THE FBI WAR ON TUPAC SHAKUR AND BLACK LEADERS - JOHN POTASH

I tore through this thing in a day. I’ve heard John Potash on some conspiracy-minded podcasts and he typically speaks well (he has a sort of gen. X hipster vibe and vocabulary) and tows the line between boring and over the top so I decided to take a look at one of his books. The title is somewhat misleading, I would say that Tupac makes up only a part of what he’s talking about. Potash takes a much broader view of state repression of leftist leaders and hops around a lot. There’s chapters about the Panthers, including lots of great information about who was an informant, the death of Huey Newton (always has seemed suspicious to me, Potash makes a reasonably strong case for government involvement), the LA and New York Panthers in particular and the tactics the state used to break them up. There’s stuff about the MLK assassination, stuff about the A.I.M, stuff about Judi Bari. He covers the RFK assassination and the CIA’s work with domestic police forces. He gives us run-downs of the MOVE bombing and Mumia. He covers Bob Marley and Jimi Hendrix, who I did not know did benefits for the Panthers, and who Potash believes was murdered by his manager, a former MI6 man. Marley has obviously been quite on my mind since I finished “Brief History” a few days ago. He basically confirms (up to and including names, I thought James had changed all the names but, apparently, he used the real (street) name of at least one of the would-be assassins) one of the most dramatic scenes in the book, where Marley himself oversees a sort of ghetto court where his shooters confess, and confess to CIA involvement, before being executed. The Tupac stuff is quite good and very interesting, especially the role his mother played in the Panther 21 trail in New York and the degree to which Tupac was monitored and fucked with, even before he became amazingly famous. The tactics around undermining gang peace efforts and igniting an East/West feud, and how these were old tactics (going back to, at least, the British efforts against the Mau Mau) could be a whole book. The ways that various Black activists tried to politicize street gangs and were killed and their efforts undermined could be a book. A book I’d love to read and I hope someone writes someday. I think I part from Potash about the literal causes of Tupac’s death. He seems to think Orlando Anderson was paid to get beat-up so some government forces could kill ‘Pac. This strikes me as unlikely, or at least less likely than the alternative. Especially since Keefy D, who is now dying, has admitted to being in the car and that Anderson, his nephew, fired the fatal shots. He also, in a single sentance, seems to suggest that Bill Cosby had been targeted with fake rape accusations due to his activism, a stance that hasn’t aged well. Overall, this book is a good intro to a lot of these topics. He hops around so much that he never goes super deep on any one subject, each of which either has a good book about it or should have one. I’m pretty pill’d on most of these happenings but it was nice to see the connections, how the FBI agent who helped fuck with Newton also fucked with Pac and helped bomb Judi Bari for instance. I think this guy has also written a book about how the government killed Kurt Cobain so perhaps your mileage might very. Either way, it reads really fast and, if you’re not familiar with some of this stuff, it could be a good place to wet your feet. 1996 government assassinations. 

