INTRODUCTION TO CIVIL WAR - TIQQUN

Second Tiqqun book I’ve read this year. Tiqqun, of course, is the French collective that published a handful of polemic volumes in the early 2000’s, and the other book of theirs I read, Theory of Bloom, I found a little better than this one. Tiqqun suffers here from the French disease of not being very clear in one’s writing without the French virtue of fascinating possibilities and suggestions in this ambiguity, as with the kings of wonderfully suggestive French nonsense, Deleuze/Guattari. Perhaps it is because I am always against it when someone is talking about Empire in a very abstract metaphorical manner, as is done in this book, without even the slightest nod to the fact that France has a very real, non-theoretical empire throughout north, west and central Africa that both causes real suffering, including torture, theft and murder, and the people writing this book benefit from (this obviously applies to an even greater extent to the USA, and implicated me) this arrangement. This isn’t to say that one should speak about Empire metaphorically or symbolically, it just bugs me when the conversation stays entirely in this realm. This book has some good stuff about form-of-life being the basic unit of humanity and the ways that these forms-of-life co-exist, and/or are pitted against one another, and managed under capitalism. Made me feel like I need to read some Ambigen, since I think he’s the one who really pushes that concept the furthest (though, it’s apparently a Wittengstien coinage). There were some bars for sure, I enjoyed, “Liberating spaces liberates us a hundred times more than any kind of “liberated space,”

“That when ONE tells us it’s either this or death, it’s

always

actually

This and death.”

And, “The two super-institutional poles of Empire: the police become Biopower, and publicity is transformed into the Spectacle. From this point on, the State does not disappear, it is simply demoted beneath the transterritorial set of autonomous practices: Spectacle, Biopower.”

That second quote is formatted like that in the book, the last section is much more poem like than the earlier sections. So overall, there were some good interesting ideas embedded in this but I failed to see the overall point. I’m not sure what practical insights in terms of the workings of our world or ways we can conceive of changing it. It’s short but the Bloom one was much better. 99 civil wars.

A MIND OF ITS OWN: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE PENIS - DAVID FRIEDMAN

Not sure when/how I first came across this one. Obviously, the penis is a perennially interesting topic, one of the most fascinating (fascinating itself is an english word that comes from a latin word, fascinum, that denotes a phallic amulet) and universal subjects available. On one level, the book provided a lot of interesting information and pretty good theorizing. Friedman runs through a history that stretches back from ancient Egypt’s Osiris up to Viagra and the medicalization of impotence. There’s lots of Freud, as you might imagine, and lots of interesting little myths and factoids about different ways the penis has been conceptualized and thought of across time. The topic really lends itself into broader discussions of sexuality and masculinity and Friedman manages to touch on lots of these topics without getting too bogged down on any one subject or time period. That being said, there is too much Freud, I get that the man was obsessed, even haunted by the penis, but still, there are other angles. The most engaging part concerned the intersection of race and the penis in the United States which is predictably dark. There is a mind-bendingly psychotic anecdote about Europeans being weirded out in the antebellum South by Black servers wearing shirts and no pants so you could see their dicks (imagine being so insane and perverted that you’re freaking out an 1800’s European). There is lots of talk about how castrations figured into lynchings (which that book, At The Hands of Persons Unknown, went into in depth). There is a really compelling section where the male subjects of Mapplethorpe’s Black male nudes talk about what a racist weirdo he was and how he made them feel like “animals in a zoo.” I’m a Mapplethorpe fan and I’ve seen his work in some major museum exhibitions and had never heard the opinions of these men before. Overall, tho, this book was missing two things. First, any sort of non-Western perspective. It claims to be a social history but we only get Western antiquity, Europe and the United States. It would have been great to get a, say, ancient Chinese or South Asian take on what the penis symbolizes and means or how those cultures deal with masculinity. We got the European and colonial take on the Black penis, how did the African cultures of the time feel about it? Additionally, it would have been nice to get a trans chapter. I get that the book was published before the recent explosion of trans visibility but now that we have many more visible men without penises and women with penises it would have been good to get a trans perspective about the culture significance of this organ. Overall, reasonably interesting. 69 Phalluses 

