THE PHANTOM BLOOPER - GUSTAV HASFORD

I’m a well-known Kubrick-head, fanatic might even be the right word, though I’ve not read many of the books that his movies are based on. I’ve read Lolita, Clockwork Orange and 2001 but none of the others. Full Metal Jacket, perhaps the best war movie, is, famously, based on a novel called THE SHORT-TIMERS by actual Marine Gustav Hasford who, I just recently learned, intended the book to be the first in a trilogy about Joker, the main character in the Kubrick film. I still haven’t actually read THE SHORT-TIMERS, but I was fascinated about a sequel and decided to get my hands on that. The movie and book seem to be pretty close together, plot-wise, so I don’t feel like I missed out on vital context and could read this book without too much trouble. THE PHANTOM BLOOPER picks up where Full Metal Jacket/THE SHORT-TIMERS left off. Jokers has survived the battle of Huế but not without witnessing the deaths of dozens of fellow Marines, including his buddy Cowboy, who he mercy-killed. At the beginning of the book Jokers is at a forward operating base that is under constant nocturnal assault by a quasi-mythical YT Vietcong who the Marines call the Phantom Blooper. At this point, the book is similar in tone and message to the Kubrick film. It’s sardonic and violent and cruel and whip-lash. However, the book really kicks into gear in the second part where Joker is captured by the North Vietnamese during an assault and is held in a village instead of being killed outright or sent to the Hanoi Hilton. He’s there over a year and is both plotting his escape and slowly being integrated into Vietnamese society. He learns about rural Vietnamese life, marches on the Ho Chi Mihn trail, farms rice, learns Vietnamese and eventually undoes the brainwashing R. Lee Ermy put him through in Full Metal Jacket. He starts to see them as people with dignity rather than the faceless enemy he was trained to see. He eventually joins them in fighting the Americans but, again, is captured, this time by the Americans and folded back into American culture. The final third of the book follows Joker as he travels around the USA after his discharge. He joins a Veterans Against the War march and gets beat up by the LAPD. He goes and visits Cowboy’s family before eventually returning to his family in rural Alabama. Here the story goes a bit off the rails, philosophically, and Joker tries to draw a parallel between The Confederacy and the Vietcong, seeing southerners as themselves victims of imperialist exploitation, just like the people of Vietnam. Obviously, this is insane. There is and was, in fact, a group of violently exploited folks across the South, but they weren’t Confederates and this lack of insight is troubling and widespread. Here is someone who needs to read SETTLERS. Likewise when he veers into mystification w/r/t the Vietnamese and Southern relationship to the land. Not to say that this isn’t true or important but it isn’t what is most striking about the Vietcong. The Southern Vietnamese were also agricultural and enmeshed in a centuries old culture, the difference between the two is rooted in their views on Communism and Capitalism, issues that Hasford mostly ignores. You see this same sort of thing, all the way down to the Confederate apologia, from Wendell Berry. So close, yet missing the mark. At the end of the book, Joker starts off to return to Vietnam, to live and fight with his buddies. This book is out-of-print and never discussed and it’s easy to see why. I only found out about it because I was looking into the state of mutiny in the army at the end of Vietnam, a purposefully repressed facet of that war that I’m still digesting. It’s a fast and punchy war novel with a really radical premise. There’s lots of little bits about Phoenix and CIA sex-trafficking if you’re, like me, on that tip. It's sad that Hasford died before he got to complete the trilogy and that no one has filmed this book. Perhaps as the Boomers die off we can see more honest and interesting portrayal of Vietnam in our popular culture, though I won’t hold my breath. 1973 days on the Ho Chi Mihn trail.