AFRICAN DOMINION: A NEW HISTORY OF EMPIRE IN EARLY AND MEDIEVAL WEST AFRICA- MICHAEL A. GOMEZ

          I got this book as a present for Christmas last year and it’s one of three physical books I brought with me here, to actual West Africa. As I’m sure you well know, if you’ve attended school at any level, from elementary to college, African history is basically completely untaught. People can’t locate the countries, or feel that the whole thing is a country, they can’t name any African historical figures, they can’t name any major events or episodes, besides being the victims of the slave trade and the whole continent is basically saddled with the Hegelian declaration that, “Africa has no history.” Obviously, this is racist and untrue, it’s a fairy tale that Westerners tell themselves to feel less bad about the horrible shit they did but knowing this doesn’t solve the problem of not having been taught anything about actual African history. So, for the last few years, I’ve been trying to fill in the blanks in my own knowledge and get a better handle on the continent that humanity evolved on. This book is a welcomed addition. It follows various West African empires and kingdoms from, roughly, around 1000 CE to the late 1500’s. Actually all the books dates are written with the traditional roman calendar dates, ie 2022 CE, as well as their Islamic equivalents, ie 1443 AH, given how much that Islamization is a theme. The book largely focuses on the Mali and Songhai empires and their surrounding allies and enemies. We get the big figures, like Mansa Musa and Sunni Ali, but also lots of unknown-to-me political and religious players. Gomez bites off a lot. He not only tries to tell a coherent history of West Africa, he also takes long asides to explain the roles of social institutions like slavery, or the role of women, or the nature of historical research when the main records we have are either oral traditions (which have, until recently been discounted by “serious” historians. A Fist Full of Shell does a good job wrestling with this question as well) and how they change and transform over time. Obviously, being in West Africa as I read this added another layer. Most of the events of this book took place North of where I’m living but multiple ethnic groups that make up the town I live in are mentioned in this volume often, which gives me more context for everyday life in this town. Especially since I live in a 100% Islamic area and the spread and Influence of Islam, as well as the way it changes society, is a major thread Gomez traces. My only complaint would be that the prose in this book is pretty flat. He’s an academic and is trying to cover a long, largely unknown stretch of history but he really fails to sauce up his writing and engage the reader. Even when really fascinating stuff is going on, the writing is pretty dull and you have to work hard to keep yourself focused and engaged, a missed opportunity since this stuff is so little known. However, if you fancy yourself as someone who knows about history, I’d bet you have an African History lacuna and this one of the premiere books to help you fix that. 1325 pilgrimages to Mecca

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS - MARLON JAMES

      At 600 pages, it’s hard to call this book brief and there are many, many more than seven killings in it. Actually, at first I was trying to figure out which seven killings the title was referring to, that perhaps there were 7 “more important” deaths, before the last 50 pages or so revealed the meaning of the title. Title aside, this book has been on my radar since it came out in 2014, it won all sorts of awards and was pitched as being about the attempted assassination of Bob Marley, a historical event that I’m interested in. What the media, conveniently, left out is that this book is really about the history of Jamaica in the late 20th century and more specifically, about the ways the CIA fucked with that island and the blow-back all this caused in the US. “Even though the Singer is the center of the story,” the book says at one point (it only refers to Bob Marley as “The Singer,” for whatever reason) “it really isn’t his story.” This book is profoundly CIA pill’d and really, in an almost non-fictional way, describes the ways that the island was Strategy of Tension’d around the Manley/Seaga elections. The book takes a trick from As I Lay Dying and switches narrators every chapter, often giving us multiple views on the same events and characters whose lives intersect, sometimes without their knowledge, across decades. There are multiple criminals, CIA agents, journalists, regular civilians all of whom are trying to figure out what’s going on in Jamaica and trying to alter it. For personal reasons I was most interested in the CIA stuff. James is particularly wise in showing how the agency is not a monolith, there are some hyper-educated, elite Yale-types who see what they do as profoundly sophisticated and noble and a group of violent thugs who are all too happy to sow discord and kill commies. The tension and collaboration between these two groups is a constant theme if you study the CIA, and is very well rendered in this book. After the stuff directly dealing with the shooting of Marley, the book really expands out and gets wild. The book follows the characters as their gangs go trans-national and become instrumental in the cocaine and crack booms in the USA. The story I’m most familiar with regarding crack centers around the Contras and LA, this book traces the East Coast version of this story, and centers around a lightly fictionalized version of the Shower Posse (here called the Storm Posse) and their rise in role in the drug trade. We get cameos from Griselda Blanco, talk of the School of the Americas and illusions to real life events, like drug-gang leaders with ties to the government mysteriously burning to death in prison. James said he did enough research for this book to fill another book with all the stuff he learned and I do hope he eventually writes that book. I was aware of America’s on-going involvement in both the drug trade, generally, and Jamaica, specifically, but this book really does a great job making it readable and literary. For 600 pages, I captivated and engaged. For it’s blend of real-life geopolitics and literary merit, and, frankly, violence, I can favorably compare it 2666, one of my favorite novels of all time. I know they’re supposedly making a TV show from this book, though I doubt very much that they’ll allow this level of CIA realism on TV, so, in the meantime, if you have any interest at all in 20th century history, Jamaican music/culture and/or want to read a great recent novel, fuck with this. 1976 government-backed gangs.