CIA AS ORGANIZED CRIME - DOUGLAS VALENTINE

Back at it, more 20th century history/CIA stuff. The most obvious comparison would be with the other Valentine I read recently, The Phoenix Program, which I would say is a much better book. While The Phoenix Program is very detailed and focused on a series of government actions, this book is much more sprawling and would serve as a good introduction to these topics. In some ways it reminds me of Understanding Power, which is a good intro to Noam Chomsky but doens’t go as deep into any one particular topic. Also, like Understanding Power, some of the chapters in this book are interviews with Valentine. He’s got an impressively wide range of knowledge about CIA history and a pretty good overarching theory of how the CIA and various intelligence agencies work, his theory is in the title itself, but I was most interested when he gets into the nitty-gritty of a particular topic. To me, the most compelling parts were when he was tracing the legacy of Phoenix and showing how it shows up in other actions. Basically, it’s developed in Vietnam, as outlined in his other book, before being perfected in South and Central America during the 70’s and 80’s and before being used as the template for the GWOT. The number of folks, like terrorism advisor David Kilcullen or former Delta Force Commdander (and then Family Reserch Council goon) Gen. Will Boykin, he’s able to quote as outright stating that we need to model our counter-insurgency strategy on Phoenix is extensive. The number of powerful people, from John Negroponte to Governor and Senator from Nebraska Bob Kerrey to Congressman Rob Simmons to San Quentin assistant-warden turned senior advisor to the Iraqi Director General of Corrections where he closed down Abu Ghraib Prison (in a huge suprise,he found no evidence of wide-spread torture) Donald Bordenkircher, who are literal Phoenix alums is also astonishing and chilling. Excited for Eddie Gallagher to be elected to congress in our era. Second to the Phoenix stuff, there’s an interesting throughline about the nature of drug enforcement and America’s (tho, especially the CIA’s) use and manipulation of these markets going back to, at least, the KMT (and to the Opium wars if you want to throw in British history). Valentine has written a few books that I haven’t read on those topics in particular that I’ll have to check out, we only get a sort of overview here. The tone is a bit more polemic and it’s a bit less scholarly and focused than I would prefer but it would make a good overview of these topic for a neophyte. I learned a lot of interesting stuff. REX84 organized crimes.

CYCLONOPEDIA: COMPLICITY WITH ANONYMOUS MATERIALS - REZA NEGARESTANI

Typically, I try to balance the fiction and non-fiction I read, trying to have at least one of each on the docket at all times.I knew this book is often called theory-fiction or even sci-fi so I decided to slot it in as my fiction choice after reading 1996. That, however, is not the right way to think about this book, this is a very speculative and far-out work of theory with a bit of fictional flourish around the edges. The fictional framing part can be summed up quickly: it involves someone trying to track down a vanished academic named Dr. Hamid Parsani, who we learn might not even exist in the traditional sense before his manuscript mysteriously appears in an Istanbul hotel room. Most of the rest of the book is his incomplete and frenzied theoretical writings. In that sense the book is similar to Spinal Catastrophism, in that long portions of it claim to be the academic writings of a fictional entity. I will hand it to Negarestani tho, the philosophy of Parsani is very far-out and heady. He circles around a number of big ideas, many of which involve thinking about the Middle East itself, and especially Oil, as sentient and malevolent beings that are twisting history to their own ends. Here’s one example of how he talks about oil, ”recall, however, that they spoke always of a buried terrestrial sun which must be exhumed, a rotting sun oozing black flame, the black corpse of the sun.” I found all of that stuff very useful and persuasive as a way to think about contemporary middle MENA politics. In classic theory fashion, he spins out and speculates on monotheism and Islam and modern warfare and all sorts of related topics. Lots of talk of Moloch and the dark nihilistic forces behind the war on terror. It’s amazing that he wrote this thing before the rise of ISIS. Here’s two more quotes that I really enjoyed; “all modes of urban warfare are monotheistic rituals,” and,“the future of warfare lies in the hands of rogue units,” to give you a taste of what he’s up to. He’s connected somehow to the CCRU folks so there is the requisite talk of Lovecraft and large menacing Lovecraftian horrors beyond human comprehension. Long stretches would get boring or confusing but he jumps around enough and writes in such a declarative and exciting way that I remained hooked. I would have preferred more of the fictional elements, this seemed like a theory book that has fictitious elements, very much like Spinal Catastrophism, but overall it was engaging. I will continue to think of oil as a malevolent pre-islamic demon. 2014 oil demons. 

