THE FRANKLIN COVER-UP: CHILD ABUSE, SATANISM, AND MURDER IN NEBRASKA - JOHN DECAMP

On the Coll-McGowan scale of insanity or outlandishness w/r/t CIA books, this one certainly falls closer to the McGowan end, which might be obvious from the inclusion of the word “Satanism” in the title. The Franklin Scandal is a weird one. It involves 2 interlocking conspiracies and very dark suggestions. The first, which people went to jail over and seems indisputably true, involves a man named Larry King, a Black man who sang the national anthem at the ‘84 and ‘88 Republican conventions and who was rising star in the party, both locally and nationally, who ran the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union and who used that credit union to embezzle funds and live lavishly. That part isn’t too uncommon, people enrich themselves off of money meant for the community every day of the week. The second part, the part that is much more famous and lurid, involves suggestions that King’s real job was acting as a pimp for the Omaha elite, procuring young boys and girls in the foster-care system, including from the famous Boys Town. This part of the conspiracy was emphatically denied and “debunked” and resulted in a number of the child-accusers going to prison for perjury for years, which does seem strange. And that’s only the broad strokes, the accusations and explanations spin out far from there. As the title suggests, there’s a Satanic Panic element, where many of the child-victims report witnessing human sacrifices and other satanic doings. There’s speculation that the bank was being used to launder and move around CIA money that went to the Contras and other less-than-savory recipients. There’s talk of the whole operation being part of a blackmail scheme. All super far-out accusations, wild stuff. While these sorts of stories are interesting to me in and of themselves, the pedigree of this book is what initially drew me to it. John DeCamp is not just some kook, he was a State Senator for a long time in Nebraska. He is himself a Republican and attended events put on by Larry King (with no kid-fucking, he insists). Even more intriguing, he was a life-long friend of former CIA director Bill Colby and actually worked under Colby in Vietnam as part of the genocidal, secretive and profoundly evil Phoenix Program (which, not for nothing, did actually involve killing children). Colby apparently works with DeCamp to uncover some of this stuff before dying very mysteriously himself. Colby’s own son made a movie about how his father killed himself over grief stemming from CIA blackmail operations that involved child prostitution. And Franklin is hardly the only place one finds such accusations. Even as this story was breaking, the press also uncovered the case of Craig Spence, another connected (especially to Donald Gregg, H.W.’s, national security advisor. Spence was able to give child prostitutes midnight tours of the White House) Washington official who was also caught up in accusation of child prostitution, blackmail and intelligence involvement before killing himself as the investigation tightened around him. Obviously, these sorts of accusations can’t but bring Jeff Epstein to mind. I’m prepared to believe that intelligence agencies engage in this sort of behavior, I’d be shocked if they didn’t, however, the satanic stuff is another strange twist that I don’t really have a good explanation for. I don’t think that there’s widespread human sacrifice going on, this seems much harder to cover-up and I don’t see the upside (since I don’t believe in the sort of “Satan” this suggests) for the people who are high enough up to cover-up such activities. Perhaps they push this angel to “shit-coat” the whole operation and make it seem on-the-face ridiculous and laughable to any sane person who hears about it in passing who therefore don’t investigate further or look into it. Is that why the lurid and ludicrous Pizzagate stuff popped up around Epstien’s arrest and “suicide”? Who knows? Otherwise the book has some problems you’d expect from a book written by a republican lawmaker, namely it’s conflating homosexuality with pedophilia and over-indulgence in the Satanism angle. There’s interesting stuff about Omaha/Nebraska politics. Omaha is my birth town but I don’t know anything about it, I’d never heard of the Ak-Sar-Ben society before this. There’s a quick aside about Roy Cohen being involved in similar plots in the 50’s and 60’s which would boost his already stellar villain credentials. DeCamp also relays a story about Hunter S. Thompson using some of the trafficked kids to direct and participate in a snuff film which is not the first time I’ve read about the snuff film rumor w/r/t Hunter Thompson. Who knows? The back half of the book includes chapters on other topics, mostly around the Militia movement in the 90’s, including the Oklahoma City Bombing, which is also a bit all over the place and not very groundbreaking. Apparently the militia folks read the original version of this book and decided they trusted the guy who wrote it so DeCamp became a go-to lawyer in that world. Definitely some interesting stuff in here, like I said, I’d classify it as pretty far out and do think that most of it could be condensed into a longer article. 666 secret plane flights.