THE BURN-OUT SOCIETY - BYUNG-CHUL HAN

     I read this one in a day since I’ve been tackling a handful of other, very long, though very good books and I needed something different. I’ve been aware of Byung-Chul Han for a while, he’s a Korean-German philosopher that people seem to really like, but I hadn’t read any of his books and was only vaguely aware of their content. This 50 page little tome was certainly different that I was expecting. It’s very pithy, almost aphoristic; it gets in and out of the ideas it’s interested in. Han is focused here on why so many people are burned out, depressed and/or suffer from ADHD. He posits that after the Cold War, we’ve gone from the sort of discipline/control society, so well described by Foucault, to an “achievement society” where people are motivated by an internal sense of drive. “They are entrepreneurs of themselves,” as he puts it. To Han, we’ve gone from the hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks and factories (the emblematic institutions of the discipline society) to fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls and genetic laboratories of this achievement society. This book reminded me a lot of “Coming Up Short” from a few years ago which is about how the current economic conditions have lead to young people being forced into creating a narrative about overcoming w/r/t their lives since the typical symbols of adulthood and “making it” like a house and steady income and a job and family are increasingly hard to come by. Han is showing how such a system is internalized, especially when one doesn’t make it, and how this failure to achieve creates what we call burn-out. I think he’s right on about how some segments of our society have so deeply taken to heart the achievement narrative that they auto-exploit until they burn-out. We can see this in both the ever-popular “you’re-your-own-entrepreneur,-go-out-there-and-get-it” narrative as well as the self-care industrial complex that has sprung up to deal with the psychological fallout of this way of living. I think Han is also right that this represents an acceleration of capitalism. I rarely say this about a book, but this could have been longer. I think Han is really onto something, I’ve seen and experienced burn-out in my personal life and have noticed that it seems to be increasing, both in frequency and in terms of how much it’s part of the general discourse. 50 burned-out people

CHINNAMASTA: THE AWEFUL (sic) BUDDHIST AND HINDU TANTRIC GODDESS - ELIZABETH ANNE BENARD

I first learned about Chinnamasta by witnessing a diorama of her at a Durga Puja event in Kolkata about 7 years ago. Durga (and Kali) Puja are major events in Kolkata, entire streets shut down to erect these enormous pandals, which are temporary religious structures that are often quite striking and covered in bright colors and/or neon. Within them are shrines which  contain life-size or larger dioramas of the god(s) being venerated. Different groups and neighborhoods compete to have the most impressive ones, not so unlike Mardi Gras floats. It’s a very dope experience, I’d certainly recommend it, but it was during a night of going from pandal to pandal when I walked into one that featured Chinnamasta, who is a version of Durga. Chinnamasta is typically portrayed in a very striking pose. She stands with an aggressive stance, a large knife in her right hand. In her left hand she holds her own head, which she’s cut off. The head itself drinks from the blood sprouting out of the neck wound. She typically has two asstendents with her (who’s name change depending on the version of the story) who are also drinking streams of blood coming out of her neck. All this is going on while she standing atop a couple having sex. So we’re talking 5 gods in one scene. It’s a lot and it’s really, really striking. I was totally taken by her and have been somewhat obsessed with that image ever since. She’s a fairly minor deity, so there’s not a ton of temples dedicated to her, she’s often lumped in with Durga or, less typically, Kali, so it’s been a while since I’ve really got to think about her and dig into her imagery. This book, despite its silly title (the author chooses to spell “awful” like that) does offer a correction to this. Interestingly, the book spends a lot of time talking about the difference between her worship among Hindus and Buddhists, which is an aspect of her I wasn’t aware of. Having recently read that Mayahana Buddhist text, I was very ready for any discussion of “voidness.” The book ends with a list of 1,000 names for Chinnamasta, which was a cool list and apparently is used in meditation. I was hoping for more discussion of her symbolism and mythology, there is some of this but the idea of her being the sacrificer, the sacrifice itself, and the thing being sacrificed to is quite intriguing and plays into her role as the goddess of paradox, is very intriguing to me and I would have liked her to linger longer on what that means. There’s a lot of general talk about tantra and how it is different in Hinduism and Buddhism but I would have been more interested in her role as manifestation of contradiction and enigma. Either way, she’s very interesting to think about, while Kali performed a minor miracle for me in India (I drank some Ganges water at a celebration to her and didn’t get sick) it is Chinnamasta I think about most often. 5 gods in one image. 

