RETURN TO THE WHORL - GENE WOLFE

It’s all over now. It took a few years and, I’m going to guess, dozens perhaps hundreds of hours, but I’ve now made my way through the entire Solar Cycle. That’s 12 books divided into three series . The 5 volume Book of the New Sun, the 4 Volume Book of the Long Sun and, finally, this Book of the Short Sun trilogy. And, in many ways, that has really only allowed me to begin this series since, as the adage goes, there is no reading Wolfe, only rereading, which seems most true with this last trilogy. Wolfe was deep in his bag with this one. All of these novels are puzzle boxes to some extent. The fun of Solar Cycle books is reading between the lines and figuring out what’s actually going on. It is a distantly Wolfe-ian joy to figure out the never-stated but hinted at revelations early in New Sun that the characters are actually on Earth in the far-far future and that the “castle” is actually a disused space-ship, to name two obvious examples. But if the earlier books are puzzle boxes, Wolfe goes full Pinhead with these last three and dials up the interlocking mysteries to the highest levels I’m aware of. Because the timelines are screwed up in these three novels, it’s only at the end of this book that events in the other two volumes make any sense. It begs to be re-read with the knowledge you get by finishing, so, in many ways, I can’t really review it properly. That being said, I did find this book satisfying and interesting. Early in this volume we get a farmer explaining how to hybridize corn and the importance of hybridization, which seems boring but actually stuck me as a commentary on the theme of hybridization that runs throughout the novel. Many (most? maybe all?) of the characters are shown to be hybrids of some form or another. The narrator, Horn, is obviously Silk, which is confirmed with the last words of the novel, but dozens of the other characters, including a talking bird, are also revealed to either contain 2 or more entities within them and/or are given to being possessed. We also learn more about the Inhumni which reveals all of them to be something of a hybrid species. All of the Gods are revealed to contain parts of aspects of characters from the original series, even the planets themselves might be newer versions of “our” planets. I was glad to see the inclusion of Abaia, the sea-monster/goddess from New Sun who I always wanted to know more about. She’s actually seen here as a collection of monstrous sea-women (who are perhaps growing out of Abaia’s back? That’s how I read the scene). I felt the inclusion of Severian, from the New Sun series seemed tacked on, especially since there was no reference to this meeting in the original series, this book contains a cop-out line where Severian pointedly says he won’t write about this meeting, but there are some things like the size of Severian’s dog that don’t quite match up with the original so maybe something deeper is going on. Again, I’ll have to reread the whole thing, now that I have a basic outline of the whole story. Overall, I’d say the New Sun series is justifiably considered the best. The overall vibe is strongest and weirdest. The Long Sun series is the easiest to understand and has powerful vibes, but not next-level vibes like New Sun. These 3 books fit in between them. Wolfe is really flexing his writer muscles by folding in all these mysteries and allusions, it’s hard to imagine anyone else could have written this thing. I would say that at a certain point the mysteries and confusion overwhelm the vibe, to the books’ detriment. Hard to complain tho, very cool stuff overall. I look forward to rereading the whole series from the beginning, maybe in a year or so, and seeing what I can get out of it now that I’ve done the background work of reading it for the first time. 3 Whorls