THE GARDENS OF MARS - JOHN GIMLETTE

My Peace Corps buddy recommended this one to me a while ago, when he was in town and we were bullshitting about old times. I can be pretty pedantic when reading, generally, but it certainly amps up to a new level when the subject is something I think I know something about, in this case Madagascar, so I’m perhaps not the ideal reader. Gimlette, who I wasn’t aware of but who appears to be a pretty serious and competent travel writer, spent about a year moving around Mada and wrote this for a general audience unfamiliar with the nation. He does a pretty impressive job. I’ve read a lot of the available literature (in English, most of the stuff about Madagascar is in French, which I, to my shame, don’t read) and this is perhaps the best overview of the history of the island. Typically, writing on Madagascar will center on the highlands and focus primarily on the (admittedly insane) story about the various Merina kings and queens of the 18th and 19th centuries. Gimlette makes it a point to travel to most of the country. He misses some rather hard to get to and/or dangerous places like SAVA and the Toliara but I haven’t been to those places either (read Vollmann’s RISING UP AND RAISING DOWN for an insane story about Toliara) and he does travel, largely, on the packed and difficult taxi-brusses, for which he has my respect. He does a pretty good job of explaining the relations between Madagascar and the outside world and the process that eventually led to their colonization. Likewise, the book was published in 2021 and, thankfully, it is pretty up-to-the-moment about current political developments on the island. Occasionally, he veers into noble savage territory when describing the poverty and degradation; at one point he calls a group of indigent folks in Tana “cheery paupers.” Since his sources are mostly French accounts (more on that in a sec), he, in my view, goes too easy on them and paints them largely as befuddled by the Malagasy, rather than laying bare the brutality of the relationship between empire and colony. He, suspiciously, doesn't have this problem when describing the brutality of the Merina kingdom. He makes the bizarre claim that foreigners find Malagasy “impossible to learn” tho I can tell you, as a stupid person who managed, it’s not that hard, the French are just lazy. You can see a how this effects his thinking of this when he tries to wrestle (and, again, I would say, comes down too softly) with the demonic level of child-exploitation at the French resorts he visits and how quickly he comes to the defense of foreigners who got lynched for that sort of stuff. That execution happened while I was living there and I wrote my own little take on it here, if you’d like my take. On another note, could have used more Betsileo stuff, they’re the forgotten MVPs of Madagascar. Likewise, it would have been nice to fold in more of the recent archeology and scholarship (another shameless plug for David Graeber’s Madagascar work) w/r/t the history of the island, instead of just relying on mostly French accounts. But the story of Madagascar is fascinating. It’s full of shipwrecks and strange customs and a truly unique history. No book could cover it all, Gimette doesn't go to a Famadihana for instance, but he does an admirable job trying to cover this whole island. I’m sending it to my other Peace Corps friends to build up some nostalgia in order to propel us to a return trip. It’s been almost 10 years since I first stepped foot there and I miss it. Time to return. 1896 Red Islands