THE BAPHOMET - PIERRE KLOSSOWSKI

I thought this was going to be a non-fiction book about the Baphomet, a strange god-form that has become quite popular recently. Perhaps this is because of the Satanic Church’s trolling, which involves erecting statues of the Baphomet in public spaces that have Ten Commandment memorials, or perhaps it has to do with the Baphomet’s hermaphroditic  nature, which makes him a natural alley of the ever more popular gender-queer contingent. Or perhaps it’s because he looks so cool. Either way, this book is not that. It’s a experimental novel where most of the characters are the spirits, or “breaths” in the books parlance, of Knights Templar brothers who were tortured and executed for all sorts of satanic shenanigans. The breaths waft around and possess people and reminisce and generally fuck-up the timeline, not unlike Book of the Long Sun, it’s hard to tell who’s speaking when any spirit could be possessing them at any time and speaking from a different time frame. There’s lots of stuff about all the pederast shit the Knights Templar got up to (being Catholic and all). At one point a spirit explores the body of a beautiful youth and tries to fly up his asshole only to discover a Templar jewel stopping him. At one point the Antichrist becomes a character though he appears in the form of an anteater named Fredrick (which I assume is a joke about Nietzsche?). The whole thing is quite weird and hard to follow. It’s quite a vibe tho, no doubt about that. The whole thing is quite short and dedicated to Foucault, who I guess was friends with Klossowsi and who wrote a long introduction. I still think I would have preferred a book about The Baphomet itself but you get what you get. 1119 Horned Goats

SECRET OF OUR SUCCESS - JOSEPH HENRICH

Read this off a recommendation of an old friend, despite it being within one of my general areas of interest, early man, I hadn’t heard of it. Typically, I’m pretty allergic and skeptical of the “science” of evolutionary psychology, which I regard as a pseudo-science functionally equivalent to phrenology, and, for obvious Epstein-reasons, the Kill Bill siren goes off in my head when I hear the phrase, “Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University” where Henrich is the chair, but despite all of that, I found the book pretty interesting and it managed not to raise any major objections on my part. Henrich’s main argument is for a cultural-gene coevolution to explain human beings' success as a species. That our ability to create and sustain culture is embedded in a positive feedback loop with our genetic reality which allows us all sorts of adaptations, and he does go through quite a list of them, that become creatures of culture, creatures that can live within and sustain cultures where we can adapt to anything and live anywhere. He spends lots of time in the book trying to convince the reader that humans owe all their success to culture, that we aren’t that powerful or smart without it, which I guess I didn’t need much convincing of. It was funny to read about all the studies that people were put in against chimpanzees to prove that we aren’t even that smart, isolated from culture, though again, I’m pretty predisposed to heavily weight culture. I have my normal suspicions about the relevance and reproducibility of lab psychology experiments but there’s tons and tons of examples drawn from anthropological observations as well. I don’t fully agree with his arguments that downplay the role of language in this process. Henrich thinks we overstate the importance of language, which is perhaps the case, but seems to go too far in the other direction by saying that culture can be transmitted without it (through imitation) which seems like a bit of a stretch to me. Language does seem vital to explaining the robustness of human culture. There is an interesting part in the book about how reading a lot can weaken the part of your brain that identifies faces, which I feel like explains a lot of my life, that was nice to read. Overall, I think I went into this book mostly agreeing with Henrich’s proposals so I didn't need much convincing, however, the sheer number of anecdotes and side stories did keep the book quick and engaging. 1.2 million hominids.

