FEATHER WOMAN OF THE JUNGLE - AMOS TUTUOLA

Making my way through all the Tutuola has been a multi year project at this point. I think I’m up to 4/11 so I’ve got a ways to go. He’s sadly not as popular, at least here in the US as I feel like he should be. Part of the problem, besides the obvious chauvinism of Amerikans especially w/r/t Afrika, might have to do with him writing in a genre and mood that is outside of what people expect from a “novel.” In the ~400 years that the Western novel has existed we’ve come to expect certain elements that Tutuola simply isn’t interested in. Novels typically are long narratives following individuals or groups, Tutuola’s form is closer to Sinbad stories or closer to replicating the experience of tellin’ tales with your buddies (one of my favorite things to do). The frame in this story is an older man, who is now chief, relaying the experience he had as a younger man who went on adventures outside of his village when he was younger to seek his fortune. He tells his stories over a series of nights, after and before people drink palm-wine and dance. Again, very Sinbad and very close to real life. The tales are similar in theme but each rich enough in colorful detail that you’d listen to this sort of thing forever. Basically, he leaves to make money, finds another village or setting that is strange and threatening, is captured or held in some way, before he uses his wit and cunning to escape back to his village, where he enjoys life until he runs out of money and needs to go on another quest. There’s a great line about how this is humanities nature, to quest out and get into new stuff, “”I wonder, why every human being never satisfy with whatever his Creator had provided for him!” But I replied, “This was how our Creator had created all human beings.[sic. throughout]” The stories themselves are lots of fun. The Feather Woman turns our narrator into an image of himself (which seems like a sly take on the idea of novelizing an experience) and rides a mean ostrich, there’s a diamond goddess who rules a diamond city but, confusingly, despite being a god also worships different gods. There’s stories about the path the first YT men used to come down from heaven, underground hairy giants, the bush of quietness, and all sorts  of weird shit. I’m forever glad that Tutuola didn’t try to fit his clearly immense understanding of West African myths into a more conventional format. It renders his books unique and sui generis, tho I’m disappointed he’s not more well known in the larger English speaking world. I’ll continue to work my way through his stuff but so far, so good. 10 unmapped bushes. 

CRISIS ZONE - SIMON HANSELMANN

AVAILABLE

Like many of you, I mostly read this thing as a webcomic last year. I actually stopped partway through so I could enjoy the full thing as a book. Hanselmann’s comics are really well suited for Instagram. His panels are already very consistent and square and he’s really good at telling short, funny/depressing stories that accrue weight over time as you know more about the main characters. It’s also nice to see he’s blowing up. I went to the book signing for this, at Fantographics no less, and the line was around the block. Hanselmann is Tasmanian but lives here in beautiful Seattle, so I’ve seen him at zine events and whatnot before, but never with the sort of line he had for this. But on to the book itself; I can only hope that this goes down as the definitive “lockdown artwork” when we look back at 2020 from a future vantage point. I’m guessing this book will deepen and get more interesting as we move on from 2020 and forget how strange the beginning of the lockdown was. This will be especially true for those of us in Seattle since Hanselmann includes a lot of Seattle specific stuff, most famously the CHAZ and related BLM protests. It’s also nice that Hanselmann doesn’t betray the characters by making them major protest figures or involving them deeply in local politics or making them “woke”. These people (Megg, Mogg, WWJ, Owl, Jennifer, Booger, etc.) clearly are too self-involved and insular to care about politics so it’s nice to see that Hanselmann stayed true to that. There’s more minor PNW references too, like a riff on the what-does-all-this-tear gas-do-to-menstrual-cycles question that we’ve been dealing with up here. However, the tone departs from MM&O comics in other ways. This book is really heavy on Werewolf Jones. He’s always drifted between main character and periphery, I think it’s fair to call him the fan-favorite, and he’s always been more cartoony and “fun” compared to the others. Even his dark stuff, like how shitty of a dad he is, is typically played primarily for laughs. This book lampoons the TIGER KING phenomena (which is going to look so strange in 5 years) by giving WWJ a TV show called ANUS KING which is exactly what you think it is. His fame allows the story to get super crazy and much further out than we’ve seen before. WWJ forms his own autonomous zone, he goes to prison, Owl breaks bad and forces Jones into sexwork, several characters transition, characters have sex with Carrot Top, someone is abducted by aliens, people are shot, people die, it’s much more plot focused rather than focused in people’s interiority (especially depression) like in pervious volumes. I assume we’ll get back to the more regular stuff with “MEGG’S COVEN” which Hanselmann has said is next (I actually think it was supposed to already be published but he switched to work on this when the pandemic hit). I really liked this and thought it was funny. I’m into the gross-out and druggy humor and I’m into the stoner-loser milieu Hanselmann conjures. I miss the deeper stuff w/r/t depression and codependency and family dysfunction and failure but I’m sure it will be back with a more carefully plotted sequel. But as something that was written daily, during a historic crisis, and put out for free online, it is without peer. I’ll show this to my teen kid when, in the future, they ask what it was like during the first lockdown (I’m guessing we’ll be on number 60 or so by then) was like. 2020 cat/Carrot Head/witch 3-somes.