HOW TO MAKE LOVE TO A MARTIAN - KARRINE STEFFANS

Recently I had to go out and get my hands on a Kindle, due to an upcoming move that will make getting physical books difficult, and I’ve been using the internet to fill it with titles. As of right now, it’s mostly titles off of my list of books that aren't in the library, rendering most of the current next-ups relatively obscure. But beyond filling out my Kindle before I move (and on that note, please send me suggestions of any sort of book, tho I’m especially light on poetry and/or fiction) I did want to give it a spin in terms of reading a book off of it. I’m a pretty big bibliophile, if you’ve ever been to my house or lived with me, I’m constantly surrounded by and switching out books. I like their physicality and smell, and really like staring at them when I’m drunk. I don’t think I’ll ever love the Kindle but I’ll chose it over not reading. This was a good book to test out the system on, I’ve definitely read one of Steffans’ books before, I believe it was CONFESSIONS OF A VIDEO VIXEN tho, possibly, it was VIXEN DIARIES, the sequel. Both books, and this one, were both ahead of their time and, simultaneously, part of a tradition that stretches back to, at least, Pamela Des Barres, wherein groupies or admirers or young (often illegally so) female fans get a chance to write a juicy memoir of the scene they were part of. Nowadays, Steffans would have a scandalous and popular social media presence and probably be rich off of OnlyFans. Steffans is stuck writing books about her time in the hip-hop world from the late 90’s on. Unlike the previous volumes, which are more like a collection of anecdotes, each with a different popular rapper as the main character, this book focuses on her relationship with Lil’ Wayne. I’m something of a Wayne completist so I was naturally drawn to the subject, and w/r/t Wayne, the book does not disappoint. He definitely comes off, as he always does, as insane and somewhat inhuman (he does have a mixtape series literally called I Am Not A Human Being). Steffans finds it endearing and masculine and calls him a Martian, but I don’t think that really captures his frequent cruelty. But the book is Steffans’ new story wherein a woman falls so completely in love with an insane millionaire it upends her life, not a series of one-off with a current who’s-who (tho, Lil’ Bow Wow is in the book alot and has a strange relationship with her and Wayne). If you’ve seen other Wanye media (let me suggest the wonderful The Carter documentary which is the hip-hop version of Don’t Look Back) you get a glimpse here of the vampiric Wayne lifestyle where he shows up in the early morning, around 6-7, fuck you, goes to sleep, wakes up around 1, goes to the studio and repeats. He’ll also seem to often get his convoy together in the middle of the night to go skating for hours, either alone or while Staffan watches. The rest of the day, the girl who’s been flown out, stays in the apartment or hotel room alone. Sometimes, apparently to play mind games but possibly also from xanax-fueled memory loss, Steffans is flown out and stays in a plush hotel room for days while Wayne is living on his bus in the parking lot, seeing other girls, and never going up the the suit nor call her down to the bus. Steffans is smitten and immediately rearranges her life completely around Wayne, to the point of telling multiple husbands that she will leave at any point for a few days if Wayne summons her. She makes good on this a number of times and it, as expected, strains those relationships, with guys who come off as real shitty, abusive partners. Steffans goes out of her way to make sure we don’t have any pity for these guys though she does also reveal how often she leaves her son in the lurch (ex. having to scramble and lie to get others to take him to guitar practice) to give Wayne what he’s asking for. Wayne seems like he always does, in a Tasmanian devil like whirlwind of sex and drugs and money and rap, in jail one minute, having multiple kids by different women every few months, not responding to Steffans for months and years at a time then asking her to drop everything and fly out on a moments notice. It’s an incredibly strange and unhealthy seeming relationship with a man who does seem to have spent so long living a very strange, opulent and inhuman lifestyle that he really is some sort of Martian. Whatever the version of dramatic irony is where the reader seems to know something that the author doesn’t is heavily at play here. Steffans seems to think Wayne is the love of her life and worth everything while he consistently seems to forget about her, ignore her or see her as one small piece of the way he’s trying to live. She gets an abortion, worrying that, based on what she’s seen with other baby moms, a kid would kill the vibe between them and never tells him for the same reason; Wayne is very surprised when she’s upset that he suggested he’s never hurt her. Seems like a very unrewarding way to live but it’s not my life and it is an interesting read if you’re into the extended Ca$h Money Universe. 2008 Lollipops

THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING - DAVID GRAEBER & DAVID WENGROW