THE FREE-LANCE PALLBEARERS - ISHMAEL REED

Well, I guess that settles it, I’ll have to read all the Reed. And the motherfucker can write, there are dozens of novels, essays, plays, poems, collections he edited, saucy interviews, public speeches and anything else you can imagine. Even working my way through the novels is going to take some time, there are 13 listed on Wikipedia, with this title being the first, from 1967. Reed is really dialed in to what he’s trying to do in fiction right from the beginning. This novel, like all the other ones I’ve read so far, is less a traditional story than an all-out attack on any and everything. Reed takes absurd and funny situations, here it’s a society called and run by HARRY SAM (always capitalized) a Polish former used-car salesman who presides from a toilet thrown (what sort of toilet is the source of religious debate), pushes them to their extremes while constantly firing off far-out ideas, devastating critiques, historical insight, weird puzzles, oblique references and tons of jokes. He parodies various types of then-exigent political movements, from hippies to Black Power folks. he anticipates and critiques the woke-imperialism we seem to be stuck with now (at the beginning the main character Bukka Doopeyduk, is trying to be, “the first biological warfare expert of the colored race.” There is, of course, a revolution and lots and lots of references and allusions that I’m sure I missed. I was particularly fond of an ongoing obsession by a professor to push an enormous ball of dung around as part of his research for an academic paper entitled, “The Egyptian Dung Beetle in Kafka’s Metamorphosis,” and another subplot that revolves around a government programed called the “Mojo Power Retraining Act” which obviously plays right into one of Reed main obsessions, tracing, celebrating and highlighting African-American religious movements, counter-cultures, spiritual understandings and other occluded and persecuted elements in Black culture. With the same foresight he used to foresee and ridicule Woke-Imperialism, he also manages to make sure the critique is broader than just Black Vs. YT and includes a lot of references to the various Native genocides on this land. Reed also runs the Before Columbus Foundation, a group centered on indigenous issues so it’s interesting to see this concern present even in his first book. But despite all this, modern standards would highlight the lack of women and female perspective in this book. Otherwise, I see the Vonnegut connection and the Pynchon connection that he’s often saddled with. Vonnegut certainly in his fearlessness in taking a story in a bizarro direction while maintaining the political critique, tho I’ve never seen Reed get earnest and saccharine like Vonnegut tends to. In terms of Pynchon I think the influence runs the other direction. Only CRYING was published before this one and Pynchon references Reed in GRAVITY’S RAINBOW, writing “Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it than you'll ever find here.” which is a pretty straightforward endorsement. They both mine the same paranoid shadow-Amerikan-history veins and mix this in with a total flood of strange reference points (both of them sort of predict the internet and the feeling of reading something while Wikipedia’ing what’s on the page), tho Reeds’ critiques include deeper racial components which, to me, makes them especially valuable. They definitely have the same yen for silly names (something in the pot back then?) and in this book, to give you a short sample based on a 30 second skim through (next time I’ll write down all the silly names as I go): Bukka Doopeyduk, M/Neighbor, F/Neighbor, Eclair Porkchop, J. Lapp Swine, Cipher X, U2 Polyglot, Arboreal Hairyman. #PynchonNames could easily be #ReedNames. Despite the issues of who should get credit for what, it is interesting to think about them side by side. Obviously, their respective races weigh most heavily into their disparate treatment (Reed is respected but not included in conversations of “greatness” the way Pynchon is), I think there’s also the fact that Pynchon is a famous on-the-lamb (is he in Mexico? California? Manhattan?) “recluse” while Reed is every stitch a public intellectual who will sound-off in interviews, support younger writers, found Foundations, critique other creators (another chance for me to bring up Reed’s play “The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda”) which are both brave and do seem to make him real enemies. Finally, I wonder if the form is fucking up his reputation as well. Reeds novels, like I said before, are numerous, and they’re also pretty short. At 150-200 pages, I find them a nice little week of reading, a distilled shot of the Reed worldview, but they stand in contrast to Pynchon who takes decades to produce mammoth, all-encompassing works that, in many ways, are like 5 Reed books taped together. I wonder if creating shorter novels at a quicker rate was training critiques and academics to not look too deeply into any single volume since there’s always bound to be another. And maybe it makes his oeuvre intimidating to an outsider, where does one start? Interesting to consider but this book was awesome. He’s all the way there as a writer right from the beginning. If you like Reed, get you this. At some point I’ll have read all the Reed and will be able to place this one against all the others in a grand, unified theory of their relative values, but, until that day, I’ll have to let suffice that this one is excellent. 35 of those dancing Ghanaian pallbearers who were so popular on the internet a year or so ago who I couldn’t stop thinking about during this book.

