SHETANI’S SISTER - ICEBERG SLIM

I think I’ve got just 2 or 3 more Iceberg Slim novels to go and then I’ll have read them all. This is one of the later novels, one of the last two completed and published before his death and published by a non-Halloway House publisher. As a pure novel, this is one of the best one’s I’ve read. Slim typically follows a single character, almost always a pimp or con-man or other denizen of the underworld, and tells their full story over the course of a book. This book actually has 2 main characters, and a number of fleshed-out side characters, and alternates their stories until they meet up. One of them is an alcoholic vice cop, Rucker, who’s obsessed with keeping the streets of Hollywood free of hookers and the other is Master Shetani (who the book more than once points out is “Satan” in Swahili) a brutal pimp who’s trying to move his operation from NYC to Hollywood. Shetani is one of the best and darkest of all the Iceberg pimp-characters. He’s half-YT, a trop of Slim’s for whatever reason, with hellish green eyes which he has a mural of above his bed. He employees two murderous brothers as enforcers and keeps his stable of girls addicted to heroin to keep them in line. He even has a coat of arms painted in his room of a hypodermic needle and a coat-hanger crossed over one another. Shetani is also an addict, and the book subtlety highlights how this puts him in the same position as his girls vis-a-vis his supplier, the Mafia. What’s most interesting about this character is his slow (or slow at first) unraveling and descent into madness. Most of the other Iceberg books take on a the pimp/hustler character’s rise, this one focuses on the fall. Shetani is obsessed with his younger sisters, who died in a hospital when they were both wards of the state after Shetani kills his abusive YT mother. Shetani actually spent years in a psych ward for attacking nurses and doctors at the hospital that failed to save his sister. This would be typical Iceberg back story, tons of his pimp characters hate and/or kill their mothers, except Slim takes it a degree further by having Shetani become obsessed with the idea of reincarnation and then obsessed with the idea that a new working girl he cops is his sister reincarnated. The tragedy lies in the fact that he can’t show any weakness and help this girl, who he thinks is his sister, get out of the life without everyone in his world assuming that he’s squared-up and is no longer the most heartless pimp in the game. Needless to say, shit gets insane. The cop story line is not as compelling but still interesting. The hero cop is a bit flat, besides being a recovering alcoholic Rucker is flawless, but his partner gets addicted to cocaine and seduced by a ho of Shetani’s. This story features lots of great LA stuff, since LA was the city Slim spent the last part of his life. The climax is a bit abrupt, I actually wonder if a chapter was cut off of my version. All that being said, like most Slim books, this would make a great movie. It’s almost Wire-esq in it’s balancing of cop and crook story-lines. And, of course, no one writes evil pimps better than Slim. I actually think this would be a good place to start with Iceberg if you’re thinking about getting into his work, especially the novels that aren’t PIMP. 1992 satanic pimps.

As always with Slim, this book has an amazing collection of street names:

-Master Shetani

-Pee Wee Smith

-Kansas City Nettie

-Petra

-Froggy

-Judas Jimmy

-Eli and Cazo (brothers)