This one is pretty bitter-sweet. Your boy really tearing up writing a review of the last “true” David Graeber book. The man did seem infatigable, logorrheic and graphomaniacal so, fingers crossed, we might get some more speeches or essays or other ephemera leaking out of the next few years. I’m nearly a completest with the Graeber stuff, as an anarchist anthropologist who specializes in the highlands of Madagascar as well as someone who is actually, in-person involved in protests/political change, he’s pretty narrow casted to my interests and I’m sure I’ll eventually work my way through the last couple of his books I haven’t read (it actually might just be one book, I’ll have to check), but I never got to meet him (tho, he was, apparently, considering visiting the CHOP before it fell) and it will always remain quite sad that will never get his take on the current situation again. All that being said, this book is quite a capstone. Like many of his books, it’s a sprawling monster. I came away with 3 pages of notes and half a dozen more books to read. It’s 500+ pages, with long footnotes, a very extensive bibliography and an area of focus that literally spans the entire existence of humanity. Actually, slightly longer than the history of humanity proper, there’s lots of discussion about pre- and co- existent sapiens, on every (non-Antarctica) continent, in pretty impressive detail. The thrust of the book is a rejoinder to a popular notion, followed up by a theory of the authors’ own. The rejoinder is to the idea, or myth rather, that people existed in egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands for 10,000’s of years before eventually figuring out agriculture which leads to cities and hierarchy and all the rest. It’s the Pinker Argument (and the Hobbes/Rousseau/Diamond/Peterson/etc. argument) and it posits that domination and hierarchy and all that are a package deal with agriculture and social complexity. But these folks aren’t archaeologists or anthropologists, and aren’t keeping up with what people are actually learning about our ancestors, instead, they’re providing a “useful” myth that explains our situation. But Wengrow and Graeber are actually experts in this stuff and they’ve got the receipts. The book is basically 500+ pages of counterexamples to this narrative. There’s a ton of stuff about how the “agricultural revolution” is actually a 3k year process that involves all sorts of social arrangements, there’s lots of info about the Inca as well as the Cahokia, I enjoyed all the theories and explanations about ice-age burials (tho, as someone who is part of a religious group, the Moravians, who themselves have weird burial practices, practices that aren’t representative of the society as a whole, I’d caution reading a ton into that in particular. Like all speculation involving the deep past, at a certain point, a pretty close point, you’re guessing), there’s Minoan stuff and discussions of gendered labor and caring, the mysterious “Bird-Man” in North American Native artwork (personal interest of mine, I have a hunch Baby is a version of this archetype) drug regimes across history, the nature of kings, different ways to organize a horizontal society, all sorts of wonderful nuggets. I was particularly taken by the stuff about the North Amerindian critique of European culture and their effect on the enlightenment. Typically one is taught that the Europeans showed up and immediately killed everyone and took the land, and while that is, eventually, what happened, there was much more back and forth, especially in the first hundred or so years, with Europeans (mostly Jesuits) trying to understand, in order to convert, Natives while the Natives themselves were doing the same. There’s a great anecdote about Iroquois representatives travelling to Europe, and witnessing a tortuous execution and being horrified. Not from the torture, that was also part of Hudson valley life at the time, but the idea that they’d inflict it upon a member of their community, not an outsider (i.e. a war-captive). Prepare yourself to learn much more about Kondiaronk. Overall, I found this book, like most of the Graeber I’ve read, surprisingly hopeful. You might be able to tell by the list of books on this site that I’m not someone given to optimism, typically, I’m pretty allergic to it. Greaber and Wengrow manage to sound a hopeful note, that there really are other ways to live and be in the world, ways that have been tried and worked out, sometimes for thousands of years. It’s a nice rejoinder to the teleology and/or Whig history that infects both ML dialectics as well as the more mainstream, silly Pinker/Peterson/Diamond/Harari variety. I poured some Malagasy rum on the CHOP ground for him when he died and I miss him every time I think big-picture about the world. Infinite Possibilities

THE VICEROY OF OUIDAH - BRUCE CHATWIN

This book checked off three boxes for me. First, it’s short and I’m trying to speed run through a few things before I move. Which brings me to two, the setting of this book, Ouida, but more generally West Africa, where I’ll be living soon and thus would like to have a sense of. And finally, three, this is another Chatwin book, whose oeuvre I’m slowly working through. I have a buddy with a Master’s Degree in Chatwin and I’ve enjoyed every one so far. He's got a good fiction/non-fiction mix going on in his work that resonates with me, this book being no exception. This novel follows a fictional version of Francisco Félix de Sousa, who Chatwin names Francisco Manuel da Silva, who really was a prominent Brazilian slave trader who did decades of work with the Dahomey. The Dahomey are fascinating for a dozen different reasons. We know a lot about them due to their geographic location and reach, they engaged in these enormous yearly festivals, called xwetanu in Fon, which involved human sacrifice, they had an all-female unit of their army and a (to Western eyes) despotic king. They feature pretty heavily in the Western imaginary, as the quintessential slaving African kingdom. The last slave ship to reach the USA was from Dahomey. Sadly, this book focuses more on Fran Manuel’s descent than it does on the Dahomey themselves, and in this sense the book is very close to HEART OF DARKNESS. A YT man comes to Africa to make money in a brutal business, in this case slaving, and is slowly driven insane and ruined. Da Silva hopes to use his money to set his family up in Brazil but, of course, he never returns to his home country. Slowly times change and “The West” decides it’s moved past slavery and the whole thing is a bit of an embarrassment so people ice out Da Silva. They got very, very rich of of slavery then decided to cut ties and claim a moral high-ground. Likewise, the Dahomey, who’s power had been based on their ability to sell slaves to the Europeans were also pushed to the side and thrown away, no longer being useful. By the time Da Silva’s family gathers in Ouidah for the 100th (I think) anniversary of his death, there are 100’s of descendants and they are not only not rich nor Brazilian, they’re not YT. The writing is very sharp and simple and there are basically no likeable characters. Sadly, since we only glimpse the Dahomey perspective through the lens of the various non-African characters, we don’t get a good sense of how they fit into Africa as a whole, which can make it seem, to people who maybe don’t know about the history of West Africa (read FISTFUL OF SHELLS, if you’re interested in that) that the Dahomey are a representative group and this oversight shades into whatever the African version of Orientalism is. On a biographical note, Chatwin was one of the first major artistic figures (especially amongst the British) to die of HIV. He buckled to the stigma and didn’t announce his status, though he did apparently tell people he got it from a rape he suffered in Ouidah while researching the book (he was put in jail on suspicion of spying). Now this is certainly possible, though he was also lovers with Mapplethorpe’s lover Sam Wagstaff so it’s much more likely that he acquired the virus through more “typical” means though the quickness with which he invokes the violence and death of West Africa seems like a mindset you find in this book. Just a thought. Either way, the book is quite short and very tautly written. Like I said, it’s only bad guys doing bad stuff and you should know something about WA going in but overall, I enjoyed it. 1904 cowry shells