ON BEING BLUE: A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY - WILLIAM GASS

William Gass is really a fool for this one. I’ve never read anything by this guy before. I believe I bought, but never read, a copy of THE TUNNEL, his most famous novel, back when I was on “long  postmodern novel” kick in late high school/early college. So I don’t know much about the guy outside of his reputation as a great novelist, but his novels are very long and I found out that both he and Wittgenstien wrote books about the nature of color and since my library didn’t have the Wittgenstien one, I went with ON BEING BLUE. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting, perhaps something more analytical and precise, but this thing was all over the place and pretty amazing. The book is ostensibly about the color blue, which I think he’s correct in identifying as a more malleable and flexible color. There are happy blues and sad blues, a range Gass says is only matched by green. He also spins out into the more connotative aspects of blue, like blue meaning raunchy or blue meaning sad. There’s a long section about blue (or obscene) writing and sex scenes in books. He’s got strong opinions about which naughty words are best. He’s got a poet's sense of sentence structure and rhyme. ”Cock is okay but only schoolboys have dicks. Thus civilization advances by humps and licks” or, “Poets who would nervously meter their stick or brag of their balls; who never vulgarly vaunt of their lady’s vaginal grip or be publically proud of her corpulent tits, succumb to the menace of measurement.” He also makes the claim that, “certainly nothing else will do for fellatio, which has never had its poet.” But that’s only because this book was published in ‘75 and fellatio’s (and cunnilingus’) poet, Lil’ Wayne, wasn’t born until ‘82. He’s got some interesting stuff about the relationship between words, concepts and reality, though his insights are more poetic than philosophical in the traditional sense, ”What was naïve in the magician was the belief that things have names at all, but equally naïve are the learned and reasonable who reject any connection beyond the simply functional between blue and blue...Words are properties of thoughts, and thoughts cannot be thought without them.” It’s really short, less than 100 pages, and seems like it was a labor of love. It jumps across topics and between ideas so quickly I have to assume it’s a collection of ideas he thinks about all the time. Nothing but respect for that, ideally other authors would write short, non-fiction books about their weird theories w/r/t color or whatever. 18 decillion colors

TRAUMA STEWARDSHIP: AN EVERYDAY GUIDE TO CARING FOR SELF WHILE CARING FOR OTHERS - LAURA VAN DERNOOT LIPSKY & CONNIE BURK

