THE DARK LORD: H.P. LOVECRAFT, KENNETH GRANT, AND THE TYPHONIAN TRADITION IN MAGIC - PETER LEVENDA

Some bizarre shit in here. Not sure where I came across this book, I believe I was interested in Levenda, who wrote (tho he denies it) the Necronomicon and is currently very involved with the Blink-182 guy’s quest to uncover alien info. The whole alien disclosure thing remains very interesting and suspicious, even more so now that I’ve read this Levenda thing and have something of a read on his whole deal. Besides the Necronomicon, the most famous thing Levenda has written concerns Nazis and the Occult and this book plows a similar field. There are no Nazis, per se, but the book is fascinated with a dark and “evil” strain of occultism, which he tracks and spins out. Basically, Levenda takes Grant’s writings, some of which I’m familiar with and all of which is pretty deep in the weeds, and explicated and gives context. The main thesis seems to be that Crowley and Lovecraft, despite not knowing each other, were on a similar wavelength (Levenda makes multiple mentions of the fact that Crowley had a profound experience with a extramundane entity named Aiwaz in Cairo at the same time the NOLA cult in Call of Cthulhu is supposedly doing their dark rites) and that the Cthulhu stuff is realer than supposed. Grant spent a lot of his life trying to contact these entities and identifies them with Set and other Dark Gods (like Satan,Typhon, Shiva), and he claims that contact with entities is the main point of magick. Personally, I would say that Lovecraft’s work seems to be an analogy for a racist’s horror in hearing jazz music and Crowley’s is largely an elaborate excuse to have gay sex, but if we take it seriously Levenda shows so interesting connections. Both seem to have picked up on the idea of “dark” extraterrorestrial or supramundane forces making contact with and having sex with humans. Lovecraft views it as horror, Crowley seems interested at a minimum. He follows Grant in jumping from tradition to tradition, we get references to the Vedas, Vodun, Palo Mayombe, Yazidism, Kabbalah, tho I would argue that neither one of them has a great grasp of the all the source material (neither reads Sanskrit, the Vodun stuff is surface level and no one who isn’t a Yazidi really has a good grasp of Yazidism), but as someone who is also interesting in all of these subjects, there’s some good stuff to chew on. It contains some of the best writing I’ve been able to find on the Qliphoth and the stuff about the ways Lovecraft’s writing affects real work and obsessed people is also very interesting. He’s easily the most hyperstitious writer we’ve had so far, the idea that Grant and others spend their whole lives trying to contact fictional creations of his is fascinating, especially since that is basically what happens in the stories themselves. The comparative religious stuff is intriguing but I would have preferred more rigor. Grant is very taken with words sounding like other words, across languages and cultures, and deciding that makes them related. There is some interesting stuff about human sacrifice at the end that I wish got more play, it seems like it bubbles below the writings of Grant and Crowley and they both seem like they’d be interested in it. Either way, one of the more interesting takes of Lovecraft I’ve seen. If you’re into Crowley or Lovecraft or want an intro to Grant, it seems worthwhile, as religious study, much less so. 666 dark lords.

