’m giving the book away. To solve this problem I copy quotes I like in notebooks I carry around and reread when I’m bored. I’ve got about 5 now and I treasure them. I was not aware this was/is a longstanding practice, undertaken by the likes of Jefferson, Virginia Wolfe and Marcus Aurelius. This book is a bit more eclectic than most. Garner does not offer an index nor clearly sort the quotes by author or chronology or subject. They do occasionally play off of one another and there tend to be a series of quotes on the same general theme in a row. He seems to value humor and pithiness. He’s apparently a book critic and has a personal commonplace book that is many thousands of quotes long, from which he pulled these. Beyond that, I’m not sure how to review this book. I enjoyed a lot of the quotes. I found this a great book to read before bed. It’s the rare book you can read in any order, just open up a page and read until you’re tired. I do wish that this format would become more popular, I'm into it. 99 Quotes

 Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book

- ”I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief” -Kerouac

- “He who cannot howl / will not find his pack” - C. Simic

- “Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon.” - E. Dickerson

- “It’s always the night or we wouldn’t need light.” -Thelonious Monk

- “Damn me, but all things are queer, come to them of ‘em” -Moby Dick 

- “Research is formalized curiosity.” - Zora Neale Hurston

- “The sex act cruelly mimics history’s decline and fall.” -Paglia

- “It is invariably oneself that one collects.” - Baudrillard

- “Nobody knows how to feel and they’re checking around for hints.” -DeLillo

- “No single thing abides; and all things are fucked up.” -PKD

- “Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool but care.” -Pynchon

- “Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.” -E. Waugh

- “Christ! What are patterns for?” - Amy Lowell

- “After 3 days without reading, talk becomes flavorless.” -Chinese proverb

- “The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theater, the dance hall, the public-house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc.; the more you save- the greater becomes your treasures which neither moths nor dust will devour- your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life- the greater is the store of your estranged being.” -Marx

HEAVEN NO HELL - MICHEAL DEFORGE

I am glad the Seattle Public Library system like DeForge as much as I do and keep his books in stock as soon as they’re published. I’ve been interested in DeForge and his comics for maybe 5 years now and I’ve read most of them. He hasn’t made a bad one yet and this one might be my favorite. It’s a series of short comics, a few pages a piece, that manage to do something quite unique: change style story-by-story but still keep an overall vibe. Some of the illustrations are remarkable ornate and flowy and detailed, other stories feature spare and muted illustrations. He even messes with the format, some of them are typical comics, with panels that you read sequentially, others are drawings with captions underneath(like The Family Circus), or consist only of large splash-pages that are crammed with text. Some of them are technicolor bright, others are dark and unsaturated. Through, there is not one panel or drawing that you wouldn’t immediately know is a DeForge drawing. His style is so unique and now so versatile that I don’t think he has comics peers in terms of illustration. On the story front, DeForge has made major progress. Before, I was not checking him for plot. His comics usually have a silly, quasi-spiritual, far-out plot (like a cult leader in the forest) which seem to basically act as means to the god-level illustrations he does. This book had some great plots. There’s a story about a team of kid detectives and a teacher trying to solve a murder which is campy and fun. A story about someone who’s parents are large insects. A story told through photos of the narrator’s mom. A story about a TV show version of THE PURGE which has humorous, quasi-anarchist results. I really enjoyed the whole thing, I’d recommend it as a first DeForge. The man is only getting better. 18 Purges. 

MAMA BLACK WIDOW - ICEBERG SLIM

Your boy’s slowly working through the Iceberg oeuvre, I believe I’ve now read 6/10, and it is quite amazing how overlooked it is. Beyond the Pimp stuff, which really only exists now as a precursor slash guide to the Blaxploitation aesthetic which itself goes on to be foundational to hip-hop, Iceberg is basically forgotten which is quite sad. Iceberg is, in many respects, a sort of demonic Jacob Lawrence. Someone who is telling the story of the Great Migration but highlighting the darker currents that this unleashed. Typically, characters move from a small town in the South to the big city, in this book it’s Chicago (which allowed me to play a fun game of “have I been to this location?”) where they are destroyed by the forces of racism and capitalism and descend into a street-nightmare. This book follows that trajectory, with the Tilson family moving from Southern-style Mississippi racism to Chicago where they are slowly destroyed by Northern racism. There’s a bit of a Moynihan report vibe to Iceberg’s critique, “How could he know that Mama would become like the man of the family and he would become like the woman.” but Slim is good about locating the racism in not just the Chicago rich and/or the Police, but also with the Trade Unionists, who are YT and refuse to help the family’s father. Otis (the main character) watches his brothers and sisters descend into drug dealing and prostitution and pimping and all the other street activities that Iceberg has such a laser focus on. The titular mother is quite a character, perhaps among the most evil of all the Iceberg villains and is a sort of template for Precious’ mother in PUSH. This also ties into the main fact that makes this book unique in the Iceberg universe, it’s gay main character. The back cover of the book describes Otis as a “Black drag queen” which isn’t quite right. Otis is certainly a man who has sex with men (almoste exclusively, though he does try to force himself into straight sex) but he typically does this while dressed as a woman in specialized (and bi-racial) clubs on the South and West sides. The book flirts with ideas about overbearing mothers causing queerness (along with that emasculated father) as well as with the idea that a childhood molestation is partly to blame. Likewise, the character himself often views his queer desire as a force outside of himself, which he names “Sally.” All that being said, I did find this small and limited window into gay Black life in the early 20th century worthwhile. The way the bars, the slang, the racial dynamics and social forces functioned during that time is something I do think that Iceberg, with his deep perception of the urban dispossessed, would know about. He doesn’t seem to hate queer people, the way I was expecting, he views them as an integral part of the street culture he knew so well. As for the interior life of queer people, I don’t imagine he was super-accurate, but who knows. At several points the main character brings up how much he likes MLK, I kept trying to figure out if this was a dig. Also, there is a long passage about the theological beliefs that Otis cobbles together based on his life-experience that reads like a folk-Gnosticism which I hope Slim fleshes out in an upcoming book. Either way, this book delivers, should be taught in college and is a major Iceberg Slim work. 1936 families moving North. 

• “The White folks used him to clean up their puking and droppings until he wears out. Then they simply press another hungry nigger into service. They never really see him or realize he is a human unless he steals from them or kills one of them.”

• “Sometimes fairly decent human beings join the force. They don’t stay long after they find out they’re part of a vicious system that has a license to maim and murder Black people in the street. But too many White cops in the ghetto are just thugs...Now you take nigger cops. They’re so mean and brutal because they’re ashamed of the uniform and they know how much they are despised by their own kind. 

• “I remember how I first started wondering if God was like the old man. Maybe he had just grown so old he didn’t realize he was doing horrible things to good people who loved him. Maybe God had had his awful lucid moment and was overcome with guilt at the infinite carnage and heartbreak he had wrought even among innocent children, like the old man who had destroyed himself. Dorcas, I decided that whatever the case, I’d better not get too involved with him.”

Street Names

Big Lovee

Fat Roscoe

Rabbit

Bunny

Soldier Boy

Rajah

Railhead Cox

Grampy Dick

Lockjaw Hudson 

Cuckoo Red

Little Hat

Sweet Pea

Five Lick Willy

Prophet Twelve Powers

Toronto Tony

Butter Beans

Crip (a literal rat)

Kankakee

Indian Joe

Cadillac Thompson

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.