While this book has yet to reach the pretty insane level of popularity that THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE reached (and it still appears to be gaining mainstream popularity) this book is getting a lot of attention from the general public, wherein “trauma” has transformed into a prominent concept and way of understanding oneself and the world, as well as people who, like me, work in the bathyal zone and are around this stuff, for real, all the time. I’ve been doing trauma-adjacent stuff, as my job and in my personal life, since I was 18 and working on Chicago’s South and West sides, witnessing things like a 13 year-old learning their 3 year-old brother had just been killed (to name one example of dozens I’ll never forget). I’ve been injured on the job, in incredibly traumatic and stressful situations, and still have phantom pain (clearly psychological in nature) in the injured areas, I’ve been assaulted and threatened and witness to violence in my personal life as well. All that’s to say that this subject is important to me. For reasons that it would take an entire other essay to get into, I do think of myself as resilient and calm and “built for” this sort of work and I intend to do it until I pass, and this is something that is important to me and that I think about all the time. There’s a lot of terms for what this book is about, trauma exposure response/vicarious trauma/secondary trauma/compassion fatigue/burnout, etc. I tend to think of it, as I wrote above, as being in the bathyal zone, the area above the abyss. There isn’t much light and gazing below you into the abyss (which will play you by gazing back) is ill advised but sometimes unavoidable. For example, when clients here at the homeless shelter I work at mention something to me about their childhood that connects them to one of the foster kids I used to work with, and I see the uninterrupted conveyor belt of misery our society condemns certain people to, and feel like I’m talking to the same person at two points in their life, the abyss opens up (or grows within, whatever metaphor you prefer) and spending time in that space certainly comes with long term consequences. To pivot metaphors, maybe it’s more like working exposed to low-levels of radiation all the time. It’ll catch up. All of that’s to prelude to saying that I found this book pretty unhelpful. I’ve got a few issues with it. The first has to do with the ways in which this focuses on the individual and puts the impetus to not burn out on all of us individually. She says as much when she writes, “on one level, this is the only thing we can ever really control - ourselves.” Or when she addresses the very real issues of overwork in this field by writing, “Negotiate a sane schedule before accepting a job, and renegotiate your current agreement if need be. Surround yourself with coworkers who will support you as you stick to your agreed-upon hours and take time off. Be a positive force in your workplace.” This is pretty insanely disconnected from what this work is really like. Has she really worked in a short-staffed high-stress places? I’ve literally lost a job insisting I be allowed to take a vacation I had put in for months previous but they wanted to cancel due to staffing issues. At my current job I’m a Union Negotiator and it’s a constant fucking fight to do anything that improves worker quality of life. So I’m not sure she understands that the problems in the field are not the result of workers not being good negotiators of their schedules. Likewise, she doesn’t address the ways in which the trauma-burden is uneven in these institutions. Specifically, almost everywhere I’ve worked (Americorps, Peace Corps, nonprofits in both the USA and abroad, etc.) has been set up so some small number of people do that client-facing and thus soaking up the vast majority of the second-hand trauma, are subject to intense burnout, and are paid the least by a lot. They couple this with another class of people who “manage” and “oversee” the programs and don’t deal with clients or the public and certainly don’t do the really hard stressful stuff. They typically have high-level degrees and a clear discomfort dealing with the traumatic messy stuff (since they get no practice, or worse, they are constantly telling you about some practicum they did for 6 weeks 15 years ago in grad school, the last time they were hands on). She also doesn’t address the ways in which we, as trauma stewards (her term, I’m not into it) are part of systems that do traumatize and hurt people. This is most egregious when she talks about cops (there is a whole insane section about a cop recalling her attempts to get the other cops to mediate then tries to invite Thich Nhat Hahn to speak with them) who yes, deal with secondary trauma, but dish much more of it out than they take in. Perhaps their vicarious trauma is rooted in being a bad person who’s causing harm? Obviously, this is an easy call with cops (they’re clearly doing more harm than good and I care very little/not at all if some of them feel bad about it) but I’ve worked with the CPS system and the American public school system(s) and other large bureaucracies that crush up lives and hurt people. Where’s the line with that stuff? When is trauma fatigue rooted in the deep knowledge that you’re abetting something monstrous in your day job? If these things are going to exist anyway, is it your obligation to join and try to improve or are you just lending legitimacy to something you know is wrong? I think about his stuff constantly, and I know the people I know in this business do too, but Libsky isn’t interested in these questions. She wants you to mediate and get back to work. Which is basically where this book ends up. The formatting here doesn’t help. Lipsky interspaces the text with New Yorker cartoons that are vaguely on topic but the effect ends up being that the text appears like a H.R. person’s cubicle, covered in cleaver work cartoons. And like an H.R. person, the suggestions here are anodyne and commonplace. Do stuff you like, stay connected to the reasons you do this work, do yoga, etc. I guess I was hoping for something about how to structure this work better. How to build systems and ways to arrange the world that don’t rely on the people actually doing the work constantly engaging in endless self-care so they don’t fall into endless depression. Disappointing. 3 vicarious traumas