THE WESTERN LANDS - WILLIAM BURROUGHS

The final novel from my problematic fav, Burroughs, and the last in the trilogy that includes CITIES OF THE RED NIGHT and THE PLACE OF DEAD ROADS. I believe this is the 10th or so book of Burroughs’ I’ve read and will probably be the last for some time. It’s appropriately elegiac for a final novel. The Western Lands of the title refers to Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife and thoughts of death and souls and what lies beyond death preoccupy the whole book. Despite being episodic and strange as the other two books in the series, this one veres into a new territory for Burroughs, autobiography and memoir. He often writes about a figure called “The Writer” who is clearly Burroughs himself and goes on to give us episodes like him hiding prescription amphetamine bottles in a Florida swamp after his son lands in the hospital or what it was like to write something as popular as Naked Lunch then have to live with that notoriety the rest of is life. Don’t worry, it certianly isn’t a “real” memoir (though I’m sure Burroughs, given his long and scandalous life could have written an amazing one) and also contains lots of sex and murderous centipedes and assassins who can kill with putrid breath and cities obessed with dueling and all the other Burroughs’ craziness. Of the trilogy, I’d say I enjoyed this one more than TPODR and less than COTRN, though I really like the super-far out sex and death stuff that he gets into. It’s interesting to read him coming to grips with his own mortality after a very long life, thinking about the ancient egyptians and what they have to say about the afterlife (he seems especially taken with their concept of humans having seven souls), since he typically seems so far-out and avant-garde and beyond everyday human experiences. Typically he focuses on bug-men or pederastic death rituals or other Venusian control systems and the like. Death itself, his own death in particular, does seem to be both mundane in that it will happen to everyone as well as mystical in the sense that no one actually understands it so perhaps it makes the rare Burroughs subject that humanizes him (something one does not read Burroughs for). There’s a lot to think about with him as both a person and a writer. I remain convinced that he is both a very bad guy and the strongest writer of all the Beats. It's sad that Naked Lunch totally overshadows everything else he’s done, I’d put this trilogy up there with any number of far-out bug-shit sci-fi avant-garde stuff from the 20th century. 7 souls

DRUG CARTELS DO NOT EXIST: NARCO-TRAFFICKING AND CULTURE IN THE U.S. AND MEXICO - OSWALDO ZAVALA

Been waiting on this one for a while. This book got on my radar a few years ago when it was originally published, in 2018, mostly because of its provocative title, but I had to wait almost four years for someone to translate it into English, since my Spanish isn’t quite up to snuff. Either way, it’s here now and quite good. Zavala is a former reporter in Juarez and current professor in NYC who has an interesting and engaging take on the narco phenomena and its representation in the arts, specifically fiction. When I got this book I was hoping for more of a straight history and investigation of drug cartels and trafficking in Mexico and the involvement and manipulation by various US-based forces, a la Gary Webb. This book has some elements of that but it also includes long digressions into Mexican and world literature that engages with these topics. On the one hand, this is great. Zavala has given me a long list of Mexican novels I need to read, as well as wonderful passages about one of my favorite books of all time (and perhaps the best novel published in my lifetime) 2666. However, since many of these novels and plays have never been translated into English and I’m not a huge Latin American literature person in general (always fraught to read novels and poetry in translation) much of this was lost on me. All that being said, his main points about the interplay between narcos and the state are relevant and interesting. The popular narrative, that the cartels exist as a powerful, murderous force, at war with the goverments of Mexico and the US, is not only false, but constructed for the expressed purpose of being instramentallized by those governments for specific political ends. The figure of the cartel and the narco are great excuses to extend the logic of the War on Terror to areas south of the border. Far from being separate parallel entities who are competing with the legitimate Mexican government, the cartels are in fact enmeshed with the governments of both countries to further specific political ends. Initially to fight “communism” and leftism in Mexico, ex. the CIA and Mexican government’s involvement in the cartel torture/murder of DEA agent “Kiki” Camarena (and you can read Charles Bowden’s “Blood on the Corn” if you need to get up to speed on all that) or, much more recently, the use of cartel goons to murder leftist teacher/protesters in Ayotzinapa. Now, in addition to that, the cartels are also instrumentalized to  help both depopulate areas rich in natural resources and/or hydrocarbons, which explains both the 2019 massacre of the Morman fundamentalists in Northern Mexico as well as the emergence of the folk saint, El Niño Huachicolero. All that is to say that this book elucidates the paranoia and insight one gets speaking to Mexicans. I’ve long said that Mexicans are the most paranoid and suspicious people I’ve ever dealt with (I mean this completely as a compliment). I remember living in Mexico city and riding in cabs or going to markets and asking people about El Chapo or El Barbie or any of the other “kingpins” who were big in the news at the time and the people I’d speak to would, almost without fail, launch into a long speech about how these people weren’t real or overblown or in the pocket of the government. That the stories concerning them were bullshit and a distraction and that the government was much, much more enmeshed, through bribery and corruption, with these forces than the mainstream media would let on. I believed them then and believe it more now. This book is a great step in the right direction of cutting through government propaganda and getting a real understanding of the actual dynamics at play in the War on Drugs. 100,000 cartels