-Railhead

-Cool Walker

-Big Cat

-Tree

-Lovely Leon

-Rainbow

-Sugar Red

-Sir Lady Java

-Tank

-One Pocket

-Red Dog

-Big Cotton

NONBINARY - GENESIS P-ORRIDGE

Now here is someone who needed to write an autobiography. I’ve known about and been interested in Genesis since I found out about Throbbing Gristle in high school. TG is one of those things that I respect more than I enjoy. Their music is fine, not my favorite but interesting to be sure. In Seattle, I got more acquainted with Noise music, which flows directly from TG and other early industrial stuff so I am perhaps more likely to enjoy them at this point, but I always like the idea of Genesis more than any one piece of art they’ve made. Gen has always pitched themselves (they use plural pronouns, including “we” as their first person pronoun, throughout the book) as a sort of true bohemian. An actual Art Monster who lived a strange and extreme life. This book proves that mostly to be true. At one point Gen even writes that the point of the book is to prove that a) such a life can be lead and b) it could be done again. Gen goes from a relatively poor but normal Boomer British childhood to getting into college and basically pivoting to full-time freak. It’s always amazed me how easy and reasonable it seems to be to squat in England (the police are quick to put guns in faces in the USA) and Gen does it for years while taking part in all of these interesting and important art projects. There’s great stuff about early TG and industrial music, COUM Transmission art happenings, early rave culture and tales about how much ecstasy Gen used to do, Gen’s involvement in body modification culture, the list goes on. Gen also has the quality where so many of the people they interact with go on to do things like found the clothing brand BOY or be Billy Idol, or be early punk pioneers. Sadly, Gen apparently died while writing this thing so while it does cover their whole life, it could easily be double the length and still engaging. Sadly, the only part that’s deeply fleshed out is the beginning of their life, which is always the least interesting part of an autobiography. Sure, it does confirm my theory that everyone who attends British boarding school is horrifically abused and involved in homoerotic escapades (how else could you produce the British empire, I suppose) but I’m much less interested in that stuff than, say, something like being involved with the guy who wrote “Modern Primitive” and pioneered extreme piercings and body modification stuff (think Mandan-inspired the hook suspension thing). We only get fleeting references (Tibetan bells?!) to Gen’s genital piercings and that’s a shame. They deserve a chapter at least. Likewise, the final major project that Gen undertook, called Pandrogyne, where Gen and their partner Lady Jayne underwent tons of plastic surgery (funded by a lawsuit against Rick Rubin, every part of this book is insane) in order to both look like a “half-way in-between” version of one another, could use much more explanation. Very far out stuff. Really ahead of the curve with the current gender rethinking going on. So yeah, very good and a quick read, my only complaint was that I wanted more. Hopefully someone writes a bio of them, they’re one of the few artists who can truly say that the way they lived their life was art itself. 1 Pandrogynous being. 