LEXICON URTHUS - MICHAEL ANDRE-DRIUSSI

Gene Wolfe really has me out here reading dictionaries back to front. I’m one step short of learning Orcish or Klingon. But despite that chilling realization I don’t think I’ll dip back into the Wolfe-well for a minute. There’s 3 more in the Solar Cycle left for me and I’ll probably try to get them before the end of the year but, right now, a break is in order. Obviously, I loved this thing. I got it to clear up some questions I had about the timeline and whatnot but the words he picks out and defines from Wolfe’s insane vocabulary were so good I was running to write shit down left and right then decided to just read the whole thing over 2 days. I came back with a list of dozens, including “echopraxia” “algedonic” “xanthic” “phrontistery” and “thaumaturge” to name just a few. Entities/motifs like “Jahi” “Amphisbaena” or “Oizys” have also sent me down a few really cool rabbit-holes. Not to sound like too much of a lazy millennial but how the fuck did Wolfe find these words and how did Andre-Druissi follow up so thoroughly without the internet? How the fuck does he know so much about ice-age animals and the Seven Olympian Spirits, to name just two disparate he hopscotches around? A truly mind-boggling achievement; well done, boys. There’s nice longer sections on the history of Urth or the connections to things like the Tarot or Kabbalah that were all quite interesting and could/should/might already be long articles or dissertations. And this is only the 5 (he gets into the does-Urth-count? thing and wisely includes it) New Sun books, less than half of the Solar Cycle total. Will some brave hero update this to include the other books, or expand this one? As deep as Andre-Druissi goes there’s still a bunch of words and ideas left out. I suppose things like reddit now exist to collect the works of obsessives and a sci-fantasy story, especially one as abyss-deep as Urth, is very, very fertile soil for exhaustive research I hope I live long enough for more book-quality scholarship (I love a good reddit rant/deep twitter thread too, I promise) on Wolfe. He should at least be in the position of a LeGuin or PKD in terms of genre authors taken seriously by the serious, and be the topic of a comparable amount of paid-professional scholarship. Get on this academia. I’ll end this by trying to show how smart I am by mildly disagreeing with Andre-Driussi on something. There’s a section of the book where we learn about a historical figure (though in “our” future) named Kim Lee Soong who’s presented as an “early” space-traveler. Anyway, A-D suggests that this name is Chinese, based on a similarity to “Soong Meiling” who was Chiang Kai-shek’s wife. I don’t think this checks out, due largely to the fact that Japanese, Korean, Chinese and other East Asian cultures typically present their names with the family name (what we’d call the “last” name) first. So “Kim Lee Soong” has “Kim” as the last name. Google doesn’t think Soong is a common Korean name, though “Song” and “Seong” both are. Plus, the name “Kim” means “gold” in Korean, which has a solar theme that fits in thematically. Plus, I like the idea of Korean space travel. The efficiency of the K-Pop operations I’m familiar with seem to suggest that they could manage interstellar exploration. But this is all a silly nit-pick. A-D wrote an amazing guide to those books and just a cool collection of obscure words. 1000 Chiliads

