DARK ALLIANCE: THE CIA, THE CONTRAS, AND THE CRACK COCAINE EXPLOSION - GARY WEBB

Man they did Webb dirty. Not just the salient facts that they, probably, literally killed him (offically a suicide by two shots to the head, but I’m not here to litigate that particular matter), and certainly ruined his career and life but they also managed to shape the public perception of his work to a remarkable degree. If you don’t know, Webb is famous for writing the Dark Alliance series of newspaper articles in the San Jose Mercury Sun which, in the popular imagination, was about the CIA causing the crack boom by facilitating the sell of cocaine as part of scheme to get money to a rebel group/death-squad in Nicaragua that they supported for anti-communism reasons. I didn’t even know he’d expanded it into a whole book until recently. At this point, the accusations about the CIA and cocaine are old and sort of thought of as either a crazy, reckless, stupid scheme some cowboys implimented on a short-term ad hoc basis long ago, or street rumor bullshit printed by an unscruplous, unhinged and paranoid “journalist.” The truth is significantly more insane. This book is quite long, at 500+ pages, well-sourced and sprawling. It pretty definitely lays out a clear path that starts with CIA created  “rebel” and runs through a series of guys who are all combination gun-runners, drug-dealers, terrorists, DEA agents, CIA-affilates before landing with Freeway Rick Ross, a major LA cocaine dealer in the early crack era who moved at least 200-300 kilos through this pipeline. This seems basically proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, and isn’t even really denied. The CIA, in the few fleeting moments when they’ve been forced into any sort of accountability or oversight, will begrudgingly conceded that some people they did business with probably did sell a bunch a coke but not with their (the CIA’s) knowledge or participation. Webb not only definitely proves that this obviously isn’t the case, the book is chock-a-blocked with instance after instance where investigations by other agencies (like the FBI or DEA) into the drug-dealings of CIA connected dealers are squelched, to name one example, he sprawls this thing out in a million different directions, all of which could have been their own books. There’s a side-story about a drug route into Mena, Arkansas and the involvement of then-Governor Bill Clinton and those associated with him, the “Frogman” case in San Francisco, a scheme to use an Indian reservation near Riverside to manufacture guns for smuggling to the Contras, the suicide/murder (which, sadly, acts as a bit of foreshadowing for Webb’s own life) of journalist Joseph Daniel Casolaro who was also working on aspects of this story. We get glimpses at the CIA’s previous attempts to merge secret wars with drug dealing, using opium/heroin sales to finance secret anti-communists forces in Laos, tell of a similar cocaine-to-fund-rebels scheme being run at the same time in Miami but involving Jamacians (part of which is recounted, fictionally, in Brief History of Seven Killings), a side-story about the US’s attempt to deal with the Medellian cartel to get money and guns to the Contras (this one includes an anecdote about Escobar himself telling people he had, as blackmail, a photo of George H. W. Bush shaking hands with Jorge Ochoa in front of suitcases of money), and an interesting sociology and history of crack (including how the whole epidemic resembled a similar wave of smokable cocaine devastation in Peru). To me the most fruitful, or the thread that I’d most like explored in further depth are about the weapons sold to the gangs (the same shady, CIA affiliated gun-runners like Ron Lister or Danilo Blandon sold high-powered weaponry and surveillance equipment to the Contras at the CIA’s direction, but also sold these very same military-grade weapons to gangs, which greatly exacerbated urban violence) in LA and elsewhere and to what extent we’re looking at a sort of American strategy of tension. Even at the length and depth of this book, there is so, so much that we needed to get investigated further by other journalists. Of course, we did not get this. The last part of this book is about the reaction to his piece, how the mainstream media, especially the Los Angeles Times went out of their way to denounce and bury the story (as an interesting aside, Tucker Carlson wrote one of his first notable pieces of journalism, after “failing” to get into the CIA, was a Webb takedown) instead of following up. Incredibly predictable and depressing. This book is much more thorough and definitive than it has the reputation of being. It contains a pretty startling image of how power and politics actually work in our world and engenders all sorts of questions about the world since the book has been written (the 2 decade war in Afghanistan springs to mind for some reason). One of the most grounded, riveting, informative and useful books in the on-going CIA reading group of one. If this sort of stuff interests you at all, read this, I promise you that you don’t know the whole story. 86 vials of crack