MASTERS OF DEATH - RICHARD RHODES

Dark stuff. This book covers the history of Holocaust and, specifically, the role of the the Einsatzgruppen, the SS units that did most of the massacring and killing. The popular depictions of the Holocaust focus on the shower/gas chambers probably because it’s such an extreme and gruesome image, one that’s pretty unusual in human history, however, the vast majority of the ~20 million unarmed deaths perpetrated by the Nazis (6 million Jews, 3 million Poles, 7 million Soviet citizens, 3 million Soviet POWs) were shot by these mobile groups that went from town to town behind the Wehrmacht to clear the area for German colonialism. As you can imagine, this book is quite grim. Lots of first-hand accounts of entire towns being marched or trucked out of town into a forest and shot, one after another, and thrown into a pit. A surprising (to me at least) number of people didn’t die from the shots, played dead for a few hours while their neighbors and loved ones were killed and stacked on top of them, then climbed out of a pile of the dead and dying and ran to safety. Their accounts are in this book and they’re beyond one’s ability to really think about. Two me there were two really interesting issue this book brought up. The first has to do with what the Nazis thought they were doing. At first the story is that they’re killing partisans and resistance fighters, people who would kill German troops if given a chance making their liquidations a matter of self-protection. However, when they move on to women and children and non-military aged men, this reasoning stops really making sense, to either the leadership or the soldiers themselves. The leadership (we’ll get back to the soldiers) starts to reach for the language of colonialism to explain what they’re doing. Himmler says that once they clear out Eastern Europe, they’ll be able to populate the area with Wehrbauer, their term for soldier/farmer/settlers. They specifically invoke a number of Western European and American projects. Hitler says, “The Russian space is our India. Like the English we shall rule this empire with a handful of men,” and, at another time, “There is one duty: to Germanize this country by immigration and to look upon the natives [of Eastern Europe and Russia] as Redskins…I don’t see why a German who eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil that produced this bread has been won by the sword. When we eat wheat from Canada, we don’t think about the despoiled Indian.” So basically he was trying to shove into a few short years the amount of genocide that took the classical Imperial powers, France, USA, Britain, a number of decades to accomplish. It’s also interesting to me that they were constantly attempting to keep these actions a secret as possible. They punished SS men who took pictures (sometimes as documents of the horrors but more often for sadistic personal reasons) and occasionally attempted to move graves and exhume and burn bodies so opposing armies wouldn’t find them. One thinks about the world in which they won and talking about the Nazi holocaust gets you the looks you get when you talk about the US’s actions as genocide (try comparing the Texas Rangers to the Einstazgruppen, a pretty one-to-one comparison, and see how people react). The second interesting issue the book raised had to do with how Nazi leadership dealt with the soldiers tasked with carrying these actions out. On the one hand, you need men to actually pull the trigger and kill hundreds of defenseless and crying men/women/children everyday for days on end without “becoming weak and cracking up” (Himmler’s words) but they also didn’t want them to enjoy it too much and become sadistic psychos who tarnish the reputation of the German army.Himmler himself described it as a Scylla and Charybdis situation. At first they attempt to have locals in the towns they conquer do the killings themselves. The Banderists and the Order of Ukrainian Nationalists, both of whom have become very famous recently with all the current war in Ukraine, were eager to massacre Jews but the rest of the region wasn’t getting the job done quick enough. This actually makes me think of later US massacres, like El Mozote, or Dasht-i-Leili or some of the Phoenix stuff, where the US planned, ordered and oversaw “locals” doing the killing to retain some level of deniability. But back to the Nazis, they set up hospitals and programs for SS men who suffer nervous breakdowns due to their role in the killings. They instruct officers to make sure to have big group dinners afterwards, in the “German style,” with alcohol and music, to help these men compartmentalize what they did and allow them to keep on killing. However, the book also has a brief part at the end about a unit called Sonderkommando Dirlewanger, made up of criminals from German prisons and headed by an alcoholic, pedophillic veteran tasked with the most gruesome rape-and-pillage style actions imaginable so perhaps they weren’t always so concerned about optics. Overall, while to book is dark as it gets, it does connect up to the present. As more and more of our wars rely on these specialized units, who we often call “Death Squads” when they’re not on our side and “Special Forces” when they are, who are often engaged in “work” that is both secretive and unsavory (looking at you Seal Team 6), is probably good to look back to see where this sort of technique was refined for the 20th century. The Enstazgruppen legacy is certainly alive and well. 1939 Special Units

ACID DREAMS: THE COMPLETE SOCIAL HISTORY OF LSD: THE CIA, THE SIXTIES AND BEYOND - MARTIN A. LEE & BRUCE SHLAIN

When reading TRIPPING WITH ALLAH a few weeks ago, I noted how the author quickly dismissed the idea of making LSD part of his psychedelic journey and how hypocritical it seemed since his objection seemed to be that it wasn’t deeply rooted in a tradition, like Ayahuasca. Obviously, this is quite false, there is a robust history, if relatively short compared to things like Ayahuasca, but a history that has much more complicated implications for someone like the author, who was, at the time of writing TWA, a Harvard student. The good news is that we now have this book to help us understand the history of LSD, the only psychedelic a W.E.I.R.D. person can reasonably do without accusations of appropriation. Acid is very much a product of the 20th century West, for better or worse. This book gives a good rundown of the history, from bicycle day up through the middle of the 70’s. As you might know, the interest in Acid comes in two waves. An early wave where it is the focus of CIA interests through MKULTRA alongside a handful of smarty-pants, upper-crust intellectuals, such as Aldous Huxely, who often have ties (often unknown to them) to intelligence. Then something happens, and it suddenly pours into the counterculture and nascent anti-war movement where it spawns psychedelic art and rock and becomes a bedrock part of “The 60’s” and the self-congratulatory Boomer Imaginary. There’s all sorts of fun anecdotes, like Leary and his crew taking over a beach in Mexico where they erect a town on the water and have someone tripping in it 24/7 as a sort of psychedelic vigil, but the most interesting part of the book concerns the million dollar question of whether or not the psychedelic boom was counterinsurgency, ie did the CIA flood the New Left with Acid to make render it navel-gaze-y and ineffective? It is interesting to see things like Ken Kesey going to early anti-war demonstrations and telling people to just ignore the war and work on themselves while the Hells’ Angles he brought with him beat people up. Tim Leary’s message, of tuning out and not engaging in politics as such, was on a similar wavelength. William Burroughs, of all people, was an early proponent of this idea, that the amount of acid and its timing was sus. John Sinclair endorses the idea, as do a number of more “classic” leftists from the time. There’s an awful lot of spooky folks mixed up in the early Acid days. Jolly West, who is mentioned here but deserves so much more space (this book was written in the 80’s and we’ve got more info on him now. I’d recommend CHAOS and POISONER IN CHIEF to learn more about what the fuck he was up to), was working at the Haight Ashbery free clinic during the Summer of Love (and when Manson was bringing girls there). Leary himself is bankrolled and put up, first by OSS officer and Ted K. torturer Harry Murry at Harvard, then by Billy Hickcock, a member of the Mellon Family with all sorts of ties to CIA connected banks, like Castle and Resorts International. John Starr Cooke, who is also related to very high up CIA folks helps plan and fund the Human Be-In. Captain Alfred M. Hubbard, who gave LSD to Leary and turned on over 6000 people apparently, was OSS and considered “The Johnny Appleseed of Acid.” The list goes on and on. The most intriguing to me concerns a guy named Ronald Hadley Stark, who was a member and bankroller of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a group that both produced millions of hits of Acid in the mid-late 60’s but also funded Leary’s prison break. Stark was a mysterious guy, who did tell people he was in the CIA and, when he wasn’t setting up Acid labs, bounced around Europe, selling drugs and involving himself with terrorists groups across Europe and the Middle East. At one point, after an arrest for involvement in Italian terrorism, a judge in Italy declared that he thought Stark had some relationship with American intelligence. A CIA asset funding the Orange Sunshine Acid seems pretty smoking gun to me but Stark is very mysterious and the book cannot definitely prove what he deal was, maybe he was a con artist/drug dealer/terrorist and saying he was involved with the CIA was part of that. He reminds me of Reeve Whitson from CHAOS, a very strange guy who might be CIA, might just be a real weirdo, but we’ll never be allowed to know, despite the implications being very far-out. Either way, this book was a great read, certainly worth reading and thinking about if you’re interested in psychedelics or American history. At best, Acid can be thought of like the Internet, something created by our nation’s enormous and monstrous military/intelligence-industrial complex that’s managed to really integrate itself into our culture. Definitely going to ponder some of the stuff in here the next time I drop acid. 25 hits of orange sunshine.