THE FIVE PERCENTERS: ISLAM, HIP-HOP, AND THE GODS OF NEW YORK - MICHAEL MUHAMMAD KNIGHT

It would be hard to listen to as much hip-hop as I do and not be interested in the Five Percenters. Especially given how much I love Ghostface. They exist as a sort of shadow referent, you get bits and pieces of the lingo and philosophy in different rap songs, always suggesting a much murkier and profoundly cosmic depth than what a casual listener (and a YT devil at that) is able to get out of the songs. I’ve read RZA’s Wu-Tang book so I was somewhat familiar with the Supreme Alphabet and the Supreme Mathematics concepts, by which Gods are able to break down the meaning of words and numbers by ascribing every 0-9 digit and A-Z letter a meaning so that each word or number can be “read” or understood on a more profound and spiritual level. Knight does a great service here by diving deep into the Nation of Gods and Earths, by attending Parliaments and talking to current and former Gods and reporting back. Knight is a YT guy, and UNC-CH PhD, convert to Islam who’s written quite a bit, both fiction and non-fiction, about the fringe-ier aspects of Islam and Islamic culture. I’ve read his book on Islamic Magic and have his book about doing Ayahusca on the Kindle for a future read. Part of what makes the NGE so interesting is their commitment to an oral culture, they Mathematics, Alphabet and Supreme Wisdom Lessons (a series of 120 questions and answers) are not written down and are passed on orally from person to person, often in a prison context where they’d be considered contraband. To me the most interesting part of this book was the larger context of the NGE within the, lets call it “alternative,” history of Black American spirituality. This thread runs from characters like Father Divine, Marcus Garvey, famous North Carolinian Nobel Drew Ali, Wallace Fard, Elijah Muhammad and others and through organizations like the temple of Moorish Science, the Blood Brothers, the Ben Ismaels and, most famous of all, The Nation of Islam. This book is at its best when it’s tracing this history, retelling the truly insane biographies of some of these people, and trying to grapple with what these movements tell us about the United States and Black culture. If anything the emphasis on the NGE, and their leader Clarence 13X/Father Allah, is a bit too narrow. This is not to say that Allah’s story is not incredible. Knight makes a strong case that he should be considered along with figures like Malcolm X or MLK in the history of American spirituality and the upheavals of the 60’s. Though he is quick to point out that Allah was too strange (he’d lecture people about the meaning of the height of Mt. Everest, for example) to really take on this role and achieve the sort of power a Malcolm X was able to wield. Knight gives Allah a lot of credit for helping the mayor keep NYC from burning after King is killed and the mayor helps Allah build schools and take kids on trips outside of the city. There’s a whole other story here, one that I hope someone gets deeper into at some point, about how gangs at this time in American history were largely political or had a political aspect. Most people know about the Crips and the Panthers coming at the same time and the same place in LA, but even groups like the Blackstone Rangers in Chicago ran community centers and protected areas from rioting. Lots of these groups were able to get concessions from local governments before the tactics changed, especially after the CIA-created Crack epidemic, these gangs were recast as solely criminal enterprises and their mere existence became one of the justifications for our nightmarish, swollen prisons. This book only touches on this but its something I think about a lot and haven’t fully put together. Anyway, the time Allah spends in unbelievably cruel “mental hospitals” alone give him the air of a religious figure, and Knight often reflects on how going around and hearing stories from people, who are still alive and personally knew Allah, is like building a Hadith in real time. That being said, I found the sections where he attempts to disprove the common stereotype that the NGE by travelling around with YT NGE disciple Azreal, who knew Allah in prison, the least interesting, the specifics of that part of their theology isn’t as gripping as their overall place in the firmament of American fringe religions and their history. Also on that note, I’m a little more down on the NOI that Knight is. I’ve thought for a while, and recent revelations (regarding people being exonerated and former Police admitting to setting certain actions up) have only seemed to prove, that the NOI, at the behest/goading of the FBI, murdered Malcolm (Knight uncritically reports the official narrative), which makes statements like “COINTELPRO had effectively squashed the Black Panther Party in five years but couldn’t bring down the Nation of Islam in four decades.” I need a little more skepticism about why that might be. But all that being said, this book was quite good. The Gods and Earths are quite fascinating and the history they play into is even more interesting and worth of study. I’d love to see a more general study of non-Christian Black religious movements in the US. Any recommendations on that? 120 Supreme lessons

SPINAL CATASTROPHISM: A SECRET HISTORY - THOMAS MOYNIHAN

“The overlap between the grave, the bath and the bed; strategic escapes from the burden of verticality.”

-Anne Carson (this quote isn’t in the book, it just sprung to mind while reading)

This is a buzzy little theory book from a few years ago that I’m glad I finally got around to reading. I can see why it made such a splash (as much as a jargon-y, theory book can “make a splash”), it’s very original and far-out, it’s wide-ranging but also pithy, with sort chapters that don’t overstay their welcome. It’s full of interesting theory-speak words like “zeitbeger” “psychozoic” “chronotaxis” and “cosmotraumatics” as well as provocative ideas sourced from all over like, “Misogyny is birthed from the spine,” “The universe is one colossal chronometer” or “There is something cosmically damaged about the upright human.” all of which Moynihan explains but doesn’t dwell on. He’s remains focused on giving you the full breath of his ideas. The starting point comes from Moynihan’s body itself, the book is dedicated, “to my scoliosis” and takes the human spine and the upright posture of man as a jumping off point to discuss all manner of issues. He is focused on the ways in which this posture, which is unique in the animal kingdom, sets humans apart and causes all sorts of pain and problems. He illustrates the way the structure of the universe itself is visible in the physical body of man. Large portions of it are quite pessimistic, given how our spines predisposes us to back-pain, as well as the large pain that comes along with consciousness itself. Moynihan explores outwards and tries to ponder why greater intelligence aren’t visible in the universe, including ideas about how the physical laws of the universe themselves might be the result of  𝛀-level intelligence playing games beyond our understanding. I only realized partway through the book that Moynihan is CCRU adjacent though he manages to not dwell on Nick Land nor Mark Fisher, which is a nice change of pace. The CCRU connection gets more interesting when he quotes, at length, a man named D.C. Barker, who coined “spinal catastrophism” and, who is, apparently, an ex-NASA guy who went off the rails with his pessimistic speculation. I found his ideas, as related in this book, pretty interesting but when I looked into him he, apparently, isn’t all together real. He seems to be something of a CCRU egregore, or at least it seems that way, I’ll have to do more research when I have better internet access. It seems that he also used to teach “Anorganic Semiotics” at “Miskatonic Virtual University” which does seem to raise some questions. But, all that aside, the book raised some interesting points and got me thinking in new-to-me ways about the “meaning” of our spine and posture. It didn’t bore and is full of all sorts of interesting spinal illustrations. It manages to both not take itself too seriously and also be rigorous about what it’s saying. A real best case scenario for theory book. I’d recommend. 100 Million spines.  