NIGHTMARCH - ALPA SHAH

Read this one due to its carrying an endorsement from the David Graeber, peace be upon him, as well as being about a topic I’ve been interested in since living in India. It was shocking, when living in Kolkata, to see how much communist and communism are part of the regular political landscape there. Obviously, due to purges and a massive century+ long suppression campaign, legally and otherwise, the United States doesn't have communist politicians or political movements, let alone Communist guerrillas, since the murders and suppression of the Panthers, a self-described Maoist organization, in the 60’s and 70’s. There’s something similar happening here in Japan where I currently live, where there is a large and legal communist party, but that’s a story for another time. Either way, India, as the world’s largest democracy, has a sizable communist movement that both holds political power in some areas, especially in Bengal, as well as an ongoing armed uprising in “tribal,” or, Adivasi, regions. The Naxalites, an armed Maoist group, who’s name comes from the village Naxalbari in West Bengal where the Naxalbari uprising of 1967 occurred, were perhaps the trendiest armed Left-Wing (in the West, I don’t mean this to insult them, only to point out how fleeting Western Leftist attention spans can be) movement between the Zapatists, from the late 90’s, early 2000’s, and the Kurds, in the mid 2010’s until today. There are dozens of books about the Naxalites and their movements, including a famous one from Arundati Roy, but this one struck me as the most embedded and comprehensive. Shah had spent over a year living in the region working with and studying the various tribal peoples in the region, and was at first skeptical of the Naxalites, assuming they were a sort of violent protection racket, before slowing getting to know them and eventually joining them to live for a time and take a multiple day night march through the jungle with them. They have to walk at night, given the Indian State’s ongoing efforts to hunt down and kill them, and Shah seems to have been in actual danger during this time. The book toggles between an accounting of the march and the people she meets and conversations she has with various rebels and villagers they encounter and deeper more theoretical passages about the morality of their violence and gender roles within the revolution and whatnot. I found this very enlightening and illuminating. The march stuff was exciting and not overly dramatic, I never felt like she was over or understating the stakes, and the theoretical stuff was really interesting. The book includes and interesting rundown of Maoism and its effects on the world, a striking critique of gender and class roles within the Naxalite movement (many of the leaders are upper caste folks who abandoned their families to live underground) and the ways they seek to correct these forces, the effects of Capitalist globalization on this region and the the tribal peoples therein, a political history of India and its shortcomings, and dozens of other topics. I personally found the counter-insurgency strategy employed by the Indian state to be very Phoenix Program-y. The Indian government will go around, capture Maoist leaders, torture them, kill them and then stage to body to make it look like they were killed in a shootout with the state. Additionally, the state seems to arm and assist (and create) vigilante groups, often made up of former Maoists or greedy locals, like Salwa Judum, to hunt down and kill the Naxalites, while doing things like raping and murdering villigages seen as being symptathic. In the end I was incredibly inspired by these groups, it seems so hopeless, I admire their commitment to a better world. 67 Maos

PARMENIDES - PLATO (trans. R. E. ALLEN)