DILLA TIME - DAN CHARNAS

Not since the Beverly Pimp C book has a hip-hop figure been treated and discussed at such a length. This book is quite new, I’m the first person to read the Lawrence Public Library’s copy and I had to read it pretty fast due to the fact that I’m leaving the country in a few days. I’m one of the Donuts Dilla fans. I’ve listened to that album a ton. I love it. I think it works in many different settings and deepens everytime you hear it. Donuts fans are somewhat disparaged in the remembrance of Dilla’s friends/colleagues who are somewhat dismayed that Donuts overshadows Dilla’s rather immense output and influence. I like Slum Village, the Common stuff, the solo stuff, all that, but certainly listen to Donuts the most. In fact, the book points out that Dilla composed Donuts at the same time as his album, The Shining, an album he put much more time and effort into and considered and hoped to be his masterpiece, and Donuts is much more popular and listened to than The Shining. Again, guilty as charged, I have certainly not listened to that album nearly as much as Donuts. Charnas does a really good job of explaining why Dilla is unique and interesting as a musician. He allows himself a lot of space, and employs some very useful diagrams and visual representations, to explain Dilla Time, his term for Dilla’s unique sense of rhythm and beat. As I understood, as a pretty musically ignorant person, it largely involved setting slightly different time-feels (ie slightly before or after the conventional beat) onto each individual instrument so these time-feels play off each other and add an additional polyrhythm to the music which accounts for the sort of dreamy, laid-back but propulsive vibe that’s so addicting in his music. Always good to spend more time thinking about Dilla’s music, and the book was at its most interesting, to me, when it was talking about the music itself. Than man himself is a slightly different story. Unlike Pimp C, who outside of the great music he made would be a worthy subject of a biography, given how crazy his life was, Dilla comes off as a pretty calm, quiet guy who was obsessed with listening to and making music. He seems to have spent a huge percent of his life going to record stores, listening to records and mastering the MPC. He intersects with a ton of huge figures in hip-hop and you get the sense that many of them, perhaps Erykah Badu most of all, could have made more compelling subjects inside of the same milieu (I remember thinking this same thing but regarding the founding fathers and John Adams after reading David McCullough’s book). But that’s not to say that there aren’t fascinating bits and pieces. Dilla ends up having a secret family/kid, he twice is put in a position to give music to N*Synch, at the height of their fame, and Justin Timberlake in particular, who heard Dilla’s music early through a friend of a friend sort of situation, and chooses not to pursue the opportunity (the book suggests that after hearing no the second time, Timberland links up with the Neptunes), and my favorite section, which features the then-recently-deceased O.D.B acting as a sort of psychopomp. Dilla, famously died of a rare blood disorder quite young and one of the first time he was in the hospital in a quasi-coma his mom overheard her son’s half of a conversation involving getting on a white or red bus, which freaks her out. Later Dilla tells her that he was speaking to ODB who advised him,  “Don't’ get on the red bus. I’ll be back for you. Anything you want, you’ll have it. Don’t worry about it.” Seems like a good job for ODB. He composes Donuts shortly after this situation and the book makes an interesting argument that themes of mortality and death are at the forefront of Donuts (ex. the book claims that the sample on “Hi” is manipulated to sound like “Is death real?,” which I’ve always heard as “It’s dat real”), which is something that I’d never really picked up on during my listens but will certainly think about going forward with Dilla. Overall, a pretty incredible book. If you like Dilla and want to think more about his music it’s worth the 400 pages. I hope we keep getting these deep biographies of seminal hip-hop figures. There still aren’t that many of them so there's a ripe orchard to pick from, so to speak. 2006 micro-delayed drum kicks