IN GREEN’S JUNGLES - GENE WOLFE

Lots of books get accused of being difficult, Pynchon or Joyce pop directly to mind, but typically when people say that they mean long and perhaps screwed up, time-line-wise. However, Wolfe actually deserves this reputation. This is perhaps one of the most difficult and confusing books I’ve ever read. In some ways, it is unfair to review it as a single volume. It’s the middle part of a trilogy, which is itself part of a longer dodecology, all of which, by every account, can’t really be understood the first time through. To read Wolfe is to reread Wolfe, as the saying goes, and this book very much proves that rule. We continue the story of Horn, on his quest to retrieve Silk from the Long Sun Whorl, a generational star-ship, and bring him to the newly colonized planet of Blue. However, while the last book focused on two main timelines, the beginning of Horn’s journey and after Horn’s return, having “failed,” this book jumps all over the place and seems to involve some sort of time travel and/or astral projection. I suspected that Horn died and was resurrected in the last book and he much more straightforwardly undergoes the same experience in this book. Only when he’s resurrected it seems to be in Silk’s body, though he doesn’t seem to have realized that himself yet. While none of the mysteries of the first book are really answered, we have been given many more. There is much more about the Neighbors, the aliens who lived on Green and Blue before humans arrived and the Inhumi, a vampiric race of shapeshifters. Also, like I said before, Horn/Silk now seems to be able to timetravel and/or astrally project so in addition to ambiguity over who certain characters actually are, now there is ambiguity over where/when the characters actually are. We also get the first (to me, I’m sure if/when I reread there will be other instances I missed) appearance of the Red Sun World. As stated above, the book is part of the grander Solar Cycle that includes the much more famous Book of the New Sun series but so far the references have been oblique. In this book we finally get a return to that world and, hopefully, some more connections in the next book. I’m going to have to read the last book in this series very soon so all the information is fresh in my mind. It’s clear that this book is such a puzzle box and mindfuck it will only be clear after finishing the whole series a few times (and probably not even then, it’s certainly fertile ground for obsessives) so reading the middle volume the first time is mostly just confusing. However, even through all the density and slipperiness you do get the palpable sense that Wolfe knows what he’s doing, that everything is in the book for a reason and that the mysteries are ultimately solvable if you’re willing to look for them. I hope he sticks the landing. 3 Intersellar Whorls 

THE ANARCHY: THE EAST INDIA COMPANY, CORPORATE VIOLENCE, AND THE PILLAGE OF AN EMPIRE - WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