NAZI LITERATURE IN THE AMERICAS - ROBERTO BOLAÑO

This one’s a reread. I think I’ve read just about all the Bolano available in English, every now and again they release a collection of interviews or partial finished short stories and perhaps I haven’t made it through all of them, but I am a huge fan and I do think he wrote the best novel published in my lifetime, 2666, so I figured I’d work my way back through is work. Especially the stuff I read early in my Bolano obsession. This is perhaps the silliest and most gimmick-y of his works the premise itself, a short survey/bibliography of fictional writers who are all somewhat connected to the fascist right. The writers, as promised, range from USAmerikans to Chileans and run the gambit from actually-fought-with-the-third-Reich style Nazis to racists who hold right-wing views. There are upper-class Nazis and Aryan Brotherhood prison Nazis. Some of the entries are short, only a few paragraphs long, others are a few pages, with the last and longest featuring a vignette where Bolano-as-a-character attempts to find a Chilean writer famous for “publishing” his poetry with his sky plane. I remember this book being funny, it’s a very silly concept that he treats seriously and ends before it gets overdone, but I didn’t register the first time how many of his obsessions are present in the book. Bolano, despite being a famous Troskyite (the only good Troksyite, as folks have called him) has an obsession with Nazis. Partially for their relations, via the rat-lines and Paperclip, to South American History. There is even a section that very much seems to indicate he knew about the history and uses of Colonia Dignidad (look it up if you’re not familiar, basically it’s a colony of former Nazis, run by a child abuser, that had links to Operation Condor, America’s pan-South American death-squad program) and numerous references to literal Nazis being resettled in the South America. But Nazis come up in his other books, most prominently in 2666, partially as a symbol of a doomed campaign, something that a South American Leftist like Bolano would be quite familiar with. No one is better than Bolano at making the life of an artist, particularly a poet, seem exciting and interesting. Savage Detectives does this best but even this book, which is about pretty reprehensible figures, makes the idea of writing poetry and living your life in such a way to prioritize poetry seem noble and exciting. Bolano himself seems to have lived much of his own life this way and he has an amazing gift for getting you to understand why he’d choose to do so. Funny, bizarre short and pithy, it’s as good as I remember, better now in the context of his work as a whole, and somewhere I’d recommend folks start with Bolano. 1945 poets.