LIFE FOR SALE - YUKIO MISHIMA

Mishima is really a best case scenario for fascists. He made good, weird art, he seemed to focus a lot of his mental and physical efforts into body fascism applied to himself, he was deeply homoertotic and ended up killing himself, and no one else, in a spectacular failed coup. If only other fascists would follow suit. I’ve been aware of Mishima for a while. I've seen his weird art movie, “On Patriotism: the Rite of Love and Death” which is mostly just a sequence of a character played by Mishima committing seppuku (which, again, Mishima ended up doing later in his life for real). It really lingers on his muscles and flesh, playing into the gay themes that are also apperent in the only book of his I’ve read, THE SUN AND STEEL which is about bodybuilding and his relation to his body. He’s most famous (outside of the details of his death) for a tetralogy that I hope to read at some point. All that's to say, this is the first novel of his I’ve read and it was quite good. It reminded me of Walker Percy or Nathaniel West in that it sort of has a hook-y premise and explores themes of modern alienation and ennui. The book is about a man named Hanio who tries to kill himself and when he wakes up in the hospital, decides to put a sign on his door advertising that his life is for sale. After that the book is mostly a series of vignettes where someone hires him to undertake a task that will probably kill him while he just sort of maintains a passive, bemused distance. It makes sense that this book was serialized in a magazine before being published as a novel, the whole book feels pretty episodic, especially at the beginning. Hanio is asked to sleep with the wife of a mobster to instigate a murder, he’s asked to test poisons, he lives and acts as a sort of living livestock for a vampire, all sorts of absurd scenarios. He also gets laid a lot, presumably since his devil-may-care attitude makes him really sexy, and decides he sort of enjoys life when he’s just drifting around, going on adventures and not worrying about death. Ironically, this leads him to enjoy his life more and not want to die. There’s a subplot involving a spy showdown between “Country A” and “Country B” that seem clearly to be the USA and the Soviets, as well as a shadowy organization of intelligence goons that clearly seems to be the CIA or KGB. Likewise, you can tell he wrote this thing in the 60’s and what side he was on during the cultural upheavals; there are lots of shots at the hippies and acid and the whole counter-cultural milieu. Overall the book was much funnier and lighter than I had expected from Mishima. There are at least two points in the book where he complains about the way Westerners smell. Besides Percy and West, I also felt a lot of Kafka or Murakami swirling around in the mix. I think I’ll stick with his “lighter” works for a while before really tackling his super famous stuff. 1 life

SHOWA 1939-1944: A HISTORY OF JAPAN - SHIGERU MIZUKI

The Japan reading continues. This is sort of a three-for-one, with it being both a book by a Japanese person, about Japan, in a quintessential Japanese style, in this case Manga. I’m not a big Manga or Anime guy but it does seem to be an important part of Japanese culture and Mizuki is apparently famous and respected in the field. Weirdly, the Lawrence Public Library only has this one volume of his SHOWA series, which is 8 volumes total. As you can tell from the years, this issue is almost exclusively about the war. Mizuki served in WWII, and this book weaves together his personal experience of the war alongside broader history. Interestingly, the parts of the book that feature Mizuki himself are drawn the most cartoonishly, even though Mizuki has actual memories of these events, while the larger, historical stuff, like the Battle of Midway, which Mizuki did not personally see or serve in, are drawn very realistically. And quite well, the drawings in this book, especially the splash pages of fighter planes, are uniformly excellent. Mizuki depicts himself (again, cartoonishly) as quite bumbling and incompetent. He’s a bad soldier, uninterested and unsuited for military life, and spends most of his time doing the worst sort of grunt work and getting slapped around by his hyper-militaristic superiors. There’s an interesting sub-plot where he befriends natives on a South Pacific island he occupied for a while. The drawings of the natives, when depicted in the cartoony style and not the realistic one, do draw from racist american cartoons (especially in the lips) which is unfortunate but could be read as an unintentional commentary on the spread of racism around the world and the connection between racism and imperialism. On the imperialism note, this book walks a strange line w/r/t Japanese atrocities in WWII. My understanding is that the conduct of the Japanese army in WWII is still a very controversial subject in Japan. Mizuki does make reference to Nanjing and other atrocities committed in China (for which they, the Japanese, take signifigantly less flack for, in the West, than Germany, despite very similar conduct) though he doesn’t dwell on them at all and they’re seen as peripheral. At one point he writes a weird aside which explains that he doesn’t understand why Gen. Homna was hanged for the Baatan death march since it wasn’t the general’s fault that the Philipines are hot. Likewise with the comfort women, who are said to be doing their sacred duty (this phrase is in quotations in the book, I’m not sure how to read this. Does Mizuki mean those to denote irony, as in “sacred duty” is the official line but you and I know it’s bullshit? Or does he mean it as a direct quote from propaganda? I do not know, especially since the quote is obviously english translated from the Japanese), are mentioned briefly a few time but we don’t dwell and Mizuki claims to have never visited one. Overall, this was an interesting, quick read. It’s always interesting how a country views itself. As a Southerner, I’m always interested in the ways losers remember wars. I’m always interested in the ways Japan (and Germany) came late to the colonialism game and tried to make up for lost time. I’m not sure I’d read this whole series, though I am disappointed it didn’t go all the way through the end of the war. It seems weird to me to chop of the last year of the war the way the publisher (author?) did. 1945 Enola Gays