ORISHAS, GODDESSES, AND VOODOO QUEENS - LILITH DORSEY

First of all, I’m writing this on the 7th of September, a day that is holy to Yemaya, the Yoruba deity associated with the sea, and as someone who lives near the sea (or the sound, it’s not totally clear to me who controls the sound) I’d be remiss to ignore her. Anyway, I picked this book up because I’m always interested in African spirituality stuff and when I browsed through the table of contents in the library, I saw that there was both a Pomba Gira as well as a Santa Muerte chapter. Obviously, I’m quasi-obsessed with the Bony Lady so I was intrigued. Typically, her syncretism is seen as one that combines Indigenous American and folk European religious beliefs, though ever since I saw how popular “Las 7 Potencias Africanas” candles featuring S.M. are across Mexico. Dorsey claims that the ritual of blowing smoke (pot or cig) into the statue's face, which is a signature S.M. move, comes from African traditions. However, she also misidentifies La Catrina, who is also a Mexican folk figure and is often depicted as S.M.-adjacent, as Lolita. So maybe she’s not an expert on Mesoamerican deities. Atlantic, by which I mean West African coast, primarily Yoruba, as well as the Caribbean, primarily NOLA/Haiti/Jamaica, on the other hand, she’s all over. I enjoyed her intro,  Dorsey writes about wanting first to write about Goddesses generally at first before focusing on the regions, and I especially enjoyed her insight about centering the major religious question around the mysteries of birth rather than death. She also points out the book-about-mysticism paradox by repeating a Yoruba proverb about how you can’t get Awe from a book. The chapters themselves were interesting but a bit too practical for my taste. Each one takes a different subject, first going into their history and major myths and current resonances, which I liked, followed by a longer section about setting up specific shrines, tinctures, recipes, music, acceptable offerings, etc.. Interesting but less my interest. Dorsey does a good job weaving different traditions together and coming up with a really idiosyncratic list. Most of the main ones are major Yoruba or Haitian Voodoo entities but then she branches out. Not only does it have the aforementioned Santa Muerte and Pomba Gira but also real people Marie Laveau, Nzinga and Nanny of the Maroons, as well as quasi-real figures like Annie Christmas (who is sort of a NOLA-based Black female Paul Bunyan and/or John Henry). I liked this collapsing of real into religious that seems useful, New-World-y and in some ways connected to the ancestor worship that also animates these traditions. She’s also friends with the late Dr. John so I’ve got nothing but respect for her. 401 deities. 