CITIES OF THE RED NIGHT - WILLIAMS BURROUGHS

Burroughs is one of the authors I’ve admired for the longest in my life. He and Rexroth are the best Beats, at this point, I don’t think there’s much of a contest. Tho, as an aside, it seems like the Beats themselves have lost a lot of their cultural cache, even from when I was in high school and college. True, I’m no longer a teen, but I don’t get the sense that teens are into the Beats like that anymore. Teens, weigh in if you’re reading this, are the Beats corny? Burroughs is the best writer of the bunch, the furthest out and the most interesting. He’s a bit cursed by having his oeuvre defined by one seminal book, NAKED LUNCH. I’ve read a handful of others, THE WILD BOYS, THE TICKET THAT EXPLODED, JUNKY, QUEER, and maybe another one or two. None of those stand out as much as NAKED LUNCH. I’ve also seen the house he lived at in Mexico City, the house he died at in Lawrence KS and the former location of the bar where he killed his wife “accidentally.” I also used to have a Burroughs t-shirt I really liked. I became a bit more turned off of him as I grew older, traveled a bit and met the sorts of sex-tourists Burroughs was and realized how monstrous of a “hobby” this is. It is possible, especially if you’re from means, like he was, to, as a Westerner to move to places like Morocco and engage in the sorts of sex-acts that would get you in quite a bit of trouble in your place of birth. Part of this gets elided when people talk about how Burroughs was gay during a time when it was less than cool to be so, but it’s important to remember that he was targeting quite underage boys (Ginsberg could also use a reevaluation along these lines). All that being said, I’d heard good things about the last three novels he wrote and decided it was time to dive in. This book is truly insane and a great summation of what Burroughs is about, with all the pitch-black humor and lurid milieu and everything else he’s famous for. The book sort of follows two stories, one about Libertalia, the quasi-fictional Malagasy Pirate Utopia, that lives on in this world as a sort of gay anarchist dream. As he puts it, ”your right to live where you want, with companions of your choosing, under laws to which you agree.” would be the center of this world. On another track, a private eye tries to track down a youth who’s been killed in a gay ritual magick situation and unravels the various dark forces that are at play. All the while we learn about a terrible plague as well as the titular cities of the red night, which existed in the Gobi desert 100,000 years ago. There is a lot, and I do mean a lot, about hanging people and having them cum right as they die. It’s a theme that is present in NAKED LUNCH (Dr. Benway also makes a brief cameo) but he goes crazy with it here, it occurs seemingly every 5 pages. Did Burroughs witness this? It does bring together sex and death, two of his favorite themes. There are almost no women in the book, again surprise, given the author, outside of a few monstrous Countess. In the second part of the book, Burroughs goes full Bosch and imagines a time-travel assisted scene where warriors from throughout history, from Marines to Greek warriors and everything in between, take part in an enormous battle full of gruesome scenes. He also gives us one of the most succinct encapsulations of his vision and his obsessions, what all the violence and drugs and sex means, “Audery felt the floor shift under his feet and he was standing at the epicenter of a vast web. In that moment, he knew its purpose, knew the reason for suffering, fear, sex, and death. It was all intended to keep humans slaves imprisoned in physical bodies while a monstrous matador waved his cloth in the sky, sword ready to kill.”

The end of the book includes a recreation of the action of earlier in the book as a school play. There’s a lot of magick stuff, “It’s like the I Ching or table-tapping procedure. How random is it actually?” as one character puts it, lots of historical references, lots of references to dark chapters in history and his constant them of freedom and control. It’s pretty lurid and fun, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, it’s really Burroughs firing on all cylinders and going for broke. I’m surprised there are two other entries in this series, this one seems to include everything. I do think I’ll finish the series. 1617 death-orgasms 

THE BLUE FOX - SJON

I copped this because I read a NYT magazine piece by the writer, Sam Anderson who turned me onto Anne Carson, about the author of this book, the Icelandic surrealist Sjon. Sjon is apparently something of a sensation in Europe and an all-around artist whose work I was totally unaware of but was willing to check out. THE BLUE FOX was described as short and fairy-tale-like so it seemed like a good place to start. I don’t know much about Icelandic anything, let alone their literature, outside of segments of some of their famous sagas so I didn’t have many expectations going in. That being said, this book did seem to live up to every expectation I would have had about Icelandic novels. It features shipwrecks and hunting, long passages about hunting in the snow, magical foxes, time spent inside of a glacier and accusations of witchcraft. Who could ask for anything more? There's a dark subplot about folks with Down’s syndrome and the treatment they’ve received in Iceland over time (as well as some historical facts about Down’s Syndrome I’m going to have to look into). Overall, it was quite short and very strange. I appreciated the book most when it was at its most surreal and bizarre, when animals were talking and whatnot, and found it the most boring when it tried to depict regular life. However, the whole thing is about 100 pages with most of the pages not even being full text, instead being paragraphs isolated in the middle of the page like poetry which did give the whole text the feeling of a novella (an underused form) or, like I said, poetry. I was particularly taken with the phrase which is said w/r/t smothering a child to death, “thereby returning its breath to the great cauldron of souls from which all mankind is served.”  One section even rhythms which is quite a feat of translation. Overall, very strange, I could see myself reading more by the Sjon fellow if I was going to go visit Iceland but I don’t think I’d be interested in any work of his that was “more serious.” 1883 month in a glacier