Damn, this one might have been over yaboi’s head. It’s been a while since I’ve fucked around with some ancient Greek philosphy (tho, I did read the Odyssey again earlier this year), and I’m not unfamiliar with it, I’ve read the Symposium and Republic as well as some of Aristotle’s Metaphysics in academic and personal settings as well as a smattering of pre-Socratic folks, but this was easily the most confusing and head-fucky of any that I’ve worked my way through. I will be honest, the scan of this work I got was not good, so it was hard to read and I therefore did not read the entirety of the commentary afterwards. The work itself was about 70 pages long, which I read in its entirety, then Allen provided hundreds of pages of historical notes and commentary afterwards, which I skimmed. I supplemented it with various internet commentaries afterwards to give myself a better understanding of some of the arguments being made in the text. The dialogue itself is between a young Socrates (already interesting, I think of him as perennially old and wise) and a tag-team of Zeno (of Paradox fame) and Parmenides. Zeno actually makes a strange argument that is dismissed pretty early then the elder Parmenides steps in as the sort of final boss and goes off for the rest of the text. The first part has to do with Forms, a concept of Plato/Socrates that I’ve always found a bit strange and unuseful. Parmenides, in my estimation, is able to show lots of contradictions and paradoxes with idea, ending on the insight that our knowledge comes from the material world, not the world of Forms, which do not interact, definitionally, and thus we cannot have knowledge of the Forms. Then it gets super wild and dives into issues about The One. He seems to be trying to answer the questions of whether or not all of existence could be thought of as a plurality or as One. He lays out various things you would have to believe about the one, some of which seem self-contradictory or paradoxical, like it couldn’t be made of parts, but it also couldn’t be whole since wholes are made of parts, or that contains both being and non-being. It actually really reminded me of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, which I read earlier this year, which also deals with reality being One or empty or its general strangeness. Again, parts of this were so confusing, I would like to engage with it in a more rigorous academic setting with someone who was fluent in Greek. Many times I wondered if a confusion of mine had to do with the actual content or with the strange way the Greek translated into English. For example, there was talk of an object “participating in the Form of Bigness” which is a strange, to me, way of saying something is big and made me wonder how much I was missing by not being able to read ancient Greek. But I’m sure I’ll think about it for a while, for what it’s worth, I preferred the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā but this was certainly worth engaging with. It’s insane that someone can still blow your mind from a distance of 2,500 years. 348 One

1996 - GLORIA NAYLOR

Normally, as I’ve discussed here before, I’m not a fan of autofiction. However, this book is a very unique and insane take on the genre that deserves more attention than it gets. Naylor was a star in the literary world. She won a National book award in ‘83 and Oprah starred in a mini-series based on one of her well-reviewed, inter-connected novels. However, she struggled to get this novel, her last, published and it basically received no mainstream attention. The reason seems to be the incendiary nature of the book, which, depending on your perspective, either recounts her experience of being gangstalked or her descent into madness. Like I said, the book is auto-fiction, it purports to be a lightly fictionalized account of her real life and feelings, truly the only “fictional” aspect is when she imagines the lives and motivations of individuals in the NSA who are fucking with her. From Naylor’s telling, she moved to a Georgia Sea Island to enjoy a quieter life and work on novels when she gets into a dispute with her annoying neighbor. The neighbor, unfortunately, is both unhinged and has a brother in the NSA who she’s able to convince that Naylor is anti-semetic, based on a misheard word and Naylor’s positive comments about the Nation of Islam, and thus needs to be watched. The NSA employees the ADL and others to fuck with and terrorize Naylor over the course of years. They break into her house, enlist her friends to report on her, kill her garden, follow her everywhere,read her emails, make noise at all hours to keep her up, and all sorts of harassment. Eventually, shit gets really out of control and they employ devices that can both read her mind and place thoughts in her mind, with the stated goal of getting her to kill herself. Like I said, it toggles back and forth from Naylor’s POV, which, according to her is true and autobiographical, and the imagained perspective of her tormentors. As someone who worked in homeless shelters for years, I’m very familiar with gang stalking allegations, it’s a really common delusion, and it was really fascinating to hear someone with Naylor’s level of intelligence and writing skill explain what this sort of thing must feel like to those inside of it. Her particular case might not be true, and I am sympathetic to such claims, as I’ll get into in a minute, but even if you think it was 100% in her head, it’s fascinating to read such a lucid account of going insane. Alright, in terms of the bigger picture, I think we can establish that the NSA, especially all the shit we’ve learned post 9/11, is up to some bad shit. I do think they fuck with people and, occasionally, they and other intelligence agencies encourage people to kill themselves (look at MLK) or drive them insane (MKULTRA). We also know that other countries engage in gang-stalking for sure, the term under the East German Stassi was Zersetzung if you want an example, so it seems foolish and naive to believe that the US doesn’t do that as well. Even the idea of broadcasting thoughts into someone’s head isn’t 100% sci-fi. There have been documented attempts to do this for years and there are dozens of reports from Iraq of the US trying out this type of weapon (usually called a Voice of God, or Voice of Allah weapon) in the field. We spend more money than any country in history developing all sorts of high-tech classified weapons, I don’t think it’s insane to speculate that something like this might exist. All that being said, there is a jews-are-following-me aspect to Naylor’s particular case that shade it into the mental illness side but, again, the veracity of the particulars matter less to me than the sense of dread and insanity that she manages to conjure in the book. Recommended for paranoids. 55 voice of god machines.

