WHO WE ARE AND HOW WE GOT HERE - DAVID REICH

This one got recommended to me by a buddy who’s deep into science books and science-writing. We often disagree on what’s good, he’s a Pinker-guy for example, but this time he came up with something quite good. This book is an overview of genetic research done in the last 20-30 years that seeks to fill in some of the gaps about how humans spread around the globe. There’s lots of stuff about how these techniques have evolved over time (ear bones apparently have the best chance of useable DNA w/r/t an acincet skeleton, for example), and how much fucking there was between early humans and Denisovians/Neanderthals (were they hotter than us?), but the thing about population movements was the most interesting to me. There’s interesting speculation about the journey some of our ancestors made out of Africa, including evidence that there must have been 3-4 different occurrences of groups making this trip as well as evidence of groups leaving Africa and then returning thousands of years later. There is very interesting evidence of things called star-clusters, where someone did so much fucking their DNA is visible thousands of years later. People probably know about the one suspected to be Ghengis Khan, though apparently 2-3 million currently living people, many with the last name O’Donnell, are believed to all be descended from someone who lived 1500 years ago. Reich does an okay job taking apart the difference between the idea of race an ancestory, and the ways in which genetic science has been missued by racists over time, including a part where he discusses the stupid work of Nicholas Wade who is quoted saying, “I’ve never seen anyone with a hobby in Africa,” which is an amazing statement. As far as critiques go, he comes off as naive about this technology’s potential for abuse. While I agree in theory (or in an ahistorical vacuum) with him that when discussing the problems with getting consent to study ancient remains in the Americas that, "the distrust that has emerged among some Native Americans might, on balance, be doing more harm that good" he comes off as outrageously naive when he doesn't see how this technology and research couldn't be used to harm. He actually writes, "I am not aware of any cases in which research in molecular biology, including genetics - a field that has arisen almost entirely since the end of WWII - has caused major harm to historically persecuted groups."  which is a truly amazing statement. One could easily point to the very famous example of the small-pox blankets, which was based on then-current understandings of molecular biology, but I assume he'd dismiss that as "long in the past'' there's also Tuskegee, human radiation experiments, Medical experimentation at Indigenous Boarding schools in the US and Canada, the long history of involuntary sterilizations of Natives and others running into, at least, the 70's (and recent suggestions that ICE was doing this at the border), Homlesberg, Top Hat, etc. It's a really long list. I know, personally, from Native's I've spoken with at events in Seattle (I used to have to drive Native kids to events on reservations or at community spaces in the city) that there is both a general distrust of whatever "well-meaning" scientists are up to and a more specific fear that genetics tests will be used to prove that people "aren't really indians" and will thus be denied benefits/rights/land. You saw a version of this when Liz Warren was trying to prove she was part Native with a blood test. It was cool to see some support for Marija Gimbutas, who’s theory, I thought, were considered fringe, but he seems to back up and support. Overall, this book is sort of a preview, it offers some cool insights about who was where when and shows how there are basically no “pure” groups in the sense of unmixed populations stable in just one area, everyone was moving around and interbreeding since time in memoria, but it mostly promises huge new insights (he draws a comparison to the advent of radio carbon dating and the changes that tech brought to archaeology) in the next few years and decades as this group of techniques is more widely used. I hope he’s right. We’ll see. 46 ear bones from early man.