THE ODYSSEY - HOMER (TRANS. EMILY WILSON)

This thing was quite popular a few years ago and for good reason. Somewhat incredibly, or, I guess, depressingly predictable, there has never been a published English language translation of the Odyssey by a woman. Before you think that this is indicative of general sexism, though it is clearly that too, there’s been several created by French women, some going back hundreds of years. Like many, I had to read the Odyssey in school, the famous Fitzgerld version, but I also studied latin for a while (never smart enough to get into Greek) so I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for this stuff and will read parts of versions from time to time to get a flavor. As a younger man, I was much more interested in the Iliad, since it’s much more action packed and war-focused and brutal. I originally found the Odyssey much duller, thinking that most of the “action” ie the stuff with the monsters and witches for which it’s best remembered, is confined to the middle section and Odysseus spends too much time being sneaky and plotting and very little time fighting and killing. On this read, the emphasis on less traditionally heroic figures is much more fascinating. Even our hero Odysseus, is not in much of a heroic mode most of the book. True, he blinds the cyclops and, eventually, slaughters the suitors, but he also spends much more of the book disguised as a begger or at the mercy of a witch. Female characters get much more attention, though this is still ancient Greece, including a speech from Helen that I don’t remember from previous readings. This time through I was also much more attuned to how often the book makes it clear you have to respect the homeless, since foreigners and the homeless are sacred to Zeus. The foreigners thing also hits different currently, given that I read this book almost totally in transit from the US to Togo, where I live now. Strange shit is indeed afoot and I’m pretty sympathetic to a worldview that says people should be nice to me. Actually, the part of Togo I’m in is very Islamic, who also have an ethic that centers kindness to travelers and strangers so I’m in good hands. Wilson doen’t shy away from the slavery aspect, choosing to translate the word as “slave” rather than dulling it by calling Odyssus houseworkers “servants” nor does she flinch when depicting his cruelty, especially against the house slave who “sleep with” (not a lot of consideration from the male characters as to how much conset was involved in sleeping with a slave woman) the suitors. Wilson also foregrounds the ambiguity as to when exactly Penolpe recognizes Odysseus. The translation is quick and sings, it’s not bogged down by overly flowery english. She translates lines that are the same in Greek (ex. The rosy-fingered dawn motif) differently since we’re reading the poem, not listening to it being recited and thus have no need of the repetition. Her essay at the beginning and notes at the end were exceptional. I did not know there are other versions where Odyssus father’s a child by Circe who eventually finds and kills him with a poisoned spear. As well as others where this child goes on to marry Penolope. I thought that Anne Carson was the only modern translator of ancient Greek that I needed to have on my radar but, lo, I was wrong, Wilson is on that list now. I’ll have to check out her other translations and hope she brings her considerable talents to the Iliad next. 10 long years.