CORPSE WHALE - DG NANOUK OKPIK

As previously stated, I’m not the biggest poetry guy, though it is Native History month, and I saw this title at the library and decided I should educate myself. I hate the cold and know very little about the Inuit and other far-north Amerindians so this seemed like a good place to get a taste of what they’ve got going on up there. Additionally, the cover and back about-the-author section suggested that the author stylizes their name in all lower-case letters, like bell hooks, which is a little flourish I’ve always liked. Anyway, the poems themselves are fascinating and strange. Okpik does their best to code-switch or meld Iñupiaq cultural references and signifiers and concerns with “Western” (a particularly stupid appellation in this case) poetics. Partly, this involves sprinkling in Inuit words, for which there is a glossary in the back. I like that they have a word for “a place to hunt owls” but, obviously, I speak not even one word of this language so I have no idea how idiosyncratic these definitions are. Likewise, okpik does their best to collapse the subject/object or human/nature dichotomy that is endemic to non-Indigenous modes of thinking. Okpik accomplishes this by hybridizing the subjects of sentences and stylizing them like, “She/I” as in “...She/I lie/s awake.” which is something I’ve never seen before and is strange enough to get the reader thinking in a different, more Iñupiaq way. There’s other interesting takes on the form, opik is free-versing it out, my favorite lil’ trick was a poem called Stereoscope where the text was placed in downward cascades on both sides of the page (get it?). There’s another that basically a wall of text, some of it crossed out. Outside of form these poems were strange. There’s a palpable sense of how much context I’m missing, for instance there are several images of “seal’s eyes”, which I’m sure has some cultural relevance and cultural connotations hundreds of years in the making, but which mean nothing to me. I’m not sure I was grabbed strongly by any of the poems; I don’t think I’ll carry them around with me the way one does the best poetry. I was partial to the lines, “dancing in the/ midnight sun not for law, or man, but for whale and blood.” and, ‘“A driftwood mask let her be inside out.” but the thing I’ll mostly take away is some of the Inuit words and at the sense of difference this thing was able to conjure. 7 Ravens