THEORY OF BLOOM - TIQQUN (Trans. ROBERT HURLEY)

This is a short little number that’s really popular in a certain stratum of internet leftism that I’m interested in. Tiqqun is the name of a collective/zine that published some issues back in the early 2000’s anonymously. I believe that eventually someone accused of being involved in “environmental terrorism” was alleged to have been part of the group. Anyway, the long essays in the zines have been split up into small, individual books and translated into English, where they’ve gained an enthusiastic internet audience. “Bloom” is an epithet, inspired by the main character in Ulysses, that Tiqqun uses for modern, trapped-in-capitalism people. I would say alienated people but Tiqqun writes, “a reasonable mind might conclude one day: “Actually Bloom is an alienated man.” Not true. Bloom is a man who has so thoroughly conjoined with his alienation that it would be absurd to try to separate them.” so make of that what you will. This book was short and had some great lines, “For him, all of life’s experiences are interchangeable and under-gone according to a kind of existential tourism.” “Existentialism is the first body of thought designed for Blooms.” “Who has rooted himself in placelessness, for whom uprooting no longer invokes banishment, but on the contrary, an ordinary situation.” and so on. The mood is manifesto, so Tiqqun doesn’t linger or belabor any of the points, which I appreciate. Overally, I found this book, very, very similar to Society of the Spectacle, tho while Debord focuses on the overall effects, from a society-wide scale, Tiqqun is focused on the Bloom-ification of the individual. It’s certainly a real problem. People live insane, alienated, mediated and unfulfilling lives, suffering to make capitalists richer, I don’t think anyone doubts that. I would say that this is pretty good indictment of this phenomena, though I doubt very much it would convince a Bloom to change nor does it offer real solutions, besides become a communist and be more authentic, w/r/t a de-bloomification process. Good short read but Society of the Spectacle got there first and did it better. 2001 Blooms

THE FUNDAMENTAL WISDOM OF THE MIDDLE WAY - NĀGĀRJUNA (TRANS, with commentary by JAY L. GARFIELD)

This one took me over a month to read. I finished quite a few of the other books on this list before finally completing this one. Mostly because the content is so heady. This book is a translation of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, a text by the sage Nagarjuna, written around 150AD. It’s a foundational text for Mahāyāna Buddhism and it exists as a series of verses broken into 27 chapters, which seek to argue the ultimately emptiness of all things. This is actually a good example of the shortcoming of the Kindle, since the book presents the entire text of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and then follows with a chapter by chapter commentary by Garfield. It would have been better to read one chapter of the main text, then the commentary right after before moving on to the next chapter. But either way, I did really enjoy this and it did stretch my brain. As I understood it, Nararjuna is arguing that emptiness doesn’t mean that something isn’t real and/or doesn’t exist, he’s saying that it has no intrinsic reality, or essence, that it’s not separable from the phenomena of existence as a whole. He often stresses not to fall into the trap of reification, ie things are real and have an essence, nor into nihilism, that nothing is real, which seems contradictory but between these two ideas is the Middle Way he’s emphasizing in the title. This reaches its furthest out implication when Narajuna describes Nirvana itself as “empty” in this sense. As Garfield says in his commentary, “Just as there is no difference in entity between the conventional and the ultimate, there is no difference between nirvana and samsara, nirvana is simply samsara seen without reification, without attachment, without delusion…Nagarjuna is emphasizing that nirvana is not someplace else. It is a way of being here.” Lots of the verses are, as you might imagine, enigmatic and paradoxical, with lots of emphasis on Indian logical forms like the tetralemma. Garfield does an amazing job clarifying and commenting on the text. He gives both his opinion and shares the opinions of others, and since there is almost 2000 years of commentary, there’s lots of dissenting opinions as to what Naragarjuna means. He’s also good at connecting the text to Western philosophical ideas, especially those of Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein, which helps to dissolve some of the Western chauvinism inherent in “philosophy” as an academic discipline. While I certainly wouldn’t call myself a Buddhist, the idea of thinking of the world as empty, and not divisible into discrete parts with their own essences is comforting and does ring true to me. Got to make sure I keep up on religious texts as well, I think the Nag Hammadi library is next. 27 empty phenomena

NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS - PATRICIA LOCKWOOD

A hyped novel from 2021, so I’m somewhat catching up with the zeitgeist. I’ve not read any other Lockwood stuff, though I am aware of her and I’ve met some of her fans. This book is really 2 books in one. The first half is an attempt to write how it feels to be online in the way that most of us are now. It’s a strange, mostly terrible, new feeling that is constantly changing and hard to pin down. People my age barely remember a time before it, those younger than me haven’t experienced anything else. Even those older than me, the Boomers, etc. are perhaps the most brain damaged by it, it’s perhaps one of the largest and certainly the quickest change in human subjectivity, ie how it feels to think and be alive, in all of human history. I partially came out here to rural Afrika to take a break from it, since I largely think it’s quite bad for us, tho I am typing this on a computer connected to the web, so make of that what you will. Like they said in Contact, they should have sent a poet, so it makes sense that a poet like Lockwood would get close to replicating this feeling of being online, which she calls the portal, in prose form. Stylistically the book is little paragraph long snippets, like tweets or blog posts that replicate the endless scroll. She comes up with some bangers that distill internet culture, among my favorites: 

“Why had she entered the portal in the first place? Because she wanted to be a creature of pure call and response: she wanted to delight and be delighted.”

“This might be the one that connected everything, that would knit her into an indestructible coherence.”

“The more closely we associated the diet with cavemen the more we loved it. Cavemen were not famous for living a long time, but they were famous for being exactly what the fuck they were supposed to be, something we could no longer say about ourselves.”

“But more than that, we wanted the carceral state to be abolished, and replaced with one of those islands where a witch turns men into pigs.”

“But everyday their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, towards a new person to hate. Sometimes the subject was a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution with guacamole.”

In many ways the first part of the book reminded me of Virginia Woolf, in that the point was not the plot or the characters as much as recreating and reflecting back what it feels like to think and be alive. Lockwood manages to update this by recreating what an internet mediated consciousness feels like and it’s quite impressive.. The plot in the first part of the book, such as it is, involves a person getting semi-famous for a dumb tweet about a dog and living with this newfound quasi-celebrity. The second part of the book is still in a similar style, with the short pithy segments stacked on top of one another, but something of a plot and traditional stakes emerge. The narrator's sister has a baby that’s born with a terminal illness and the second part of the book charts what this 6 month period with a dying child is like. Obviously, the life and death of a child is just about as “real” as possible and as diametrically opposed to the fakeness of the net as can be. This apparently did happen to Lockwood, as we learn in the afterward, so I suppose this section is technically autofiction. I liked the first part of the book better. She’s still a great poetic writer in part 2 but that part is pretty typical trauma-event memoir style stuff, which is not often my bag. She really does nail part one though, she should have just stuck to that for a whole book, it would have been more controversial but more interesting, imo. Either way, she’s a great writer, and this is a cool little book. 21 dying babies.