ABERRATION IN THE HEARTLAND OF THE REAL: THE SECRET LIVES OF TIMOTHY McVEIGH - WENDY S. PAINTING

One of the issues I’m trying to get used to w/r/t my switch to using a Kindle rather than physical books is that it is not clear how long a book is when you start. I’ve since learned how to look this up, but I was a couple hundred pages into this thing before I noticed that it’s 800+ pages, which I think would have intimidated me into starting it. I’m glad I didn’t know and stuck this thing out, in a more just world Painting would have won a dozen awards for non-fiction writing/journalism for this thing. It’s the definition of sweeping and epic. it does focus on the OKC bombing in ‘95 but it sprawls out into a dozen or so different directions. It includes long sections about the army and their attempt to regroup and restructure after Vietnam, war-crimes committed during the first Gulf War (McVeigh was part of a bulldozer assault that buried surrendering Iraqis alive as well as the infamous highway of death), gulf-war syndrome and related medical matters. It includes excellent sections on the pre-9/11 right-wing conspiracy world, from violent YT separatists, to UFO folks and the ways in which the government tried to monitor and frustrate them (lots of good stuff about goverment-seeded misinfo in the UFO world). It includes the best rundown I’ve ever read  of MK-ULTRA dark wizard Jolly West, a person that needs his own book ASAP. Ruby Ridge and Waco make appearances, as expected, as well as long, fascinating parts about the ways in which defense contractors and government entities interact and the ways the different government agencies, from the Military to the FBI to the CIA, all work both with and against one another to “neutralize” perceived threats. Part of me wishes that Painter had released a shorter version of this book that merely demolished the government’s case that McVeigh was essential a lone wolf (or one that received minimal, coerced help from 2 of his army buddies) who bombed the Murrah building as revenge for Waco. It’s sort of a forgotten terrorist attack at this point, 9/11 happened a few years later and only a few months after McVeigh was executed and pretty much buried this particular narrative of right-wing terrorists (tho, it does seem that such a narrative might be coming back). Maybe I’ll try to write a short summary later for anyone interested but I’d recommend going whole hog and reading this book but, briefly, McVeigh spends a few years before the attack deeply immersed in a very dark, right-wing world of gun shows and militias. He constantly interacts with people who are involved in gun-running and bank robbing and terrorism. Many of these people are FBI and or CIA informants (like Roger Moore or Andreas Strassmeir) to name two people that you can look more into if you’d like. McVeigh himself told both his original defense team as well as neighbors on death row that he himself was working undercover to infiltrate the militia movement. Everyone who actually saw McVeigh in the days and weeks before the bombing as well as the morning of the bombing see him in the presence of others, none of whom are ever found and who are absent from the official narrative. The FBI won’t even release the footage of the truck driving around OK City before the bombing (or the footage from the building itself) presumably because it shows other folks in the car with him. Painting suggests a handful of narratives: Lone Wolf, Pack of Wolves, Watched Wolves, Experimental then runs through how likely each one is. I feel like I’ll be writing forever if I try to run-down every interesting tidbit and rabbit-hole she uncovers. It’s amazing but unsurprising that I’ve never seen this stuff in the mainstream, it would be nice to have a real press in this country. Until then, we can count on people like Painter, the only reporter to actual go through all the documents, including the defense team notes, to fill in what’s missing and point in the right direction for future research. Read this book, get McVeigh-pilled. 95 PATCON agents

HELIOGABALUS: OR, THE CROWNED ANARCHIST - ANTONIN ARTAUD (TRANS. ALEXIS LYKIARD

Damn RIP Artaud. Had you lived long enough, you’d truly be the king of schizo-posting, my favorite use of Twitter. I’d never read any Artaud before. I was aware he was an influence on surrealism, and I, like many, know about the Theater of Cruelty (great name) without having read the text that the term comes from but I’d always thought of him as a theater guy and since I’m not super into theater (maybe later in life) I’ve largely ignored him. So I was not prepared for how crazy this “novel” was. “Novel” probably isn’t even the right word, part of it, especially the beginning is a sort of historical novel that traces the life of Heliogabalus, a second century Roman emperor who is sort of remembered as a second-tier Caligula, ie a maniac and madman who fucked everything, ruined shit and then was assassinated by his own guards at the age of 18. Not unlike Caligula, there is some modern debate as to how much of the bad stuff we know about him is true, given that all the accounts that have survived are written by people with a particular ax to grind. There are serious scholars who have attempted to rehabilitate or at least complicate the history. Artaud is not doing that. Artaud is not a classicist, nor an archeologist, and he’s not interested in historical truth in the conventional sense. He’s a madman writing a book about another madman. He takes as true the most depraved rumors about Heliogabaus’ life and then spins out elaborate schizo-theories about what they mean and how they connect with Artaud’s larger world-view. Like I said, it has the feeling of a really unhinged and interesting twitter thread. There’s tons of stuff about sun-worship and moon-worship since Heliogabalus, as you might be able to tell from his name, was a devotee of a Syrian Sun-god, named Elagabalous who was worshiped in the form of a black meteorite that Heliogabalous took to Rome (which he strangely doesn’t connect to Islam). There’s lots, and lots of stuff about castration and blood and dicks and what all that symbolizes. Artaud sees chaos and disorder as a ends unto itself and thus Heliogablus as a sort of hero, given his idiosyncratic usage of “anarchy,” which should mean, “no rulers” which would make an emperor by definition the opposite though Artuad uses it to mean “agent of chaos.” Here are three quotes that seem to get at what he means by “anarchy:”