CINEMA PURGATORIO: THIS IS SINERAMA - ALAN MOORE & KEVIN O’NEILL

  Another Lawrence public library find, this was a collection I didn’t know existed from one of my favorite writer/illustrator teams. Well, let me couch that. Moore is one of my favorite comics authors. I like almost all of his work and I like is bizarro hash-wizard persona. O’Neill is someone who I don’t think I’m at all familiar with him, outside of his work on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. But LoEG as some of the best artwork in the whole Moore overau (which has some high highs) so I was very excited to learn they’ve gotten back together. The comic itself is very oriented around movies. The basic plot is that this woman keeps finding herself in this increasingly nightmarish and strange movie-theater. The issues, and I believe 18 are collected here, feature a page or so of her strange wondering in the lobby or interaction with an usher who looks like Hitler, but are mostly given over to the movies she’s supposedly watching. The movies are mostly about movies or greater movie/Hollywood lore there’s one about Howard Hughes, one about the Black Dahlia, one about King Kong, one about stunt men, etc. These were all good and interesting, something like an Alan Moore take on the podcast, YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS. It’s interesting how deeply Moore thinks about film and film-lore and history given how much he hates all the movies made from his comics and how often and vocally he talks about his hatred of comic book movies generally along with his full-throated defense of comics as their own art- form capable of feats impossible in film. But I also know he’s interested in making film and has made a few, none of which I’ve seen but would love to, so this seems like a work that’s exploring that boundary and overlap between film and comic. And honestly, I’d love for Moore and Hollywood to team up. Let Alan Moore direct and star in a Dr. Strange. It will be 9 hours and both be about and take place within the Kabbalic tree of life.  But the art was predictably great even though the ending was simply predictable and a notch below what I (perhaps unreasonably) expect from Moore. I don’t know if Moore will ever make good on his promise to leave comics, I hope he doesn’t, especially if he’s writing stuff at this level or better. 1962 old movies. 

HAPPY-GO-LUCKY - DAVID SEDARIS

Always exciting to get a new David Sedaris book. The Santaland diaries came out in the mid-90’s and his book run picked up steam from there. My family, believe it or not, were big NPR listeners so I remember always hearing him on the radio then reading his books as they came out. I remember finding it so strange that he was also from the triangle in North Carolina, sometimes making references to places like malls, from him childhood, that were still there and that I went to. Sedaris does occasionally write fiction and he’ll also write non-fiction on other topics, but he’s really narrowed in on his family. His parents and siblings form the backbone of his work and they can sort of be seen as the main characters in this books-long epic about their family over the years. One would worry that all the big stories, the ones with the really big laughs or emotional payoffs, like You Can’t Kill the Rooster, or the one about his mom dying, would have been told by now, so many years later. Sedaris gets around this in two major ways. The first is how skilled he’s become at writing. He was always a good, funny writer, but he’s been able to move from essays that are mostly funny to ones that weave sorrow and jokes and deeper themes in and out of the narrative at ease. Part of this has to do with the nature of most of the material in this book, which, despite the title, is downbeat. During the period of time covered in this book, one of his sisters killed herself and his father, often the villain in the Sedaris universe-at-large, dies. It’s a testament to Sedaris’ prodigious skill that he manages to weave these life-events in with jokes and humor. There’s some other big, picture stuff that’s interesting if you’ve kept up with the larger Sedaris story. This is the first book of his in which I’ve noticed the amount of money Sedaris has made as an author is mentioned. Covid shuts down Sedaris’ touring life and he’s forced to live in one of his multiple houses with his boyfriend (who finally gets an essay about him in this volume, he’s been something of a background character in earlier Sedaris stories) and reflects briefly on how successful he’s managed to be. In a similar vein, his father, if Sedaris is to be believed, tells David, “you won” on his deathbed, which also feels like a culmination of a process cataloged in the earlier books. Sedaris is still pumping out interesting books of essays on his life in his unique style. How many more of these will we get? Sedaris is 65, surely we’ve got half a dozen or more left. Stories about getting older, the secondary characters will die off, his writing will continue to improve and I intend to read them all. 65 siblings

HELGOLAND: MAKING SENSE OF THE QUANTUM REVOLUTION - CARLO ROVELLI

I sort of broke one of my dumb rules with this one. I’m not someone who really understands physics or chemistry or any of the “hard” sciences, so I try to be careful when I see pop versions of these topics, knowing that the truth is almost certainly much more complicated than whatever is being portrayed in these books. Growing up with scientist parents, I suppose. Physics often offers the most annoying version of this (maybe tied with the evolutionary psych people) wherein people write pop-physics books that claim that not only will they explain quantum physics and thus, ultimate reality, to you, they’ll also tell you what it all means. Normally, if it’s not specifically about Time, one of my favorite topics, I shun the whole genre. That being said, Rovelli wrote one of the best books I’ve read in a while about Time, THE ORDER OF TIME, so I figured I’d check this out. Frankly, sort of a mistake. Rovelli does his best to not speculate too much w/r/t the larger meaning of these findings but it’s inevitable with a topic as fundamental as the basic mechanics of reality. Rovelli comes away with the idea that you shouldn’t think of individual objects or entities, and instead see the whole thing as connections, and objects as the collection of these connections, including, vitally, the observer. “All the (variable) properties of an object, in the final analysis, are such and only exist with regard to other objects.” Or, more broadly, “The mistake here is to assume that physics is the description of things in the third person. On the contrary, the relational perspective shows that physics is always a first-person description of reality, from the perspective of the observer.” Heady stuff, very far-out but it’s, fundamentally, based on math I don’t understand and thus basically have to take their word for, which basically makes it a religious text. On that note, I did do that weird book telepathy thing where you’re reading, think of something then the author touches on this exact topic in the next sentence. To me it had to do with Nāgārjuna, who’s been on the brain a lot recently. Reading over his theories about it being impossible to separate individual objects from a unified whole, I wondered if he’d ever read the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. Sure enough, there is a whole chapter on this topic in the book. Overall, a nice quick short read, but I’m going to continue to not really understand quantum physics. Going back to my rule about Time books. 1 connected universe