THE PHOENIX PROGRAM: AMERICA’S USE OF TERROR IN VIETNAM - DOUGLAS VALENTINE

 Meaning to get to this one for a while. If you get into parapolitical, CIA-adjacent, conspiracy-theory type stuff, it’s not too long before you hear quite a lot about the Phoenix program and therefore this book. If you don’t know, Phoenix was the CIA’s program during the Vietnam War (which should more properly be thought of as the South East Asian war since it began in Laos and involved Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam) to destroy the infrastructure of the VC, by which they meant assassinations, torture and killing, often to civilians who were accused of being covert VC supporters. We’ll never know the true numbers but famously CIA-friendly Wikipedia thinks that 81,740 people were “neutralized” and “26,396 were killed. Again, almost certainly an under-count and the people who weren’t killed, who were “neutralized,” were put into incredibly brutal prisons and tortured for years many of them crippled physically or mentally forever. As far as these prisons themselves, called PIC or Provincial Interrogation Centers, here’s what the CIA’s one-time head of the PICs, John Patrick “Picadoon” Muldoon says was going on,  “rape, gang rape, rape using eels, rape using snakes or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electrical shocks (the bell telephone hour) rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; “the water treatment”; “the airplane,” in which a prisoner’s arms were tied behind their back and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner midair, after which he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; and the use of police dogs to maul prisoners.” As you might imagine, a program where people were black-listed by snitches then killed by paramilitary groups led to a lot of abuse. People were often accused of being VC by others in their community with a personal grudge or financial incentive (there were rewards for fingering VC agents), the kill-teams themselves were sometimes made up of Special Forces folks and/or “bad motherfucker criminals” freed from South Vietnamese jails to do some dirty work. The program relied on terror so mutilations and massacres were common. Often the Phoenix forces would dress like or otherwise try to impersonate the NVA to psy-op peasants into thinking these were communist atrocities. It was also the first major military/intelligence program to rely heavily on computers and computer networks, to maintain the black-lists. I could go on and on about the evil shit that went down in the program but you should read the book for that stuff, what most interested me was the long shadow that Phoenix has cast over history since then. There are obvious examples, many literal Phoenix alumni like Felix Rodrigez show up all over South and Central America training various death-squads to enact a local Phoenix program. The playbook is simple: organize criminals and psychos into small groups, train them with US/Isreali/Australian commandos in the dark arts, use local and international intelligence agencies to deliver kill-lists and disguise who they are when they’re out there doing their dirty work. We see this in Honduras and Nicaragua and Guatemala. Mexico’s current drug war is increasingly run by narcos with Special Forces training (look into the GAFE and their relationship to the Zetas as well as what they did to the Zapatistas before that). Recently, I was reading about the “Zero units” in Afghanistan, who are CIA run death-squads we were using in that country who got prioritized to leave when the corrupt narco-government of Afghanistan fell. Like THE JAKARTA METHOD, this book is at it’s most harrowing when you see how something monstrous in one country was exported by Amerika around the world. The most tantalizing aspect of Phoenix is to what extent it came back to America. The book quotes several Phoenix people (there’s a whole side story about how Valentine wrote this book, it has to do with him getting Colby’s permission because he, Colby, liked Valentine’s previous book about his father’s experience in Vietnam. Colby gave him interviews and told people to talk with him so people were perhaps more candid than they should have been. It’s amazing and I doubt very much the CIA will ever make this big of a fuck-up again) who return to the USA into law enforcement and see Phoenix tactics at play contra the counter-war movement. A domestic Phoenix was perhaps involved with the US’s obvious involvement in MLK’s murder. All amazing stuff. I’d easily put this in the top tier of the CIA books I’ve read in the past 2 years. If you want to understand how Amerika’s empire works, you need to read this book. If we had a real education system or a real press, this would be the thing everyone knew about the Vietnam war, but we don’t so you have to search out stuff like this for yourself.  64 mythical birds

Article about the Zero units, if you’re interested. Again, this is only the tip of the tip of the iceberg, you can find shit like this in basically in country Amerika has any interest in. :https://theintercept.com/2021/10/05/zero-units-cia-afghanistan-taliban/