THE PLACE OF DEAD ROADS - WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Burroughs is really a fool for this one. This is the second volume in his final, all-over-the-place trilogy that begins with CITIES OF THE RED NIGHT and concludes with THE WESTERN LANDS. I would say that I would not know these were a trilogy if someone had mentioned this online, it shares some thematic elements with COTRN but no character or settings and the thematic elements are the things present in all of the Burroughs oeuvre. An obsession with language being a virus and evil, weapons, especially guns, drugs, sex, conspiracy, it’s all here. The book centers around perhaps the most ur-Burroughs of characters, a Western gunfighter named Kim Carsons, who goes around the old west killing people and having gay sex, mostly with MENA boys. Eventually he forms a gang, called the Johnson Family, that assassinate and kill to advance a somewhat vague notion of freedom, against a shadowy group of controllers, called the Immortality Control Board of Venus (which I read as part of Burroughs’ famous misogyny) who are attempting to prevent humans from becoming free and immortal by reaching the Western Lands (which is the name of the final book in this trilogy, which I will read in a bit for sure). The book is, again in classic Burroughs fashion, non-linear and mostly a collection of scenes or “routine,” to use his word, which he seems to have strung together, somewhat as an after-though. Eventually, Carson goes into space and meets the Venusians and learns all about space-poisons and visits enormous weapons markets, has sex with all sorts of folks and other very Burroughs things. As always, the routines vary in quality, I would say overall, I liked this book less than COTRN, it just didn’t hit the same highs to me. I’m still looking forward to reading the last book in this series but the trilogy overall really is Burroughs distilled down to his sharpest elements and main obsessions. Here is a man who spent his whole life and professional career obsessed and thinking about the same things, sharpening his style and producing variations of the same thing. 83 dead roads

THE IMPLIED SPIDER: POLITICS AND THEOLOGY IN MYTH- WENDY DONIGER

Normally, one thinks of mythology, or mythological studies or comparative mythology as a primarily right-wing or conservative area. From Eliade to Evola to Campbell to Peterson, there does seem to be something about the study that attracts the right-wing and crypto-right-wing. Perhaps since myths, in theory, tell us why things are the way they are. As someone who loves mythology, of all sorts, I’ve always found this a bit depressing. Doniger fixes this problem though. If you’re not familiar, she’s a Indologist, Sanskritist and all around genius who’s written a number of very good books, including, The Woman Who Pretended To Be Who She Was, which is one of my favorites. She has an incredible command of mythology, with an emphasis on Indian/Hindu but with a tremendous depth in basically all areas, including movies (which she considers a sort of contemporary mythology). Her other books focus in on particular types of myths (like The Bedtrick, which focuses on people playing with their identities in sexual situations) but this one is more of a grand overview. She talks about micromyths, which is her term for the smallest unit of a myth, which allows us to compare different versions of the same myths, both within and between cultures. She ranges from the bible to Hindu epics to various versions of the Cinderella story (apparently, in most Asian version it involves shoes made of hair instead of glass) to Shakespeare. She touches on how it is possible to compare myths across cultures, and why this should be seen as useful, she discusses women’s voices in male-authored texts and male-voices in female-authored texts, she takes down the idea of Archetypes and Campbell’s stupid monomyth idea. She discusses the importance of seeing myths from a wide angle and in microscopic granularity. Overall, a good introduction to her style, her work and comparative mythology in general. She’s got a witty, wry writing style and a simply incredible level of erudition and knowledge to draw on. She’s hated by the Hindutva folks in India, which is a great endorsement. I think I still prefer TWWPTBWSW but if you’re interested in mythology in general, or if you’ve read Campbell/Peterson and would like to read something by a smart person instead, I’d recommend this. 1,001 myths. 

AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF A VODU SHRINE IN SOUTHREN TOGO: OF SPIRIT, SLAVE, AND SEA - CHRISTIAN VANNIER & ERIC MONTGOMERY