JAPAN: AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY - SHELTON WOODS

You might have heard, I’m moving to Japan. My wife just got a good job working in Tokyo so in a few weeks, off we go. As a result, I’ve shifted my reading to be more Japan-focused. The Lawrence public library has a couple of Japan books so I figure I’ll work my way through as many of them as I can before heading over there. Up first is this general history guide, to sort of give myself an overview of Japanese history. Sadly, this book is basically an extended wikipedia article. It does indeed give an overview of Japanese history but it is not very deep on any one point. Also, despite having “illustrated” in the title, it has very few illustrations, all of which are black and white and small. The book makes a handful of cringe-y assessments and errors. At one point he starts talking about mongoloid and caucasoid features. At another point he claims, insanely, that, “historically, it is difficult to find a civilization that treated women more poorly than the Chinese.” Far be it of me to defend imperial China but, my god, a passing understanding of anthropology or women’s history (or ancient Greek history, for that matter) would clear that statement right up. Anyway, irregardless of those errors and the general lack of depth, it was good to spend an evening reading over all of Japanese history at once. Woods doesn’t engage in any big picture speculation so I’ll fill in for him. Coming straight from Africa, with colonialism on the brain, Japan offers a really interesting counterpoint. Along with Siam/Thailand (and to some extent, Ethiopia) Japan is one of the very few places in the world to dodge the horrors of colonialism. It’s really far away from Western Europe, it’s small and doesn’t have many national resources. It was briefly open to Westerners and foreigners of all types (Yasuke, the Black Samurai comes to mind) before they caught wind of what went down in what is now Mexico and decided that these YT devils were up to no good. They closed off the country completely for 300 years before America forced them back open, right after the end of the civil war. At this point, the late 1800’s most of the world was under some form of colonial oppression and Western nations were beginning to industrialize. Japan had to play catch-up, as well as realize that the rest of the world, the YT world, would never view them as equals. They tried to stick a racial equality plank into the Versailles treaty, which was rejected. Lacking natural resources and seeing that the only way to receive respect in the larger world was to head an empire, they began warring with neighbors, first Korea, China and Russia, and seeking to build a trans-Asian empire. At first, some in these countries welcomed them, since the Japanese were kicking out the European/American Imperial powers. I’ve always been fascinated by the  Pacific Movement of the Eastern World, an organization of Blacks in the United States that supported Japan before WWII as a champion of non-YT people around the world. Of course, Japan went on to treat their new colonies just as badly as the Europeans and American ever did (ask Nanjing) since there is no such thing as a benevolent empire. Anyway, something I often think about. The book is also light on post WWII japan, which I’ll have to find another source on. Obviously, the US has been closely involved in general and specifically with supporting Liberal Democratic party, who have basically been in power since WWII and who, despite the name, are conservative and very anti-communist. Anyway, I’ll have to dive deeper into all that. 1945 Japanese Islands