ONE HUNDRED MORE POEMS FROM THE JAPANESE - trans. KENNETH REXROTH

While the book’s design would have you thinking otherwise, it seems incorrect to credit these poems to Rexroth. I love Rexroth, he’s one of my favorite Beats, and he’s someone who nurtured a deep fascination with and long-time study of Japan. Having just started trying to learn Japanese myself I’m not anywhere near a place where I could critique or have an opinion about the accuracy of the translations. I do know enough to be deeply impressed, it’s not a very easy language. The library here doesn’t have the original, 100 Japanese poems, so I can’t say if he blew his load on the first collection and these are all leftovers. Even if they were, I really enjoyed a lot of them. There are actually 109 poems, all quite short, from a variety of authors writing across 10 centuries and I would say about 25% of them hit pretty hard a few had me writing them down for later. I really enjoyed Otomo No Tabito’s “Better get drunk and cry/ Than show off your learning/ In public” and an anonymous poem that reads, “I loathe the twin seas / Of being and not being / and long for the mountain / of bliss untouched by / the changing tides” As you might be able to tell, there doesn’t seem to be any thematic throughline or artistic preoccupation or even time-period or poetic school that all the poems share besides the fact that Rexroth likes them. That last poem about the mountain untouched by the changing tides is followed with a poem about oral sex that isn’t even the best oral sex poem in the book. That honor belongs to a poem by Marichiko that compares getting eaten out to floating away “forever in / An orchid boat / On the River of Heaven.” Marichiko is a contemporary (1974) woman who we learn very little about in the scant translation and authors’ notes in the back. Rexroth produced a rooster of poets that is about half women but gives us very little information about most of them. The notes will occasionally comment on the translation of a particular Japanese word of help explain an allusion but overall, the notes left me wanting a lot more. Rexroth clearly knows a lot about these people and has thought a lot about Japanese poetics and translation and all sorts of related matters, I wish he’d chimed in more at the end to help us understand some of this stuff better. For example, the last poem in the book, a Haiku from Ishii Rogetsu, reads, “Roasting Chestnuts / The terrorist’s wife / Is so beautiful” not a single not on that beguling poem. What Japanese word is he translating for “terrorist”? Is “The terrorist’s wife” a figure that exists in the Japanese imagination? Rexroth leaves it for us to ponder. I would love to get my hands on more of his translations. Inshallah I’ll be able to comment on the accuracy of translation question before too long. 109 blow-job poems 