CODENAME GREENKIL: THE 1979 GREENSBORO KILLINGS - ELIZABETH WHEATON

AVAILABLE

Some of those that work forces…, etc. As a person who grew up in North Carolina, with family that’s lived in North Carolina for literal centuries, I’m always interested in NC history and culture, especially the parts of it that weren’t taught in schools and connect up with my other historical interests. The Wilmington Coup or the Battle of Hayes Pond come to mind. I’ve been aware of the Greensboro massacre for a while but it’s never been really explained to me, and most people in NC don’t seem to be aware of it at all, despite the fact that it happened less than 50 years ago in a town about 45 minutes from where I grew up. It’s hard to get information on the event; this book is out of print, so I had to order it from a specialty bookstore. The basics of the story is that a group of communists and anti-racists was engaged in a years-long campaign to unionize and improve working conditions at piedmont area textile mills, a campaign that was opposed by the owners of these mills as well as local klansmen and nazis. There were a handful of confrontations, which mostly involved shouting at one another, while armed, which culminated in a Nov. 3, 1979 march through Greensboro which the Communist Workers Party billed as a “Death to the Klan” event. On the march, in a Black housing project called Morningside Homes, a caravan of Nazis and Klansmen showed up and killed 5 of the marchers. There was both a State and Federal trial against 5 and 9 (respectivly) Nazis/Klansmen, both trials ended in aquitals. Pretty horrible shit on its face, but it gets weirder. The Klansmen/Nazis (part of this book is about the ways in which these two groups come together to form a sort of racist Voltron) side was lousy with Federal and local police informants. Ed Dawson, a Klansmen who worked with both the local police and the FBI as part of COINTELPRO, was in the first car of the caravan and was given a map of the route by the local police. He claims that he twice called officer “Rooster” Cooper on the morning of the shooting that they, the Klansmen, were about to show up armed and pissed and that Police Captain Thomas called him afterwards to thank him for a job well done. There was also a ATF agent, Bernard Butkovich, who’d infiltrated the Nazi side, as part of an investigation looking for illegally modified machine guns, who other Klansmen say was the main promoter of bringing guns to the counter-protest. Butkovoich claims he never alerted the local police or ATF that his group intended to show up armed to confront the march. Despite the fact that both the Nazi caravan and the march itself were under police surveillance, no law enforcement agents intervened in the shooting and allowed the Nazis to leave. In fact, in the aftermath, they arrested a few of the communists. Their claim, which this book repeats without challenging, is that they, the police, were afraid of going into this housing project due to the tension between the residents and police (an insane suggestion if you’ve ever seen the way the police treat people who live in housing projects). Finally, the most enigmatic character in all this to me, and a fellow Chapel Hillian (and Chapel Hill High school alum), is Harold Covington a Nazi that was in the US Army, leaves to go to South Africa in the 70’s, moves to Rhodesia where he was perhaps a mercenary (he says he was, there seems to be some doubt though), before being so racist he was deported from Rhodesia (amazing) returns to NC where he leads various Nazi parties and eventually gets 43% of the vote in a Republican primary for State Attorney General before leaving NC and the South to live out the rest of his life in the Pacific Northwest. Interestingly, both the Nazis and the Communists came to believe he had some ties to the CIA and/or FBI given his racist globetrotting and seeming immunity from prosecution. This book has a lot of good info about a really important event but it falls short in a lot of ways. Wheaton engages in a lot of both-sideism and tries to come off as evenhanded in a way that, for me, obscures what actually happened. Towards the end of the book she literally writes that there are no pure heroes in the story. One side was trying to organize workers against deadly and exploitative working conditions, including in some cases leaving lucrative medical jobs to get dangerous jobs in a textile mill to be closer to the action, and then stood up aggressively to a murderous gang and the other side is literal Nazis and Klansmen. There’s a pretty clear “pure hero” to me in that story. She tries to go out of her way to illuminate the ways in which the communists were out of touch or off-putting to people and overly aggressive, all of which I’m sure is true, but this comes dangerously close to victim blaming to me. If the communists made a mistake, it was not being better armed at the march. She’s also to quick to believe that the police actions (and lack of action) as well as the subsequent aquitals were the result of incompetence and honest fuck-ups instead of something more sinister. I think if you look at goverment intervention in right-wing groups, from the various Klan informants who were involved in killing Civil Rights workers in the 50s and 60s to their role using these groups to kill Civil Rights leaders to the OKC bombing to contemporary stuff like their entanglement in the millitia movement and things like the Jan. 6th riot, a darker image presents itself that Wheaton is shying away from. I could have used a lot more suspicion and investigation w/r/t the real relationship between the Government agencies and the Klansmen. Either way, I’d recommend the book, this is a very important historical incident that has been completely memory-holed. Those who forget the past, etc. 88 Seconds 