BEHOLD A PALE HORSE - WILLIAM COOPER

You gotta read the classics. As you might have been able to tell, based on the entries on this website, I’m certainly in the middle of a years-long CIA/para-politics kick but due to my personal beliefs and disposition, I’m coming at it from a far-left worldview. Cooper, however, is certainly the most influential conspiracy theorist in the last 50 years and someone I feel it’s important to know something about. It really is hard to overstate his influence. He’s the blueprint for Alex Jones (or rather, despite being Bill Hicks in disguise, Alex Jones is the con-man version of Bill Cooper. Hard to imagine Jones shooting it out with the cops. Cooper’s really about it and Jones is a salesman), he’s an important theorist in the Militia movement, Tim McVeigh was a big fan, his chapter on the US government's role in creating HIV (a story I go more into in more detail on a different part of this website: https://walkerzone.org/words/2021/1/4/zones-of-total-permission)was distributed and discussed by the South African Minister of Health in 2000, he’s referenced in countless hip-hop songs, Prodigy of Mobb Deep credits him with introducing the idea of the “Illuminati” to hip-hop, his mythology is the basis for the deep lore on the X Files, his ideas are all over the Qanon phenomena, the list goes on and on. He was an early 9/11 truther and popularized the idea of school shootings being false flags. This book is famously popular in prisons and is one of the most shoplifted books of all time. He died as you’d expect, in a shoot-out with police, on his rural Arizona property in 2001. So it’s got quite a pedigree and it’s so influential I figured I should read it to see what’s up. This book is all over the place. Even the formatting is strange, every page has ****TOP SECRET**** written across the bottom and most of the book is “documents” he “discovered” reprinted with his commentary. Originally, this included Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which he claims is actually “of Sion” and is about the NWO but not from a Jewish angle, from an elite one. For a right-wing fanatic, he does go out of his way to stifle anti-semetism. He later claims he saw his first alien craft alongside a Black serviceman named “Lincoln Loving” and “an American Indian Seaman we called Geronimo.” The reprints themselves are often photocopies of photocopies and hard to read on the page. He’s all over the place theoretically as well. The main thrust of his obsession revolves around two plots. First, he’s worried about an upcoming New World Order which will place all of Earth under a totalitarian system. Secondly, he’s convinced that the elite of the world are in league with aliens. He covers a lot of ground in the book, from how global warming is fake (we’re actually at risk of another ice age) to how HIV is a bioweapon to the problems with the Anti-Drug Act of 1988 to the JFK assassination, all of which he’s able to, in a roundabout way, connect to his two main concerns. I really enjoyed the multiple times he encourages “TRUE PATRIOTS” (his capitalization) to never be at home or with family on holidays since he thinks that the NWO is going to round everyone up on Thanksgiving or Christmas since they’ll know where everyone is. I also like the phrase, “we have been lied to about the true nature of the moon.” While he’s clearly a maniac I do wonder if he himself was being purposefully manipulated (as I believe Jones to be) by the people he thinks he’s investigating to both flood these spaces with bullshit ideas and also to shit-coat certain concepts. For instance, this book is from the early ‘91 but he names Jolly West (who he calls J. West) and John Lilly as MKULTRA guys. West wasn’t confirmed as MK until that CHAOS book that came out last year. Likewise, he talks about Group 40, the cuban assassination squad, but recasts them as alien people and reframes the JFK assassination as alien-related. He criticizes anti-drug laws but fails to see the ways in which these laws are racial targeted or the ways in which the totalitarian NWO he’s afraid of is already here and has been here for Black Americans. He’s got a whole section about weirdo Green Beret/Spook/literal Satanist Micheal Aquino, though he doesn’t touch on any of the Persido thing, which is the most conspiratorial and lurid thing Aquino is associated with. When he says things like documents are anonymously mailed to him, or better, that he found one of these documents left in a Kinkos, it makes one wonder how much of this is by chance. He mentions this fear a few times but dismisses it because, he reasons, if the alien thing is fake what could it possibly be covering up for. This is when you wish that Cooper would actually study the CIA and see that they’re up to much worse shit than hiding aliens. There is a long history of the military and CIA using alien abduction stories or UFO sightings as a cover for other covert shit they’re up to. It would seem that Cooper fell for this sort of thing. Otherwise, I can see why the book is popular and why people like Ol’ Dirty Bastard like it. It’s really straightforward and to the point. It connects all these dots, all these things that seem fucked up and wrong about this world, things like HIV and the drug war and the cold war aren’t just shitty things that are going on, they’re caused by specific people for specific reasons. Likewise, not unlike Q, this is a sort of overarching meta-theory that lets you plug in all these disparate elements into one grand narrative. If I may be allowed a bit of conspiratorial thinking myself, I wonder if this book was part of a larger effort to shift “conspiracy theories” from a left-wing thing (the CIA killed JFK, the US government is caladestinly destroying left-wing governments abroad, the US secretly destroying left wing groups here at home, the CIA is importing crack to destroy black neighborhoods, etc.) to a right-wing thing (the government is hiding aliens, the government is going to change over to a godless NWO) and thus make it easier to dismiss and manage. Just a thought. Either way, I was entertained by this book. I’m not a huge UFO guy but I am a big CIA guy so it was interesting to see this stuff from the right-wing. They truly are pathological. 4 Horses