WHITE MALICE: THE CIA AND THE COVERT RECOLONIZATION OF AFRICA - SUSAN WILLIAMS

Another enormous CIA book; the quest to fully CIA-pill myself continues. This is one of the “serious” ones, existing opposite of things like THE FRANKLIN COVERUP, being written by a “legitimate” professor and coming complete with literally hundreds of pages of notes, an extensive bibliography and supporting facts. You couldn’t accuse this book of being paranoid conspiracy stuff. But even at 600+ pages the title is a bit misleading since the book is more narrow-focused than the subtitle would suggest. It would take an encyclopedia-length series of books to even quickly recount all the evil shit the CIA has been up to in Africa since their formation. This book focuses on Africa from the end of WWII until Nkrumah’s overthrow in ‘66 with most of the action revolving around Lumumba and the Congo. The Lumumba situation is interesting since people feel like they understand what happened, that maybe the US did something wrong, but Williams does a great job really showing the extent of the US’s involvement. In fact, tons of the relevant information is quite new, since it was culled from JFK files that were released in 2017-2018, the last time we were allowed to learn anything at all about a still existing government agency that, apparently, is allowed to do literally whatever they want anywhere in the world and we, again literally, are never allowed, even after all the people involved are dead, to know what actually happened. Not for nothing but Biden just used the pandemic as an excuse to not declassify more JFK files that were scheduled to be released this year. I’m sure there is nothing embarrassing w/r/t the CIA in these files, they simply didn’t have the time to release them. It’s amazing to think about how correct and ahead of the curve Nkrumah was. I recently read his magnum opus, Neo-Colonialism, and this book is basically the compendium with the receipts. He was right about everything, the Imperialists really were colluding with large corporations, mostly in mining/extraction, and especially surrounding the uranium deposits in the Congo, to divide, undermine and overthrow any self-directed progress the people of Africa were trying to make. However involved you think the CIA was in Africa at this time, it was worse. There’s a zillion small details to pick up in this book, which connect to the other CIA stuff I’ve read. There’s stories about MKULTRA poisoner Gottlieb flying to Congo with some sort of virus to kill Lumumba, there’s stories about CIA officers putting Lumumba’s corpse in their car to drive around. There’s fascinating connections to SAIMR, the South African group that definitely committed war crimes/atrocities across Africa and who stand accused of even darker stuff. They, SAIMR, also seem to be involved in the assassination of Hammarskjöld, along with the CIA. Williams wrote another book on that subject that got the UN to reinvestigate the “plane crash” which is ongoing. The CIA did trick the UN, along with numerous nations like Ghana, into using a device called the CX-52 to send coded messages, which they, of course, built a backdoor into in order to read whatever these nations or bodies wrote. There’s an amazing through line about the CIA’s use of Black Americans to infiltrate and catch the Africans off guard. They used Louis Armstrong concerts to gain access to areas they would have had difficulties getting to without, they put in a Black Ambassador right before they coup’d Nkrumah to muddy the neocolonial optics, they funded organizations like the American Center for African Culture and the African-American Institute, one of the groups they worked with the recruit and sheep-dip agents, The African Airlift Project, brought Obama’s dad to the USA, people like Richard Wright were both spied on and funded secretly by the CIA. It’s a fascinating thread that is still present today. Look at how Obama was able to leverage his Blackness to convince African nations to let the US build an archipelago of bases (and black sites) across the continent and establish AFRICOM. Or the way MI6 and the CIA are training death-squads in Kenya. Or what the US did to Libya. If you have any interests in Africa or world history post-1945 you must read this book, it is essential and provides vital context to basically every news story that come out of Africa in the last 60 years. Even at 600+ pages it barely touches topics like the US’s involvement with maintaining apartheid in South Africa (the CIA got Mandela arrested), or the mercenaries we sponsored all across the continent, or what we did in East Africa (especially, and on-goingly, in Somalia), or the extent of our involvement in Angola, or the ways that aid is used as an extension of our wicked foreign policy. Focusing in on Lumumba and Nkrumah was a wise choice, it’s a fascinating story that comes to a dramatic conclusion and shows how the continent was poisoned and neo-colonized immediately after independence. The Federal system for all of Africa that Nkrumah was suggesting remains a beautiful dream. I can’t recommend this book enough. ‘66 covert actions.