A BILLION BLACK ANTHROPOCENES OR NONE - KATHRYN YUSOFF

This is a buzzy little book from a few years ago that I’d had on the docket for a while. It’s quite short, and in many ways seems like it’s the outline for something much longer or an expanded version of a much shorter speech or manifesto. Yusoff, who has the incredible job title of “Professor of Inhuman Geography,” does us all a favor and goes after the term “Anthropocene” a new-ish term that you hear all the time now. As she puts it, “Naming can also be a covering over” and she wants to investigate what exactly that term is hiding. The Anthro, in Anthropocene seems, like in the term anthropology, to be gesturing towards humanity in general, as if there’s something inherent in our humanness that is causing the earth to heat up and the climate to change. Obviously, this isn’t true. There’s something very specific that humanity, and more specifically a certain racialized subsection of humanity, has been doing, for a limited amount of time, ie Capitalism and the imperialism and slavery that birthed and sustained it, that is causing these catastrophic changes. Yusoff is trying to highlight how the processes that created climate change and the Anthropocene were birthed in trans-Atlantic slave trade and ingenious genocides, which shares an extractive logic with the way we now treat the earth itself. As she puts it,  “Slavery and genocide are the urtext to discussion of species and geology, their empirical bedrock and epistemological anchor.” This is all very useful stuff and an important re-framing to the idea of an “anthropocene.” She’s not the first to suggest another term to replace Anthropocene, we’ve also got Capitalocene from Jason Moore, Chthulthcene from Donna Haraway, Plantationocene from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and (not mentioned in this book) the Psychozoic from Joseph le Conte all of which seek to complicated the trite suggestions of inevitability behind the term Anthropocene. While this is a very useful point to make, the book itself is quite dense and academic, even for something so short. She’s heavy of citations, especially from Sylvia Wynter, whom I adore, but for something that should be bit-sized and who’s main idea is somewhat simple and in desperate need of widespread popularity (we’re not going to solve this problem if we don’t understand it’s true nature), it seems like it would put a lot of people off and be seen as so much jargon. I’m not one to complain about academic-y jargon or theory-speak in general, just look at my glowing review of Spinal Catastrophism, and I liked this book a lot, but the stuff she’s talking about is, frankly, quite important this would be a tragedy if people weren’t engaging with these ideas because their written in this style. This isn’t her fault, nor is it her job to write in any particular way, but I do hope someone comes along and makes these ideas more mainstream. On billion black anthropocenes

TRAUMNOVELLE (RHAPSODY, A DREAM NOVEL) - ARTHUR SCHNITZLER trans. OTTO P. SCHINNERER

Another short little novel, to go along with THE BLUE FOX and NAZI LITERATURE IN THE AMERICAS, it’s been a while since I’ve read a long novel, I’ll have to get to that soon, but, in the meantime, I’ve been enjoying knocking these small little numbers out. This is, in fact, the novel that EYES WIDE SHUT is based on, and that is the reason I’m read it. I’m quite an EWS fan and thought it would be fun to explore the greater EWS universe. This novel, which you can read in a day easily, is recreated pretty exactly in the movie. It is about a doctor, here in Vienna, who lives a comfortable bourgeois life which is upended when he discusses his dreams and desire with his wife and, crucially, listens to her dreams and desires. It’s interesting that we are told that he, “for years…had not exchanged confidences with anyone except his wife” yet it seems like this book chronicles the only time in their marriage where he’s really thought about her inner life and desires and thoughts and it drives him insane. He hears a revelation that she, at some point in the past, found another man attractive and fantasized about leaving him for this mystery Danish man. He hears her recount a dream where she doesn’t save him from crucifixion, and this idea, that she wouldn’t be faithful to him in her dreams and fantasies, drives him insane. He deals with this by wondering the streets and witnessing all sorts of weird psycho-sexual scenes. This, famously if you’ve seen EWS, ends with him at a masked orgy of rich people, which like the movie, takes place in the middle of the book. He is found out and has to flee and thus spends the rest of the book trying to figure out what went on with that orgy and if he can be with his wife, despite her being a separate person from him. The novel certainly implies that he girls at the orgy might be prostitutes or they might be the children of the rich, which is an intriguing twist. However, the book also makes it more ambiguous than the movie w/r/t whether or not the orgy stuff even happened or if this was his version of his wife’s dream. He also mentions several time that, in his capacity as a doctor he had recently been coughed on by an infectious person so he’s somewhat worried he might develop a deadly disease, so there’s some job-related trauma playing into this as well. Definitely an interesting take on desire, especially male desire, and the perversity of heterosexuality. Kubrick has such a good spin on it that I do find this to be one of the few examples of “movie is better than the book.” 1880 masked orgies.

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