CLASSIC KRAKAUER - JOHN KRAKAUER

The last of the Togo books, and a physical copy of a book, no less. I left it at the hotel on our way to the airport. I was mailed this by my dad for some reason. My mom is a big Mt. Everest person, so INTO THIN AIR has always been around the house and, for some reason, my dad really likes Krakauer. He’s not outdoorsy, no one in my family really is, but he still enjoys Krakauer’s writing. I’m also not an outdoorsy person, a quality which made me stand out in Seattle, but I guess I’d like to be. But not on the level of Krakauer, who’s at the extreme Alpine end where the activities do not seem fun at all, in fact, the misery seems to be the point. The last essay in the book is actually on that topic, why someone would engage in the really out there, physically punishing hiking-for-days-in-the-rain-on-deadly-mountains sort of stuff he so often writes about and participates in. He gives the standard answer that it’s about achieving something you set out to do, which makes a little sense to me but honestly it’s weird to me that you both want to experience nature but choose to express this by visiting nature’s least inviting locals. This book is all essays and magazine pieces that Krakauer wrote before he was able to move on to publishing books. Even back at this point you can tell he’s one of the best writers in the genre. His stories zip along and entertain even when they’re not on the most interesting topic. As for this book, it is by it’s nature a grab-bag. Any one of the pieces could have been fleshed out more, but they had to yield to the limits of a magazine’s length requirements. The most interesting ones to me concerned a big wave surfer who died in the waters near Santa Cruz. I don’t know how to surf, nor have I ever tried, but I have a slight fascination with it. There was a piece about famous mountaineer who’s also an asshole and aging (he’s since died) who Krakauer hikes with and does a good job showing the loneliness of his life. Finally, my favorite piece was about the troubled teens in the wilderness industry that thrives in Utah. I have a more major fascination with the troubled teen industry and the various camps and rehabs and in-patient treatment centers that have popped up to serve them. They’re largely a grift, preying on overwhelmed parents, but they also attract the scariest sorts of authoritarian adults who are given unchecked power over a young and vulnerable population. They especially seem to thrive in Utah and Florida. We’re due for a deep dive into these places in general but Krakauer does a good job looking into the more “wilderness-y” ones in this essay. Krakauer has a Morman fascination and does a good job showing the link between the LDS and these sorts of places and their ideologies. He tracks a few individual people who run different programs that have resulted in deaths but I would love a book length expo of these sorts of places. 9 large mountains.

MORE BRILLIANT THAN THE SUN: ADVENTURES IN SONIC FICTIONS - KODWO ESHUN

I’ve had this one on the back burner for a minute but decide to read it when I saw that the music critic Andrew Noz was running a book group off of Discord. Always fun to read along with other people. This book has, despite it’s reputation, been out of print for some years now and even the pdf I found was badly formatted and required a constant zoom in. If you’re reading this and involved in publishing, republish this book, it’s still quite relevant and useful. Of all the CCRU folks to be out of print, it’s strange that Eshun is the one. Wonder why? Anyway, this book, which came out in ‘99 is a collection of music writing by Ghanaian/Brit Eshun that is much more philosophical and out-there than most music writing. In the spirit of Deluze, who looms heavy over the whole book, MBTTS can certainly be read like A THOUSAND PLATEAUS in the sense that order is not important. He jumps from idea to idea, if you don’t like what he’s talking about, or if he’s going off on a type of music you don’t dig, don’t worry, he’ll be onto something else in a minute and you can pick it up then. I did read the thing conventionally, ie cover to cover, but it absolutely isn’t necessary. Like most music writing, this stuff is best when you also care about the music he’s talking about. For instance, there’s a whole chapter on Alice Coletrane, whom I love, which made that chapter very very exciting for me. He certainly gets the galactic, spiritual appeal of Turiyasangitananda. But, since he’s British, there’s a ton about Jungle and DnB and other British dance/electronic music genres that I like but don’t know a ton about nor listen to very much of. This was compounded by the fact that I read this, for the most part, in Benin where I didn’t have internet access. Nowadays it’s very possible and easy to read music writing while listening to whatever the author is writing about, no matter how obscure of a reference they are making. In fact, that discord is full of links to some of the music mentioned in the writing and I’m looking forward to listening to a bunch of it when my internet is more reliable. The writing is quite unique. Eshun is quite fond of neologisms and the book is full of words like “skratchadelia,” “phonoplastics,” “conceptechnics,” “rhythmengine,” “cyborganographics” to choose a few examples almost totally at random. I liked this approach, if you don’t have quite the right word, make it up. It’s interesting that there is so much in here about Dr. Octagon and so little about Deltron 3030, which is both a better album and, to me, fits better into his fixation on afro-futurism. Also, it’s a bummer how little he thinks of g-funk. He loves George Clinton (who doesn’t) and has a lot to say about him but really seems not to like West Coast rap music in general, especially G-funk. Likewise, very little Southern rap music is mentioned but it’s pretty easy to chalk all of this up to his being British and not having the context to understand something like Outkast. Finally, the very best, most interesting stuff to me was about techno. He’s really smart about the ways that its emphasis on anonymity kept it from being bigger commercially. He has a very interesting theory about how techno inverts the Blues–->Rock pipeline by originating in YT European musics like Kraftwork before being “appropriated” by Black folks in places like Detroit and then getting “appropriated” again by Europeans to make things like Jungle. Interesting stuff to be sure. Not sure why this guy hasn’t written more music writing since this or why it’s so hard to find. Would love to get an update about where he think’s hip-hop has gone since the late 90’s, what he’d think of it’s total dominance of pop music, the rise of EDM as a pop music genre, all that stuff. 99 brilliant suns.

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