BLUETS - MAGGIE NELSON

More poetry. This was my “on the train on the way to work” book for the last week, as the Li Po was before that. I’m chewing up these shorter little numbers while I’m plowing through some much larger and more depressing non-fiction (review incoming, still got 200+ pages). This book was ideal for these reading conditions. It is the correct size and format for a book one reads in transit, i.e. it is softcover and small enough to fit in my back pocket. Likewise the format of the text is well suited to this approach. I guess one would call this a poem or prose poem with each “stanza” being as sort as a sentence or a long as a paragraph, perhaps a page long at most. The best have a gnomic quality such as “115. In which case seeking itself is a spiritual error.” Each of these “stanzas” are numbered and referred to as “propositions” in a manner that recalls Wittgenstein, who also wrote a book about color and who is referenced directly in the text several times. Nelson is also aware that Gass wrote a book about the color blue, which I read and reviewed about a month ago (this is the season of blue for me, apparently) and references it as well. There’s lots of Goethe, Joni Mitchell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the woman who wrote “The Pillow Book.” She makes reference to the fact that she toyed with several orders for the “propositions” before settling on the one she published in this book. I believe she’s called it a “nomadic mosaic” which feels correct. The book follows a few threads, there’s a story about a recently paraplegic friend who is adjusting to a new life, there’s reflections on a past lover, there’s Nelson’s lifelong affinity for the color blue and then more free-associative sections where she meditates on some of the connotations of blue (these are the most Gass-esque sections) such as it’s association with obscenity (blue movies, working blue) and it’s association with sorrow or depression. I find it interesting that both her and Gass would not touch the connection between blue and law enforcement, ex “the boys in blue.” I appreciate the directness of Nelson’s poetics, her language is much closer to the “creative nonfiction” end of the literature spectrum, she folds in interesting facts (did not know about Isabelle Eberhardt, look her up) and remains, mostly, straightforward and direct. She also has a poet’s bravery to really chase things and ideas out to the limits, past the “logical” which leads to some shinning insights and breakthroughs. On a quibbling level, she makes some statements about the Tuareg people of North Africa, famous, in part, for wearing lots of indigo, so much so it often dyes their skin, giving them a reputation as a “blue people,” that I don’t believe are true (and that 30 seconds of googling seemed to dispel). But I wasn’t reading this for the anthropology, and on the level of poetic excellence this delivered. Why is blue the color all these books are written about? Is there an equivalent book about green? I assume there must be a few about red (the most primary color, a conversation for another day) but I’ve never heard of them. Going to have to read more Nelson. 240 shades of blue.

BRIGHT MOON, WHITE CLOUDS - LI PO trans. J.P. SEATON

Always good to read more poetry, especially Chinese poetry, given daddy Xi’s imminent ascendancy. You’ll want to familiarize yourself with our new overlords’ taste in poetry. Jokes aside, I’ve had Li Po on my radar since reading that Du Fu collection a year or so ago since the two were friends in real life and since they’re both considered the pinnacle of classical Chinese poetry. I dig the general vibe of both of their oeuvres. They both write these shorter poems about travelling around China, trying to get jobs as Tang-era bureaucrats, ideally the job is court poet, that will allow them time to hang out and drink and write poetry and be in nature. There’s lots of talk of old friends and missing people and seeing folks off on their journey or being drunk and looking at the moon. All of this is quite relatable to me, it’s amazing that these poems are from 700 CE, aka hundreds of years before even something like THE INFERNO and manage to feel pretty modern to me. I too love to get drunk and look at the moon and miss my friends. This book also has lots of references to “apes,” my favorite being the line, “”Mountain Lords” we called the apes when we got them drunk.” which might be a weird translation thing (does China have “apes” or “monkeys”?) but I really enjoyed it. Drinking in the mountains alongside the apes sounds like a great time. The poems are all very short and packed with Taoist vibes, the whole book reads very quickly. The essays at the beginning and end are also quite informative. The beginning one is more of a straightforward overview of Li Po’s life, the milieu he lived in, his influences and the effect he’s had on Chinese poetry over the past 1300 years. The ending essay is even more interesting, it focuses on the translation itself by taking a few poems and showing how he translates the poems literally, as in word-for-word, before taking us through his thought process w/r/t rendering them in literate, poetic English. We’re able to see the insane nuances that cannot be rendered in English. For instance, the way the ideograms of the various words contain elements of one another and thus contain a level of resonance and artistic subtlety that has no English equivalent. He gives us multiple translations of a number of verses that do vary wildly and show just some of the artistry involved in the original. If only I knew more Chinese to really understand what Seaton is getting at. Either way, Li Po, especially when paired with Du Fu, is amazingly relevant for being almost as old as Islam. Li Po’s persona during his life (he was famously over 6 feet tall, so I naturally have an affinity for a fellow tall-king) was “banished Immortal” which truly is something to still strive for. 1 perfect Tao. 

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.