Honesty in advertising. This book is certainly what it says it is, an ethnography of a shrine in southern Togo. As you might have gathered, I’m currently living in Togo so this book is of particular interest to me. Actually, in just a day after writing this I’m going to travel to Ouidah, a city in Benin, which serves as the spiritual headquarters of Vodun/Vodu, the religion discussed in this book. Actually, to get even more precise, there are dozens of types of Vodun/Vodu (as well as spellings of said name) and this book focuses on Gorovodu, and a particular shrine outside of Lome. Where I live is 100% Muslim so I don’t actually encounter this relgious expression in my day-to-day life but I’ve been fascinated by African Traditional Religions for some time. As an ethnography this thing is pretty good. I does a good job laying out the interplay of religion and the lives of the people they are observing and it does a good job not weighing itself down in theory-speak. Though, they do reference Bakhtin and the carnivalesque which, as far as I can tell from my experience reading ethnographies, is basically mandatory. Anthropologists love talking about the carnivalesque. I have my typical complaints about ethnographies, sometimes they seem to extrapolate too far from seeing one single thing, how integrated and knowledgeable can they be spending only a year or two in these communities, how well do they actually speak Ewe and thus understand what is being said to them, etc. The book also features a long section about the history and current political situation in Togo (and the ruling family’s alleged ties to Vodu) which I personally found quite interesting and am going to ask around about here. There are better books about Vodun as a whole, DIVINE HORSEMAN (tho, this is about it’s iteration in Haiti) comes to mind, but as an overview, this was quite engaging and good. The reportage on various ceremonies was compelling. The parts about how the legacy of slavery plays into the current religious practices were very compelling. Basically, the Ewe were both the victims and co-perpetrators of this genocide and largely stole slaves from up north (where I live now) so they have ceremonies to appease these spirits who are, quite obviously, pissed about what happened to them. It was interesting to learn that these ceremonies take on a sort of quasi-Islamic vibe since the North is considered to be largely Muslim and Islam is respected as a source of spiritual power, even if the Ewe don’t practice it themselves. It’s quite a strange dynamic. I’ll have to see how much of this I recognize when I’m in Ouidah in a few days. 256 Aya

THE WITCH-HUNT NARRATIVE: POLITICS, PSYCHOLOGY, AND THE SEXUAL ABUSE OF CHILDREN - ROSS CHEIT

      This one was quite a slog. Another example of the kindle obscuring the length of the book so to the point that I’m not sure I would have picked it up had I known exactly how long and specific it would be. This is not to say I’m not interested in the topic. False Memory stuff, Satanic Panic, institutional corruption, moral panics, the McMartin scandal, group-think, all of that’s very interesting to me. Additionally, I used to work with foster care kids, many of whom had been victims of horrific child abuse so I’m pretty personally familiar that not only is this sort of stuff more common than we’d like to think, but that sometimes to more fantastical elements of a child’s abuse story can be true. This book is extremely in-depth. I thought Cheit would present a sort of bird’s eye view of people who’ve tried to “deboonk” the various child abuse scandals of the late 20th century. He does do that, in part, though large sections of the book deal with individual cases, such as McMartin, on a quite granular level. He creates charts and graphs explaining which kids accused who of what at what time and in what order. He discusses the exact wording of police questions and judicial instructions and generally gets very, very deep into the weeds. It is strange how reluctant folks are to acknowledge that “good people” could abuse and abuse over time, and how little they trust children, yet at the same time how punitive we are towards convicted pedophiles. Cheit does address these contradictions and has some smart things to say about them. I was less interested in the incredibly detailed and gruesome autopsies of individual cases and more in this higher-minded discussions of “what it all means.” Since the book has been released we’ve had the Penn State thing (which he address as this is a second addition), more Catholic church revelations and the Epstien thing (which is slightly different but of a piece for sure). This dynamic is still at play. You still have serious people doubting that such things are possible and calling any investigations witch-hunts. It’s all quite depressing. As a quick and insane aside, a few years ago, 2018 I believe, the FBI released a ton of documents about all sorts of matters, including The Finders, a bizarre cult that are at the center of lots of conspiracy theories (most of which I’m not very sold on) but in these reports, on pages 48 and 49 of part one (https://vault.fbi.gov/the-finders/the-finders-part-01-of-03/view) the report that there were, in fact, tunnels under the McMartin preschool complete with pentagrams. This isn’t mentioned in the book but it’s very strange and bears repeating. Either way, this books is quite thorough and sheds some real light on a difficult but important subject. When a crowd is yelling witch-hunt, it’s important to not get swept up in the masses. 1984 secret tunnels.  