SUBMISSION - MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ

This is one of the funniest, most ridiculous books I’ve ever read. Some background: I’ve never read any Houellebecq, I’m not really up on modern French shit, or European fiction generally (it’s a dead continent) but I’m certainly aware of his towering reputation. He’s, apparently, a serious intellectual who has his thumb on the heartbeat of a confused and nihilistic France. This book is supposed to be satire, or possibly a 1984 style warning, but I’m not sure he’s fully sure who the target of that satire is. Actually, 1984 is the wrong pull, this book is a rewritten HANDMAIDEN’S TALE, but with Islam and written from the male prespective. The plot is simple, it follows a University literature professor, who specializes in J.K. Huysmans, during 2022 when a member of the Muslim Brotherhood wins election, becomes president and begins Islamizing France. Given Houellebecq’s personal disdain for Islam, which he’s called the stupidest of all religions, one assumes that he’s trying to show us how much danger Europe is in, and how spineless intellectuals are (he goes out of his way in an afterwards to insists he’s never attended nor taught at a university). What actually ends up happening is an absurd phantasmagoria of French misogyny and islamophobia. As if to play into the stereotype that all French people are Pepe le Pew, the main focus is on sex. The narrator is a sad middle age man (tellingly, the same age as Houllebecq and Huysman when he found god) who picks a different student each year to fuck. He also fucks prostitutes and fantasizes about fucking constantly. These men are cucked by the powerful Arab Muslims who not only fuck more, they’re in a more confident, rich, rooted in tradition and get more pussy. When the narrator is considering what to do with this new world, and whether he wants to convert, he’s swayed when he goes to a rich Muslim’s house who has a 40 year old wife to cook for him and a 15 year old wife he was assigned. Likewise, he sees his dweeb coworkers get assigned a nubile young co-ed to be his wife and decides that maybe this Islam thing isn’t too bad after all. To keep the French parody theme going, the narrator also attempts to become a Catholic monk but quits because he loves smoking too much. I suppose this is supposed to be a critique of how Western Sexual mores, and general values, are unsatisfying and alienating and how reactionaries could easily marshal this feeling to gain support, but the novel itself undercuts this theory by completely removing women from the text. There’s basically one non-prostitute female character in the book, a Jewish woman who moves to Israel after the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power, but even she frames her decision as stemming from her concerns around how Jews will be treated, not how women will be. In this version, the women of France are simply fired and removed from the workforce as asked to convert and assigned older, richer husbands and put up no resistance. They fall in line and it’s up to the French men to think about what this all means and which system is better. Would you rather live in a neoliberal sexual marketplace where everyone is pursuing an empty pleasure or would you prefer to return to a strict, Abrahamic patriarchy? The president himself seems to want to recreate the Roman Empire, but Muslim this time (he should look into what groups like ISIS think of Rome, what space Rome occupies in the Islamic psyche) and we’re left feeling like the West is hollow, vain and doomed to fail from this Oriental menace. It’s actually a bit more pointed than that, basically, while France offers sexual license to men it doesn’t really offer a sense of purpose, which Islam does through it’s ancient, strict patriarchy. And since this is , at heart, really what Frenchmen want, the nation is doomed. The book read to me like the crazed, paranoid ramblings of a Western Intellectual who’s life is vapid and stupid and who, frankly, I was rooting for to get conquered. Maybe I would get more out of this if I knew more about French politics (the beginning of the novel has a lot to do with which parties align with one another and create the conditions for Muslim control) or Huysman (who also comes up a lot, with references to his life sprinkled throughout) but this book came off as silly in the extreme. I like the idea that our fuck-game, in the West, is so sad and devoid of value (because we are not sufficiently subjecting women) that he more virile and strong Muslim invader will conquer us. Inshallah this comes to pass soon. 2022 Islamic caliphates. 