DEATH WISH: A STORY OF THE MAFIA - ICEBERG SLIM

I’ve almost finished the Iceberg Slim ovreau; he wrote 10 books and this is the ninth I’ve read so I feel like I’ve got a sense of him as a writer. I remain convinced he’s outrageously underrated, from both the perspective of a pulp craftsman as well as a writer of deeper political fiction. He’s reduced to the ur-pimp, a precursor to the blacksploitation character, who in turn is the precursor to the hip-hop archetype both of which often celebrate and glamorize when Slim is definitely not doing that, quite the opposite, his books are always indictments of streetlife while illuminating the structural issues that create the sorts of environments that pimps and others exploit. Additionally his books offer a glimpse into race-relations and Black life (he’s as great an artist w/r/t the Great Migration as Jacob Lawrenece) in the 20th century. Death Wish is by no means short of this sort of content, despite exploring an area slightly outside of what Slim usually tackles. As the subtitle suggests Death Wish primarily focuses on the Sicilian Mafia, here called the Honored Society, in Chicago. The main plot involves a power struggle within the organization and various characters vying for power. They are opposed by a group of Black Power advocates called the Warriors who are attempting to take out the mafia, and the police who work for/with them, for exploiting the Chicago ghettos. There’s all sorts of shoot-outs and mafia betrayals and voodoo sacrifices and all the pulpy goodness you’d expect from Slim. I would say, like many of his books, the ending seems abrupt and not at the same level as the rest of the book and the pivoting between the black characters and the Mafia characters made both storylines feel like they needed a bit more. All that being said, it was a fun read, not top-tier Slim but a worthy addition. As always please enjoy this list of street names from the book. ‘74 Honored societies