THE NAKED SOUL OF ICEBERG SLIM - ICEBERG SLIM

The quest to read all the Iceberg Slim continues. Slim has always had a strange relationship between his life and his art, his books move back and forth between mostly memoir and outright fiction, but even the things presented as “true,” like his most famous book PIMP, has elements that have been changed and altered, both because of the criminality of what he’s writing about as well as a desire to tell a compelling story. This book is the only, as far as I know, purely non-fiction account of Slim’s life and even this has some stories that seem almost too poignant and novelistic to be 100% true as written (though I don’t doubt that, in spirit, all of this stuff happened). This book is a collection of essays about Slim’s life. It covers incidents from his childhood that he thinks shaped him into a ruthless pimp and criminal, for instance, being abused by his father and watching a friend get murdered over a dime. It covers some of his thoughts on the psychology of pimping that he touches on in his novels and memoirs. Ideas like, “her freakish yen for the punishment ritual of “kiss, kick” that is the pimp’s trade.” He covers the racial dynamics of pimping, between YT women and Black men as well as between YT men (who he consistently insists are often scat fetishists) and Black women. All of this stuff is covered in his memories and novels, at his laziest, he quotes long sections of his novels to drive home a point. Most interesting to me are the parts of the book that cover his life as a quasi-famous (or famous in Black neighborhoods) writer and cultural figure. The single best and most interesting, and I hope true, story involves going to the LA Panther’s headquarters a day after their famous shoot-out with the LAPD. He goes up to some of the leaders and tries to talk with them. People in the audience start to gather and tell the Panthers who Slim is and how he’s a famous writer and the Panthers take him to task for the counter-revolutionary nature of pimping. Slim is so happy he starts crying, which the lingering tear-gas helps him conceal. He writes about how his generation was angry and upset about the racism of the USA but, in a fit of cowardice, directed this anger towards even more vulnerable members of the Black community while the Panthers were bravely directing their anger at the system itself.  I feel like he’d be disappointed in where that Panther energy went and how the figure of the pimp and hustler, an archetype that he helped solidify is, if anything, more popular than ever. As always, please enjoy this list of street names culled from the book. 1969 Cadillacs

-Dandy Sammy

-Cat Daddy

Pretty Bert

-Giggling George

-Three-Way Rosie

-Slick Shorty

Conqueror Jackson

-Old Tom

-Yellow Kid Weil

-Sweetsend Pappy Luke

-Drawback

-Black Duchess

10:04 - Ben Lerner

Lerner is one of those popular current writers that I’ve never gotten around to reading. I remember being in college and his poetry and first book being popular. I remember this volume coming out and people really enjoying it. I remember his most recent book from a year or two ago that also got a surprising amount of buzz for a novel. Plus, I believe he taught beloved contemporary poet/novelist Ocean Vugon. What I did not know is that this, and apparently all of his work, is autofiction, which, especially if we include straightforward memoir, is the literary mode of the day. Why is this? Why are so few people interested in actual novels where the action and characters are made-up? Even anecdotal, everyone I know who has written or is writing a book is writing a memoir or a slightly fictionalized version of their own life. This is very strange to me, especially when the person writing it is someone like Lerner, who doesn’t live a particularly interesting life. He’s a successful poet and author so his life is teaching poetry, and going to artist residencies and wandering around NYC doing rich, artsy guy things like diners and gallery openings. Tao Lin is similar in this regard but Tao at least has managed to go insane and suffuse his books with his esoteric beliefs and drug-fueled lifestyle. Lerner does do Ketamine by accident at one point in this book but otherwise he’s a very square guy. He lets a guy who’s going to Occupy crash at his fancy Brooklyn apartment for a day or two but doesn’t go to the protests himself. He tutors a child of undocumented immigrants but just buys the kid stuff when he’s having trouble keeping him on track. He’s asked by his aging female friend to donate sperm so she can have a child though she doesn't necessarily want him involved. He sort of just floats through life in this privileged bubble; he often reminds us that he was paid something in the high 6-figures for this book, since the process of deciding to write, then selling, then changing the ideas for the book we are reading is a big through line of the book. As are his friends asking him if what they’re doing is going to end up in the novel, or saying they don’t want to be in the novel or telling Lerner he sounds like he’s in the novel. I will say it is very well written. I read it in about a day and many of the individual sentences were well crafted and the book moved pleasantly for something in which very little happens. I can tell that he’s a poet. I assume now that his books are popular because they’re reviewed and read by people who are also in the book publishing/author world and are able to deeply relate to what Lerner is talking about. I’m not in that world, so its depiction struck me as shallow and unpleasant, which I don’t think was the intent. It is very strange to me that people would want autofiction from a person that lives such a boring life. 1004 expensive dinners.

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.