THE URTH OF THE NEW SUN - GENE WOLFE

Man, fuck JRR Tolkien, fuck George RR Martin, fuck LITTLE, BIG even, if the Solar Cycle can be considered one book or one series and if you consider them Fantasy not Sci-Fi then it’s easily the greatest Fantasy series ever written. If it’s Sci-Fi then it’s the grandest achievement in Sci-Fi, or at least tied with PKD. I’m not even done with the damn thing yet, though the end is in sight. The whole Solar Cycle consists of The Book of the New Sun series of 4 books, which I’ve read, another series called The Book of The Long Sun, also 4 books and also read by me, then an addendum or coda to the BotNS quartet, i.e. THE URTH OF THE NEW SUN, which I’m currently reviewing, and finally another series of three novels collectively called The Book of the Short Sun which I’ll read soon to polish off the whole thing. Let’s not even consider the handful of short stories that are set in the Solar Cycle world. And even that accounting that doesn’t even take into account the real length of this achievement since to read Wolfe is to reread Wolfe. I don't think I’ve ever read an author more confident that he knows what he’s doing and has no problem asking his reader to do a lot of work or to spend pages and pages without knowing what is going on. I’m guessing I caught about half of what was going on. I actually read this one with an accompanying podcast, Alzabo Soup (s/o to them), which gives each chapter a ~1hr episode and goes through it. It was an interesting way to read a book, especially a book as involved and complicated as this one, and especially since it’s been a few years since I finished the core 4 books in the Book of the New Sun tetralogy, to which this acts as an addendum. Apparently, it’s widely (or as widely as opinions about a book a few entries into a 12 book series) considered to be weak or a letdown compared to the others. People complain that it gives too much away, which I find truly insane. Maybe I will feel different when I go back to read the cycle and pick up the subtle ways that the revelations in this book were artfully implied. Not to go too deep on the plot but our hero, Severian, picks up where he left of, headed to Yesod, a separate universe, to stand trial and see if he can bring a new sun back to Urth, which is dying. This being Wolfe, he undercuts this almost immediately and tells us without any tension being built that Severian passed the trial and it’s all good. There’s almost ¾ of the book left at this point and I started to wonder what the rest of this thing would be. No need to worry, Severian hops around time and universes weaving in and out of the events of the previous books and adding to our (or at least my) sense of the overall arch of plot and theme w/r/t the BotNS series. I did not feel like this gave anything away to me, but that might just be because I’m dumb and missed some of the revels in the previous books. I dig the super far-out space stuff, especially since, as you might be able to tell from the name “Yesod,” it’s all Kabbalah flavored. I love the tone of deep, deep strangeness that Wolfe is able to conjure, he really has no equivalent in terms of style. It’s also amazing to me that this book was written before the internet which makes his vocab and deep references even more impressive. I was able to quickly google a strange word and learn that it’s an obscure, less-common variant name for an already obscure Babylonian fish/wisdom god or the scientific name for some ice age beast. How the fuck did he write this thing? The only thing I noticed the smarter people haven’t commented on already has to do with how Severian calls himself White aka YT and muses on how his skin isn’t actually white (the color) but that’s what people call it and they value it which means that YTness has survived a couple thousand years into the future in Severians world. I had assumed everyone was quite pale by 2021 standards given the dying sun but I’ll have to think more about it. These books give me this strange feeling that is unique in my experience reading, the feeling that I really want to reread these things. The feeling that I already know that the rereads will be so much richer, and that this first go-through is basically pro forma. And I’m not even done with the whole cycle, there are still 3 books for me to finish before I begin to reread these things. The task of a lifetime. Either way, Wolfe remains undefeated, I can’t believe one human wrote these things. 1 divine year.

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