A beast of a book that I noticed a few months ago in a bookstore and felt like I needed to tackle. Honestly, I should have read this thing years ago (tho, it came out in 2019, so I’m speaking metaphorically), before I lived in Kolkata, where much of the action of this book takes place. This 500+ page monster tells the tale of how Britain conquered India, or, more specifically and interestingly, how the East India Company, which was a one of the world’s first joint-stock corporations, a type of entity invented in the 16th century, came to dominate the entire subcontinent, not to rule in the traditional, empiric sense, but rather as a business venture to extract money for shareholders. The book is almost all rise, it basically ends in 1803 when the EIC has eliminated all other major contenders in what will become India, we get a half-chapter of explanation w/r/t the revolutions to unseat them in the 19th century and then the dissolvement of the EIC into British colonial rule. Which is fine, the book is already so dense and long that another half century of history would have been too much. If anything, more about Mughal India before the EIC, since this stuff isn’t taught in American schools, would have been helpful for more context. Dalrymple zeros in on the ways in which the EIC was a new sort of entity in the world. As I said, the EIC was separate from the government proper of England. The idea of holding territory not to grow your empire and add to your glory, in the abstract sense, but to make as much money as possible for your stockholders (not even your country writ-large) was a new idea, and one that persisted through classic colonialism, which India later became, and lives on now through neo-colonialism. I’m writing this in Africa where you can see foreign companies extracting without returning anything real of value everywhere you look, a set-up pioneered by the EIC. It’s amazing to see the ways that the EIC plays the various leaders and factions of India against one another, time and time again. It was fascinating to read about the way these developments were perceived in Britain. The EIC was the subject of the first corporate bribery scandal, and the first major parliamentary hearings w/r/t a corporation. There were plays satirizing their brutality and greed and concern in the American colonies that they’d be treated like the Indians. It was interesting to chew on the idea that the British, unlike in the USA, didn’t really stay and intermarry in large numbers in India. Young men would go there to seek their fortune then return to England to buy political influence and live out their lives in comfort. I can’t help but consider the ways this must have added to their brutality. Without having women and children and family that you care about around, or even a sense that where you are is a place you care about and are invested in beyond extraction, you’re free to operate in a way that Indian leaders were not. Likewise, it was always extra interesting to hear about the larger world-political implications of the English presence in India, like Napoleon’s attempts to take his army there or the ways in which the 7 Years’ War connects Canada to India. It’s also a great reminder of how brutal and awful colonialism was, how much raw money and life was stolen from the subcontinent and how we live with this terrible theft to this day. Finally, it was somewhat disappointing, but perhaps to be expected, given a writer with the last name Dalrymple, to see him try to both spit hairs and not really investigate the idea of a “good colonialist”. The author bemoans the fact that Warren Hastings is almost impeached for Company rule in India but the much worse Clive is not. He goes out of his way to tell us how much Hastings loved India and spoke the languages and knew the people and whatnot without, really, to my mind, wrestling with the idea that this might have, in fact, made things worse for the people of India. Perhaps made the brutality of the robbery going on more obscure. Probably a moral question that deserves its own book but the idea of a Colonialists who “love” India versus the openly racist and contemptuous ones pops up a few times and could have used more ink. Anyway, as well fall deeper and deeper into corporate rule in the present, especially if they ever achieve their dreams of expanding into space, it would behoove us to look back at where this nightmare began. 1774 Sepoys. 

THE WEIRD AND THE EERIE - MARK FISHER

Mark Fisher only seems to be getting more and more popular as the years since his suicide roll on, so I felt it was only appropriate to dip my toes back in. I’ve read his most famous book, CAPITALIST REALISM, which does deserve the hype, it’s really good and punchy and interesting, as well as some of his blog writing and parts of the book he was working on when he died, called, intriguingly, ACID COMMUNISM (more on the idea of an acid communism in a future review), but this is the second full book of his I’ve read. Sadly, this is not as good as CR, it’s much more plain. As promised, the book is indeed about the states of weirdness and eeriness. He does a good job defining both; the weird is something that is not supposed to be there, the eerie has to do with an unexpected presence or absence. From there the book dissolves into general cultural criticism. We get who you’d expect w/r/t weirdness and eeriness: H.P. Lovecraft, Lynch, Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Joy Division, etc. And, like most cultural criticism, it’s interesting when you’re already interested in the work being discussed, like, say, Tarkovsky, and boring when he’s talking about something dull, like a Chris Nolan film. Fisher is smart and incisive and I came away with a few movies and bands to check out, but no really big ideas. Given the subject matter and incisiveness of CR, I was hoping for him to discuss, at length, the weird and eerie aspects of capitalism, but we get only the most cursory statements. Definitely work checking out individual essays if you dig the topic but overall not anywhere near the heights he reaches elsewhere. 1 weird and eerie road.