Larry Love Bone

The Surgeon

Charming Mills

Lil’ D

Kong

Lupo

Mack Rivers

Tit-for-Tat Taylor

Rappin’ Roscoe

Bumpy Lewis

Lotsa Black Hayes

Ivory Jones

Dew Drop Allen

Thick Set

Carl The Sphinx

Bama

The Mole

Buncha Grief

Double Head

Skinny Man Blake

Fluffy

Dandy Ike

Easy Pockets

Lucky Red

Bulldog Slim

Ya-Ya Franzzio

THE BARON IN THE TREES - ITALO CALVINO, trans. ARCHIBALD COLQUHOUN & ANA GOLDSTEIN

It’s been a while since I’ve read some Calvino. I remember sitting in on an Evergreen college class when I was in high school and hearing these college students discuss, IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT, A TRAVER and being very captivated by the story. I proceeded to read that book and a handful of others, I believe this is the 5th book of his I’ve read (the best remains INVISIBLE CITIES, an all-time banger/hall-of-famer) and it maintains the sort of fairytale, fable aspect that I’m drawn to in his work. I understand he has some autobiographical, realists novels as well, which maybe I’ll read someday, but when you’ve got this gift to spin super-imaginative yarns and dizzyingly postmodernist tales, why wouldn’t you? This book doesn’t include some of the more mind-bendy aspects of something like IOAWNAT but it is still quite whimsical. The plot can be summed up quite quickly: the son of an Italian baron, named Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, is asked to finish his snail soup by his father at a meal when he’s a child. Cosimo doesn’t want to, gets into a small fight with his dad, and climbs up a tree, vowing not to return to the earth. And he doesn’t. He spends his whole life in the trees, a life we see through the eyes of his more conventional, earth-bound, younger brother. This might seem like a silly, flimsy premise for a whole novel but Calvino manages to keep it engaging and moving the whole time. Cosimo solves the basic issues of living in the trees, like how to eat and cook and get around and sleep and create shelter. He then embarks on a number of adventures, like fighting pirates, and love affairs. Cosimo’s life maps onto the age of Enlightenment and his activities map onto some of the larger trends in Europe. He writes to Voltaire, he and other characters react to the French Revolution, he meets Napoleon, in a scene that humorously inverts the famous Diogenes/Alexander interaction (which I feel Calvino slightly undercuts by having a character literally point out the similarities, he should trust his readers to get references this obvious) and generally acts as a sort of metaphor for the age. This, to me, is most effective when Calvino lets us understand the perception of the regular peasants, for whom the Baron is a silly rich guy doing silly rich guy things, at least largely harmless in Cosimo’s case, which is a great critique of the Enlightenment and one I wish we had more of. There’s a love plot that has a surprisingly downbeat ending, I was expecting either true love or a more tragic conclusion, what we get in the book feels more real (which is weird for a book about a guy who lives in the trees for no real reason), which is to say misunderstandings, mistakes and disspointments that don’t resolve. The ending is especially great (spoilers). The baron is dying in a bed they’ve taken into the tree for him, and, not even wanting his body to return to the earth in death, he manages to use the last of his strength to catch a rope hanging from a passing hot-air balloon and dies somewhere up in the sky, his body never recovered, persumably lost at sea. 1815 trees.

DJ SCREW: A LIFE IN SLOW REVOLUTION - LANCE SCOTT WALKER

I was very excited to hear that someone was writing a book about DJ Screw, a figure, like J Dilla, who’s influence and renown within hip-hop far outranks his popular fame, even if people vaguely have the idea of slowing down music being a Texas thing and related to screw. Funnily, there is a whole minor theme in the book where Screw and his friends in the Screwed Up Click continually insist that “Chopped and Screwed” cannot be a genre since only records created by DJ Screw can qualify, despite what others may sound like. I believe I was expecting a more straightforward biography and discussion of Screw and Houston culture but this book, insted, is more in-line with Please Kill Me, in that it’s an oral history of a scene in a particular time and place. Walker does a good job talking to everyone and, while Screw died before he finished the book, he also manages to comb through the interviews that Screw did conduct before he died and weaves in Screw’s voice as well. The places where Walker writes in a more traditional non-fiction style, to give context are quite good and I wish they were longer. For example, when discussion Screw’s slowed down sound he gives a brief history of slowed music that includes a DJ named Darryl Scott that was doing something similar in Houston right before Screw, as well as a Miami DJ named Disco Dave who was making “Drag Tapes” in Miami over a decade before Screw and a whole genre I’d never heard of out of Monterrey called Cumbia Rebajada, exemplified by Gabriel “Sonido” Dueñez, that slows down Cumbia music (it’s really fucking good, I’m listening to it right now). There’s a digression about codeine syrup and it’s heavy association with the scene, despite the fact that everyone seems to agree that Screw’s drug a choice was PCP. He includes an interesting fact about the people in Houston at the time preferring Barre to Activas, and the ways this habit has rippled out into hip-hop and pop culture more broadly. Honestly, I could have used more of this stuff. Walker is a good writer and gets what made Screw unique. It wasn’t about just slowing the music down, anyone can do that on their YouTube settings. Screw, as a DJ first and foremost, was a genius at record selections (I love his love of E-40), layering records on top of themselves to create an immensely dense and heavy vibe, and repeating lines, both musically and lyrically, in exciting and unexpected ways that let you burrow deep into a song you might have heard 100 times before. Additionally, the scene, both the Screwed Up Click and the greater Houston hip-hop community, that he cultivated and guided is often overlooked in discussions of his work and should be included in any list of his accomplishments. Hopefully, this is only the first of many books exploring his work and influence, the vein is rich. As always with these things, there were a number of small interesting details that Walker manages to pack in. For instance, Cash Money Records were early in recognizing Screw’s influence and sent him records to get featured on tapes and did their first out-of-NOLA in-store signing at Screwed Up Tapes and Records. Also, the last record Screw listened to was Nevermind, which he apparently loved. Tragic that we were denied a Chopped and Screwed Nirvana placement. 356 Screw Tapes

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