LEAVE SOCIETY - TAO LIN

The Tao Lin literary project is becoming increasingly clear. I heard about him in perhaps the most appropriate way possible given his lit-hipster reputation. When I was 19 and starting college I attended my first “college party” for English majors (I was not an English major, but I heard they had good parties) and an older, good-looking English major told me she was into Tao Lin and that I should read him. Well, far be it for me to ignore the advice of the beautiful, so I copped Eeeee Eee Eeee and a book of his poems. I dug them, even back then his ultra-deadpan style and internet-influences were compelling and easy to read. I’ve kept up with his output since then. I’ve somewhat accidentally read all of his novels and his book about psychedelics. Partly, this is because his books read super fast (I read this one in 2 days) and his interests and mine overlap. At this point it’s clear to me that he’s doing a Karl Ove Knausgård (who I’ve never read, I only know him by reputation) thing, but in real time. All of his novels feature pseudonyms and some fictional elements but are quite obviously memoirs. In this book he goes as far as to tell us what conversations were recorded and transcribed and it features scenes where Tao’s parents ask him about what parts of their conversations will be in the upcoming book. Additionally, Tao has always been good about recreating the technological infrastructure of modern life by copy/pasting emails and gchats and other ways we communicate outside of speech. In fact, he mentions several times in the book that he prefers to communicate by email, especially with his parents. Part of what’s interesting about this book is the relationship between Tao and his parents due to a language barrier. Tao grew up with them in the US but they’ve returned to Taiwan and mostly speak Chinese to one another. So the parents’ English isn’t great and Tao’s Mandarin is likewise less than fluent so they communicate largely in a patois and through email. Tao has always been a slow and bizarre speaker, both in the public appearances I’ve seen as well as through his doppelgangers in his novels, so this stylistic flourish fits his reality. He often comes off as someone who’s spaced out off drugs, which makes sense since he takes acid and ingests weed constantly. Irregardless, this book basically chronicles Tao’s attempts to leave society, by which he means undertaking all of these alt-health practices. He becomes obsessed with toxins in both the environment and food, he becomes suspicious of Western medicine, he begins to get into alternative theories in everything from diet to human history to the big bang. He bounces back between NYC and his parent’s house in Taiwan, where he tries to get them to adopt his new lifestyle. Eventually, he divorces the wife we met in TAIPEI and marries a new woman and moves to Hawaii. He has a surprising number of physical ailments, from shitty teeth to a weak back, at the beginning that cures through “natural” or non-Western practices. He does his best to connect with a deeper truth w/r/t existence. This is an interesting pivot given how his previous novels chronicle his success in the publishing world and his nihilistic drug use and sex-pestery; apparently he did enough acid to make himself realize there’s more to life than being a rich, druggy NYC literature guy and does seem to pursue it honestly. There’s an interesting class element here that I didn’t quite pick up on in his previous books. While I agree with Tao, largely, that society is mostly capitalistic bullshit and lies, his choice to “leave” society instead of trying to change the conditions of society strike me as a rich-kid cop-out. Tao’s dad invented Lasik and went to prison for white-collar crime (weird similarity between him and Jia Tolentino, another POC internet writer who’s parents have a less-than-savory past). Tao asks them for money in the book and it’s clear that they all live quite comfortably and well, which explains Tao’s disconnect from the actual world and his retreat from any qualitative change. For example, he’ll talk at length about MKULTRA and the CIA’s involvement with LSD, but when his dad talks about how much he loves the KMT Tao doesn’t mention (or doesn’t know) that the CIA funded them and directed their murderous, oppressive acts in Taiwan. This is because Tao’s solution to society’s ills is the most neoliberal one possible; to change your spending habits (i.e. buying different roots, veggies and health-cures) and to disengage as much as possible. There’s no political understanding or focus on something larger than himself. It’s why, at the end, he can justify moving to Hawaii to open an Airbnb. When he makes that choice he thinks about the toxins he’s exposed to in major cities but doesn’t consider displacement and gentrification and colonialism and how his choice would enforce these systems. Only the first world wealthy can leave society, it seems. Which is not to say I didn’t like the book, it’s very interesting to read these novels, spaced every few years, basically giving us a uniquely written update on a strange man and his bizarre life. I just think he hasn’t left society to the degree he thinks he has. 1983 societies