ODES AND EPODES - HORACE (trans. by Niall Rudd)

I “studied” Latin for my entire high school career but it’s been a while since I’ve dipped my toes back into the classics. In my Latin classes, which I loved but was quite bad at, we followed the national program and studied Julius Caesar first, since he’s easy, it’s all stuff about how large the camps are and how many Gauls he killed on a given day, then moved onto Catullus and, a little Virgil. Catullus is great, very horny stuff, surprisingly funny, and very relatable 2000 years later in a way that the traditional emphasis on heroics one finds in something like Virgil is not. I’ve read a lot of Ovid in translation too, who is also fun and interesting. All that being said, I never translated any Horace or really read him in translation so I decided to break up some of my heavier reading (I’m deep into these Short Sun books as well as a 500+ page tome about India and the EIC) with some poetry. This volume was a scan of the classic (in both senses) Loeb library edition, ie those small red books with Latin on one side and English on the other, but, sadly, the scans were somewhat fucked up and some of the pages were out of order and/or missing. Either way, it was fun to look over some of the Latin and see how much I remember from a decade+ ago. Very little, it turns out, though I did remember the fact that Latin puts not importance on word order, which opens up a whole universe of poetic possibilities that are not present in English. The poems themselves were somewhat underwhelming; I came out of this thinking that Catullus and Ovid are very much better. It’s never as funny or sad as Catullus and never as far-out and mythologically dense as Ovid. That’s not to say there isn’t some good stuff. There’s constant references to far-away parts of the empire, from Britain to China, which is pretty mind-blowing to consider given how old these poems are. My favorite parts were the parts about wanting to live a quiet life in the country, sitting in the sun, enjoying your farm, letting the world pass you by. It’s amazing how frequently this desire comes up in ancient poetry, from Li Po to Virgil. Something to that, I suppose. There is an interesting line about how it feels good to be silly sometimes, which is a great sentiment to get passed down through the ages. It also includes the notorious “Dulce et Decorum est” line, which I would say has aged much less well. So while I wouldn’t put Horace in my top tier of Latin poets, he’s a good edition. 55 Odes. 

TRIPPING WITH ALLAH: ISLAM, DRUGS AND WRITING - MICHAEL MUHAMMAD KNIGHT

Not often does a book so accurately diagnose its own weaknesses as this one. And so late in the book as well. In the last 5 pages or so of MMK’s book about drugs and Islam he confesses that his true addiction, beyond his obsession with weightlifting and masturbation or the drugs or the many strains of Islam he’s interested in, all of which are explored to some degree or another in the text, is writing. He comes clean about how driven and obsessed he is with writing, especially of the autobiographical variety, and how he’s been this way his whole life. And this book really reflects that. There’s some really good, interesting shit in here, including the climatic ayahuasca trip the whole thing is built around, but also a ton of chaff that should have been cut. Chaff first: there’s a bunch of stuff about wrestling, that basically comes out of nowhere. I gather that professional wrestling is important to Knight, and he relays a story here about a time where he wrestled some old guy (who, apparently, is pro-wrestling famous, though that’s not my world so I didn’t recognize him) which seems to only be in this book because it happened to him and he’s compelled to write about it. Likewise, he spends a lot of time watching and thus writing about Transformers, the shitty 80’s TV show, which also never seems to actually connect with the stuff he’s talking about. There’s a ton about his chronic masturbation and bodybuilding and his fears that becoming an academic, he’s in grad school at Harvard during the book and, I believe, is a professor of Islamic studies now, will make his gonzo-style (he himself brings up Hunter Thompson multiple times, it’s not me putting that on him) writing boring. And perhaps that is true, academics do often write boring detached essays that suck the life out of their subjects. However, I’m most interested in Knight when he’s not writing about his personal life but rather writing about more “academic” studies. For instance, there’s long passages and chapters about the history of Islamic thinking w/r/t drugs. Does the Koran bar all drugs, or just alcohol (or, really, just wine)? What about caffeine? How do other religious traditions deal with substances? How does one read an almost 2000 year old text for rules regarding matters that were not at issue when the Prophet was alive? All of this is more interesting than Knight’s personal reflections. The drug stuff itself does lead to a satisfying conclusion. Knight attempts to do Ayahuasca a few times, first with the Santo Daime church then with some new-agey Shaman in California. The last time he really gets blasted into the spirit realm and has a pretty insane vision in which he becomes Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet and gets fucked by her Husband (and first male Islamic convert) Ali. Very far-out and he uses the experience to talk about the divine feminine in Islam and monotheistic religions in general, which is a topic I wish he’d spent more time on. I was somewhat disappointed he didn’t really investigate “Ayahuasca” as a whole, especially the recent YT, western obsession with it. He has this whole thing about how it’s “natural” and embedded in a cultural tradition and, thus, better than something like LSD. I was reminded of a recent Erik Davis essay where he talks about how one of Acid’s main selling points is that it doesn’t come with the culturally appropriator baggage that these other hallucinogens do. Mushrooms and Ayahuasca and Ibogaine are all culturally embedded in societies ravaged by colonialism and capitalism. Even if you’re doing these things “with a shaman” you’re not part of those cultures. Authenticity is not for sale in this way. Despite what Knight thinks you most certainly can just take Ayahuasca without a shaman’s oversight. I did exactly this when I was 19, with ingredients I bought online and cooked up in my shitty apartment, and ended up with a very, very powerful and strange experience that I think about to this day. And, as a YT guy who’s into fringe religious beliefs and who is working/studying at Harvard, LSD is actually his heritage and culture, he just doesn’t like it because it’s not cool the way Ayahuasca is. Anyway, I wish he’d thought about those issues more. There’s a part where he talks at a gathering of intelligence community folks about Islam and Al-Queda and I wish he’d been more ‘noided about why he was being asked to be there besides “this is really weird.” Especially given his love and involvement with the Black Muslim communities of NYC, since, to name just one example, the CIA sent Tablighin Jamaat and Sheik Mubark Gilani  into USA mosques to recruit Black American Muslims, especially in Brooklyn, to fight USSR in Afghanistan. Anyway, when Knight’s talking about something I’m interested in, he’s great and full of interesting information, I only hope that his fears become true and his deepening involvement in academia remove the more autobiographical aspects of his writing and he can focus on the more “boring” non-personal issues. 1 endless trip.