“To have a sense of the profound unity of things is to have a sense of anarchy”

“He turned the throne into a stage, but in doing so he introduced theater and, through theater, poetry to the throne of Rome, into the palace of a Roman emperor, and poetry, when it’s real, is worthy of blood, it justifies the shedding of blood.”

“The Anarchist says, neither god nor master, I alone.”

I don’t think that’s a useful definition of that word but I appreciate how insane Artuad is willing to get. The final thoughts I had about this book involve the gender and sexual identity of Heliogabalus. Earlier, Christian, writers like to paint him as depraved and gay, given his male lovers, including ones he married, and obsession with dicks and whatnot. However, he famously frequently dressed as a woman and scoured the empire offering untold wealth to anyone who could perform a surgery that would give him a pussy. Artuad uses this as a jumping off point to discuss hermaphroditism and related matters. Nowadays, I assume that we’d look at these facts and conclude that Heliogabalus would be considered transgendered had he lived in our time but that language didn’t occur (and in large part didn’t exist in the modern sense) to Artuad, which is a missed opportunity. Anyway, interesting book, worth thinking about if you’re into bizarre theory stuff. 218 Phalluses

ON THE KABBALAH AND ITS SYMBOLISM - GERSHOM SCHOLEM

I read this thing over almost a year. I’ve always had something of an interest in Kabbalah, getting it mostly through osmosis from folks like Alan Moore or Thomas Pynchon, i.e. non-jews who have an interest in Western esoterica and who have added Kabbalah to a general arsenal of symbolic structures that include things like tarot or gnosticism. It’s always something I’ve meant to know more about, and Harold Bloom recommended this book on the topic. It’s out of print but I found a copy online and I’ve kept it by my bedside for about a year, reading it in little pieces, trying to figure this whole thing out. It is not what I thought it was going to be. I was expecting a sort of textbook, perhaps one that went over some history then walked through the sefirot and other major concepts. Instead, this book is a series of long essays that touch on topics as broad as the relationship between mysticism and tradition in religion, the nature of ritual, the connection between religion and myth and, finally, on the golem as a figure in Jewish thinking. Scholem is a religious scholar and is more interested in placing Kabbalah in a larger firmament of religious thinking than he is in explaining to you what all the symbols mean. For that sort of information, Promethea is still the best resource I know of. That being said, this book is full of strange ideas and interesting concepts. Scholem sums up the task of Kabbalah as, “turning Judaism into a mystery religion.” which has all sorts of far-out implications. Not unlike certain branches of Islam, they seem obsessed with the Torah and the text of the Torah itself. Perhaps the whole thing is the name of god, perhaps the letters themselves are imbued with spiritual truths and power and can be studied to unlock these truths and powers. Perhaps some of the letters are not complete in our fallen world. Obviously this connects to the golem, who is brought to life and killed by changing Hebrew letters written on his body. Scholem does a good job showing how some of this thinking comes out of Jewish encounters with gnosticism and/or Sufism, the mystical traditions of the other, major, Abrahamic faiths. Overall, there’s lots of interesting tidbits in the book, I was particularly taken with an idea that every nut you bust that doesn’t impregnate someone can be used by demons to create more demons and thus, at one’s funeral, the demons one has sired over a lifetime of onanism return to pay their respects to their father. Overall, very interesting on a religious studies level, I would go elsewhere for really deep Kabbalah explanations, you need to already be familiar with stuff like the tree of life. 613 emanations of G-D

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.