HOLY THE FIRM - ANNIE DILLARD

AVAILABLE

I’ve had this book for a while but decided to finally read it on a weekend trip to one of the Puget Sound’s many magical islands. Dillard herself wrote this book while living somewhere in Island County, though she doesn’t, at least in this book, make it totally clear exactly where she is. Irregardless, the book is only ~70 pages long so it seemed appropriate to read the book ensconced within the environment it was written in. Additionally, like the other Dillard books I’ve read, this one is very much about place and nature, the environment and natural rhythms. I’m not deeply read in Dillard but this short, almost polemic book, struck me as a distillation of her worldview. A bracing shot of Dillard. As she says herself, “Nothing is going to happen in this book. There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time.” Before, and here I’m mostly thinking of PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK, Dillard starts with the natural, infuses wonder and a mystic mystery before launching into deep theology and profundity. This book is that, but quicker. The speed at which she tackles the largest issues imaginable would be corny or pretentious in basically anyone else’s hands. Even the opening of the book, “Every day is a god,” I don’t think many people could pull off. She, again, doesn’t flinch from the hard stuff about nature, the cruelty and destruction, and weaves in a story about a local girl who’s very badly burned in a plane wreck and struggles to fit that terrible fact into her understanding of the world. I wonder how long it took to write this. I wonder if this really is the pruned down version of something longer and tedious. Either way, I found it really invigorating and engaging, she manages to be both straightforward and no nonsense while also being poetic and crafty. I wonder if there is a series of these short, almost zine-like, blasts from Dillard. I’ll have to keep my eyes open at used book stores, I would love to have a half dozen or so laying around to read while trapped in a car or on a short trip. 176 profound mysteries.

ARCHITECTS OF SELF-DESTRUCTION: THE ORAL HISTORY OF LEFTÖVER CRACK - BRAD LOGAN & JOHN GENTILE

AVAILABLE

Here’s my LÖC story and some background: I’m not a huge fan of punk or ska (especially the non-Jamaican waves) but I do like the look and the ethos and the sorts of people that populate the scene. In High School, punk-wise, I was basically just into Dead Kennedys and LÖC. Both had catchy music and political lyrics that managed to be interesting and funny. I learned about the MOVE bombing from LÖC. Anyway, when I was 18 and living in Chicago I wanted to go see them on their tour. Turns out their anti-cop stance had actually cost them something and they couldn’t play a show within Chicago proper. The police would shut down any club that would book them. So they booked a gig in some shitty south Chicago suburb that took me forever to get to on public transportation. When I got there the show was still being harassed. The fire department was there to shut them down, despite the crowd being normal-sized for a show. The bands on the bill, I can only remember Citizen Fish, eventually decided to play the whole show, then switch out the audience and play the whole show again. Then there was debate about whether or not the second show would be all-ages because of how late it would be starting (some dumb rule in this dumb suburb) which made it unclear if LÖC would play the second show since their politics precluded age-restricted shows. Either way, I got to see them and they were, as advertised, dirty dudes who looked like they lived in abandoned buildings. It didn’t seem like an act. The show was wild and a ton of fun and it took me over 2 hours to get back on various Chicago buses and trains on the Southside in the middle of the night. I say all that to say that I love LÖC and was very excited to hear that someone had written a book about them. The book is what it promises to be, a long oral history of LÖC and the scene around them. It goes from the Choking Victim days up through right now and hits all the major milestones. We hear about LÖC’s label issues, the response they got releasing an album called “Fuck World Trade” on Sept. 11. As an aside, a member of LÖC was working in the towers, on a floor that got obliterated by the planes, up to the Friday before the attack, when he quit to tour behind the FWT album. It’s an oral history so it reads super, super fast and sticks to the most exciting anecdotes. There’s lots of great stories about getting in fights on the road, starting riots at shows, crazy drug stuff, life in a squat and all that. There’s an interesting story about Stza writing “Gay Rude Boys Unite” after confronting the manager of Buju Banton about Banton’s homophobia. I wish more time had been spent on the larger squatting scene in NYC at the time. I realized I’m asking for a different book but I would have liked to know more about the history of LES squatting and C-Squat in particular. It’s a strange moment in American history, Seattle has a worse homeless problem now than NYC did then and yet there are basically no squats here, the police are very aggressive against anything resembling such a situation. I’ve seen them deploy the SWAT team on groups who’d occupied a building less than a day. I’m just intrigued by that world. Likewise with the train-hopping, which we only hear about in this book, the authors don’t go deep into it. If you have any interest in LÖC I’d recommend this book, it’s an overgrown magazine article but if you care about the subject it’s a nice little stroll down memory lane. 666 crack rocks. 

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.