NOMAD CODES: ADVENTURES IN MODERN ESOTERICA - ERIK DAVIS

I got to meet Davis a few years ago, when he came to Seattle to talk about his latest book HIGH WEIRDNESS, which is very good. Very cool guy who comes off in person the same way he comes off in this book. This volume is from much earlier in his career, when he was writing for magazines and his website and basically doing smaller scale stuff. Davis’ “beat,” so to speak, is weirdness in all its forms. He concentrates on new religious movements, California culture in general, unusual music, and general strangeness. This book offers straightforward essays as well as reviews and travelogues. I would say he’s best when he’s discussing American 20th century religion, specifically his essay about Buddhism's spread in America (and its intersection with psychedelia, to which he draws a fascinating comparison with the ways Buddhism merged with Bon in Tibet) or his experiences at Burning Man. When he travels further from American culture he gets muddier. There’s an essay about Legba/Eshu and one about Burmese Nats (which also has the misfortune, I don’t think it’s maliciousness, of using the word “tranny” multiple times) which are much more surface level,  there are better sources for both subjects. He has an essay about Gak, the Nickelodeon slime that was popular when I was a kid which puts the “slime craze” of a few years ago into perspective. Perhaps slime obsession is on a twenty year cycle? He has an interesting review of the second Matrix movie that was a bit of a throwback. There’s a very good essay about the end of Terrance McKenna’s life. I learned that Sublime Frequency records, a label that has put out some cool, obscure stuff I’ve enjoyed, is a Seattle thing, founded by some weirdo with a strange band that, I guess, was underground famous in the 90’s. These essays, about strange “world music” (an awful term), bring up interesting issues about appropriation and the politics of enjoyment for Global North folks who are interested in the obscure and unusual and exotic from the Global South. This tension and outlook, it’s pitfalls and advantages, is, to me, the most interesting theme of the book. The sort of outlook that Davis has, one where you search the world for the weird and the strange, learn about it while maintaining some sort of distance, seems both very Gen X and much more fraught these days. The pendulum has swung, and lots of this global syncretism would be seen as approprative and exploitative. I think Davis does a good job defending his stance on these issue and, at minimum, seems aware of the implications and tensions involved with his project, tho maybe don’t ask me, given how sympathetic I am to his outlook and style. I do think he’s done a good job, in the years since this book has been written, of zeroing in on what he’s best at, ie PKD, California, Western Drug culture, etc., and dropping the rest. He’s quite erudite and a readable writer, it’s sad that magazines that would publish stuff like this basically don’t exist anymore. That being said, he still churns out great books, HIGH WEIRDNESS is his most recent and best, so this is something of an interesting time capsule. 90 gram doses. 

CAPITAL CITY: GENTRIFICATION AND THE REAL ESTATE STATE - SAMUEL STEIN

I was disappointed in this one. I’ve lived in a lot of cities in my life. I’ve lived a year or more in LA, Chicago, Seattle, Mexico City, and I’ve lived for months at a time in Pune Antananarivo, Kolkata, Havana, and visited dozens of others. I’m very pro-city, spend a lot of time thinking about how cities work and believe that they are only going to become a bigger part of the way we live in the future. I think of myself as a “city guy".” My entire life living and moving between cities has also been concerned with gentrification. How it works, what it is, who benefits and who/what forces drive it, what it means for the future of cities, are all important questions that I’d love to know more about. This book didn’t go deep enough into these issues for me. For one, the book is very focused on NYC, where Stein is a city planner and college lecturer, and I’m not an NYC guy. New York does act as the testing grounds and birthplaces for some trends that work themselves out in other cities, “broken-windows policing” comes to mind, but there are more aspects that make it unique and unlike anywhere else in the world (which NYers are always squawking about). Secondly, the book is a bit two surface-level. We get a basic rundown of how gentrification works and how our national economy switched from industry to Finance, Insurance, Real Estate (FIRE) starting in the 80’s (it coincides with and is part of the neoliberal turn) and what this has meant to city real estate and the politics of cities. All this is fine but again, a little 101. There’s a long section in the middle about the career of the Trump Family, from DJT’s grandfather to The Donald himself, which seeks to show how developers have responded to different governmental incentives over time, ie his father built cheap (shitty) housing for workers in Queens while DJT himself built expensive (shitty) housing for rich people in Manhattan, both of them following the government incentives, tax-breaks and money. Again, this information is somewhat interesting as history and biography, but it’s very specific to Trump and NYC and doesn’t connect out to gentrification writ large. Finally, Stein feigns at solutions but doesn’t flesh any out. He suggests that city-planners need to be more radical. He suggests we need large scale social movements to challenge capitalism and, thus, to change the conditions our cities operate under. I agree with all that, but I’d like more theory as to what we could build in the aftermath. He suggests looking to places like Havana for solutions, which, again, I agree with (and I’ve been to Havana, he right that it does have very interesting housing and housing laws) but I wish he’d spend a whole chapter talking about how things work in Havana, what their challenges have been, how they’ve adapted over the years, etc. Or had any chapters about non-NYC places and the ways they experience gentrification being similar and different from one another. I could see this book being more interesting if you’re an NYC person who’s deeply familiar with the neighborhoods and specific issues but to a person who’s interested in gentrification in general, it leaves one wanting more. 1624 gentrified neighborhoods