TOKYO JUNKIE: 60 YEARS OF BRIGHT LIGHTS AND BACK ALLEYS…AND BASEBALL - ROBERT WHITING

Another Japan book from the Lawrence Public Library knocked out. This one was not the history of Tokyo I believed it to be. Or, rather, not an overview of Tokyo but a memoir that, secondarily, tells the story of Tokyo’s last ~60 years. Primarily, it’s an autobiography of Whiting who moves to Japan in ‘62 with the Air Force, works with the NSA and CIA on the U2 program, goes to school in Tokyo after getting out, works in publishing/translation/teaching English, before getting published as a Japan-expert and sportswriter who specializes in Baseball. He briefly lives in NYC and seems to split, and to have split, his time between Tokyo and some other city where his UN wife is stationed, but otherwise he’s spent the years since the early Sixties in Japan, specifically Tokyo. Besides the aforementioned interests, he also hangs out with, writes about and quasi-works with Yakuza, who take up the main area of focus, after baseball. The Yakuza stuff is much more interesting to me than baseball, so I’ll have to check out Whiting’s Yakuza focused book, TOKYO UNDERGROUND, but the stuff we get in here is fascinating. I’m obviously most interested in the overlap between the USA (specifically the Armed Forces/Intelligence communities) and the Japanese underworld, in a mutual campaign to create a bulwark against communism in the country. There is some pretty juicy stuff about Yakuza bringing handwritten letters from McArthur, thanking him for all his hard work vs. communism, with them when entering the US to keep costumes and border patrol people from bothering them. As a quick aside, as part of the larger parapolitical story/sus-averse, he does mention getting to know Craig Spence and going on TV with him, since Spence was also a long-time Tokyo guy (at one point, Spence was a register forign agent for Japan in DC). Whiting does say he “consorted with homosexual escorts” and gave “illicit midnight tours of the White House,” which is one way to put it, I guess. The book goes through the 2020 Olympics and the COVID lockdowns, but he has the sort of insight that makes me wish I could get his thoughts on the recent Abe assassination. Whiting does seem to have made a good run at understanding another country. He’s been there a very long time, knows the language, is married to a Japanese person and professionally writes and thinks about Japan. There is the typical memoir lament that things were cooler and better when the writer was 25 and going out all the time. There are more knotty ethical questions about his time working along side the CIA and the Yakuza, including a brief interlude where he helps translate for forign girls working in Yakuza run bar/brothels, neither of which seem to be very positive influences on Japan. And, like I said, baseball isn’t my thing, tho Whiting clearly knows a lot about it and seems to have some insights into the differences between Japan and the US vis-a-vis baseball. Overall, it was helpful to get a history of Japan in the last half-century, even if it was refracted through the specific experiences of particular Boomer. He’s a good writer tho, I’m really interested in picking up TOKYO UNDERWORLD. ‘62 Rising Suns

BRIGHTER THAN YOU THINK - ALAN MOORE

       Despite being seemingly the only culture our society produces anymore, comic books were once (in my lifetime even) thought of as a very disposable and degraded medium. Even the idea of collecting issues into nicely bound “trade paperbacks” instead of flimsy and cheap individual issues is an invention of the past 30 years. As a result, not unlike early film, which was also seen as debased and expendable, a lot of it is lost and hard to come by. So something like this, which combs through and picks out certain stories that appeared in anthologies and special issues, in this case, stories that all have the same author, is quite special and useful in piecing together the history of comics. This book is part of a series that I didn’t know about, called Critical Comics, which allows writers and historians who specialize in comics to put together collections around a certain topic or theme and write essays between each entry. Here we get Marc Sobel’s thoughts and commentary around 10 Moore short stories. I had only read one of these beforehand so the collection was very exciting to get my hands on. Moore is one of the great geniuses of comics for a reason and it’s evident from this early work. Actually, a surprising amount of his later obsessions and occupations are all here. There is a story about a land called Pictopia where all “styles” of comics, from newspaper funny pages to Crumb-style underground comix exist next to one another and are all threatened by the newer, meaner super-hero stories. It’s a far-out concept he fleshes out better in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen but it’s fascinating he had the germ of this idea in ‘86. There is a startling range of subject matter and tone. There is a realistic, melodramatic comic about the war in Vietnam, a comic that is a poem and history lesson in defense of gay/lesbian love, a biography of Jack Parsons, a comic about 9/11 that highlights resonances with the tarot as well as a quasi-horror story that takes place in and is largely about Japan. Perhaps my favorite of these is a stupid story that imagines the Kool-Aid man as a real “person” who lives through the acid tests and is cagy about his involvment in Jonestown, all while lamenting that since his smile is drawn on, he can never change expressions. As you can see, lots of his later obsessions, magik, war, the tarot, sex, treating silly throw-away concepts as serious, etc. are very much here from the begining, and we can see reading this, how he really nails these topics later in his career with a longer work. The art changes between each story but remains strong throughout, Peter Bagge worked on the aforementioned Kool-Aid one and nails it. Likewise with the Sobel essays which make interesting connections and provide context without getting boring or over-explaining. I’d certainly recommend it to a Moore fan. 10 mirrors

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