ON BLUE’S WATERS - GENE WOLFE

Every closer to finishing the complete Solar Cycle. Wolfe’s twelve novel long scifi/fantasy epic has loomed over my reading list for a couple of years now. The books themselves can be slotted into the four-volume Book of the New Sun, plus a one book coda, followed by a four book long series called Book of the Long Sun, and now this final series of three novels known as the Book of the Short Sun. It’s a pretty amazing accomplishment, it’s mind bending that he could keep all of this in his head and release it over 3 decades, it sort of as if George RR Martin was able to complete this Song of Ice and Fire books successfully. But on to this book in particular, the first of the Short Sun novels. At first glance, these volumes are much more closely related to the previous series. It takes a while to see how Long Sun and New Sun are connected but OBW takes place about 20 years after the events of Long Sun and stars a “minor” (who we learn, late in the Long Sun series, is the diegetic author of the Long Sun books) character from that series. But, of course, since this is Wolfe there are immediately all sorts of questions about the identities of the characters and the circumstances of the books writing. Nominally, it is Horn’s Journal and his story, told from 2 perspectives. In one story, he’s reminiscing on his quest to leave Blue, a mostly water planet where he’s been for 20 years, to travel back to the generational spaceship, the Whorl, that was the setting of Long Sun, in order to find that series’ main character, Silk, and to convince him to come to Blue and be their leader. While recounting that story, Horn is also telling us the “contemporary” circumstances of his life, where he is Goan, or ruler, so another city on Blue that is at war with a neighbor as well as a race of quasi-vampires called Inhumi from Green, a nearby planet covered in forests. In this timeline, he seems to have already returned from the Whorl and Green and seems to suggest that he’s failed his mission. But it’s Wolfe so there’s also the strong suggestion that the book is actually being written by Horn’s children, Hoof and Hide, and their wives, at some point further in the future, and many, many suggestions that the Goan Horn is perhaps Silk and he doesn’t know it for some reason. I’m also going to guess that the setting, Blue and Green, are Ushas and Lune, which are Earth and the Moon, set far, far into the future, and that the mysterious sea-monster Mother is the sea-monster Abaya from BotNS. I’ll also guess that Horn has died and been resurrected at this point, though he doesn’t know it and we’ll find out about it later. He also makes several references to not eating, not being hungry and not being thirsty, which makes me believe he might also have some connection to the Inhumi. The book also parallels The Odyssey, including a cyclops, a pig/man connection (two actually) witches and a  journey to all sorts of strange lands. In the most troublesome part of the book, it also features a siren-character who joins the crew. However, when she sings her song, Horn violently attacks and rapes her, which he feels bad about but is sort of dropped as a plot point. It reads as a real fumble, incredibly off-putting and misogynistic in 2022 and it’s not clear what we’re supposed to take away from the scene.  Horn writes at one point, “There are many things I should have written less about, and a few about which I should have written more.” which is a sort of perverse inversion of reading Wolfe, where he writes very little about what you actually need to know and leaves it up to the reader to piece together the narrative and themes. I’m excited to read the last 2 books in the series. I'm sure this will only be the beginning of my engagement with the Solar Cycle. Wolfe writes for rereads so after the next two I’ll be able to truly start to begin to understand the greater picture of the whole series. 2 Alien Worlds

LEGACY OF ASHES - TIM WEINER

Since getting on my CIA shit a few years ago, maybe 2 at this point, I’ve often wondered why there isn’t a book like this, by which I mean a sort of grand overview. Most of the books I’ve read take a small piece of CIA history and investigate it deeply, like The Jakarta Method or The Phoenix Program. Even books that cover a lot of different events, like The Devil’s Chessboard, don’t cover the agency from its beginnings as the OSS in WWII until present day. So I was hyped to read this book, especially after reading that the CIA itself, along with some other mainstream publications, accused the book of being unfairly critical of the CIA. Turns out, that’s all bullshit, this book manages to slightly critique the agency while covering up or eliding all the worst things they did. At the risk of sounding paranoid,it’s almost the textbook definition of a limited hang-out. Let’s take a small example, MKULTRA gets a short treatment in this book, it mentions the part about giving unsuspecting folks LSD and makes the whole thing sound like a waste of time and money. It mentions the Frank Olson story, perhaps the go-to anecdote about MK excesses (despite the fact that they did much, much worse, you can read Poisoner in Chief if you wanna go down the MK rabbit hole) but it gives the sanitized version. In this version, Olson is given LSD,jumps out a window and the CIA covers it up for years before coming clean. This isn’t a good explanation as to what actually happened. Olson was given LSD without his knowledge, but he jumped out a window 9 days after he was dosed, he wasn’t high when he fell. Additionally, Olson was almost certainly working on chemical/biological weapons that the US was deploying during the Korean War and it seems like the CIA was concerned the LSD experience might make him talk. Not for nothing, the KUBARK manual, a CIA training guide declassified in the 90’s mentions throwing someone out a window as the best assassination technique. So here we have Weiner giving the “best” version of a bad story, where the CIA seems incompetent and silly, not murderous and evil. But that’s a minor incident involving one man, to take a larger example, the book gives pages and pages to a failed coup attempt in Indonesia in ‘58, which makes the CIA seem fumbling and stupid. Later, we get only a short paragraph about the successful CIA-backed coup in ‘65 which lead to one of the largest mass-killings in the 20th century. Weiner quotes a state department official saying that they did not give death-lists to the right-wing generals to carry out a leftist purge, which is 100% untrue, we definitely did, as we gave death-lists to right-wing governments across the world (like in the trans-South American Operation Condor, which gets nary a mention in this book). The book also lists the death toll for Indonesia at 500k which is half of the real number of leftist killed with our support and backing. You can read the Jakarta Method if you’d like a better picture of what happened in Indonesia and the CIA’s role there. It goes on and on like that. It briefly mentions that the CIA might have been involved with Mandela’s arrest in South Africa, when not only where they involved we know the officer’s name (Dan Richard), it mentions Iran/Contra but none of the stuff about smuggling drugs (not even to refute it, even if you think that these rumors were unfounded and the CIA would never do something like that, which I think would make you very wrong and naive, it does seem worth mentioning that John Deutch, the then director went to South Central in ‘96 to discuss and refute the widespread belief that they were responsible for the devastating crack epidemic), it obviously glosses over the more fringe-y assassination stuff (it doesn’t even mention the suggestion that they were involved with RFK and makes the insane suggestion that the CIA covered up the JFK assassination in the sense that they knew the Soviets were involved and wanted to conceal this knowledge to prevent WWIII. This is a belief so strange and ahistorical it’s hard to know where to start with it.). It makes the 9/11 and Iraq failures seem like tragic mistakes, the book literally calls Tenet a tragic figure, but doesn’t mention the many, many instances of pre-9/11 intelligence being withheld from the FBI (and the subsequent lying about these withholding). Overall the book manages to be both anti-CIA and too light on them. It sees them as bumbling and over-confident when the actual picture is much darker. It’s the American perpetual innocence mindset that plagues our history and dooms us to repeat it and the rest of the world to suffer over and over. There are tons of better books to read about the CIA and what they’re actually up to. I do hope that someone will someday synthesize these into an easy to read overview of their total history but this ain’t it. 47 Legacies

HUMILIATION - WAYNE KOESTENBAU

As part of a series that bills itself as consisting of “big ideas//small books” this book lives up to it’s premise. It is indeed a short little book all about humiliation. I’ve never read anything by Kosetenbaum before, I know he’s a sort of jack-of-all-trades in that he writes poetry, fiction, non-fiction, does music (plays piano?), and teaches painting at Yale. I believe he’s most famous for a book about the relationship between gay men and opera. This book does show some of that omnivorous spirit. It isn't’ straight philosophy or cultural criticism, which is what I would assume if I heard there was a book about humiliation. Instead he combines all of this with personal reflections/memoir and divides the whole thing into short little segments, almost prose-poem-like, which he calls fugues. This means he’ll swing back and forth between talking about something as serious as the torturer at Gitmo, to Liza Manelli give a bad concert to a memory of humiliation from his own childhood. Koestenbaum does try to keep things in perspective, clearly these examples aren’t on the same level of seriousness, but you do get some whiplash from toggling back and forth from such disparate examples. The most interesting parts to me involved his attempts to trace the link between pleasure and humiliation, especially in a sexual context. He never comes up with a unifying theory, the very structure of the book is designed to merely touch on things then move on, so we don’t ever get too deep. This is particularly frustrating when he discusses the “Jim Crow Gaze” and the relationship between racism and humiliation. There might be something there but he doesn’t stick with it long enough or go deep enough to really excavate something new and original, it’s more of an outline. Overall, I would say I would be interested in reading something longer by Koestenbaum, he seems to be a pretty original thinker, but I need him to follow the various threads he’s pulling longer. 1969 humiliations 

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.