ONE NATION UNDER BLACKMAIL pt. 2 - WHITNEY WEBB

First and foremost, hats off to Whitney Webb. She did it. When Epstien died in 2019 there seemed to be pretty universal agreement, in a way that is suprising in our hyper-partisan era, that something very fucked up had been going on with that guy. It was a clear if quick glimpse into a much darker world that supports and undergirds our world and one we’re not supposed to know about. Well, it’s almost 4 years later and there’s basically been no follow up in the mainstream media. No hard questions for the deeply implicated like Bill Gates, or Bill Clinton, or the administration of Harvard, or Dershowitz or any number of silicon valley ghouls, the list is really endless. No investigations from any part of our government into very serious and credible allegations of blackmail and intelligence ties (and this isn’t just from internet kooks, remember that that truly unbelievable statement from Trump Labor secretary Alex Acosta who admitted to Trumps transition team that he went easy on Epstien when he was the prosecuting attorney in Florida because he was told that Epstein “belonged to intelligence”), no follow-up on the thousands of nude photos of underage girls, presumably with the rich and famous, seized from his NYC home by police. Hell, they even conducted the Maxwell trail in such a way as to not reveal who she was trafficking these girls too. In a less corrupt world, even if the government wasn’t interested in this story, since, presumably, it involves a lot of them, perhaps the mainstream media, with vastly more resources than Webb, who conducted this research largely alone, would be interested in pulling some of these threads or a least keep bringing it up so it doesn’t get memory hole’d which seems likely to be the ultimate fate of this story. Just another wacky thing that happened long ago. But Webb did it. She really went wild, connecting dots and doing here best to show a larger system of corruption and blackmail, where business and intelligence and criminal syndicates overlap to make money and shape power. Like the last book, this volume goes far beyond Epstein. He really only features heavily in about 4 of the chapters. Webb does a good job tracing his life and giving us as thorough a biography as exists yet, but her ultimate aim is the system and structure around Epstein, the one that his bizarre death and the lurid details of his life brought attention to and that we’re being told to ignore. There is a ton in this book about suslord Leslie Wexner, including several quotes his given over the years w/r/t his belief that he’s possessed by a Dybbuk, as well as some murders he seems to have been involved in. A couple chapters about the various Clinton scandals that aren’t BJ based and are thus ignored by even the right-wing press (there’s some actually interesting Vince Foster info that goes beyond the typical right-wing screaming when his name comes up). 

There is some very interesting stuff about how Epstein seemed to be moving toward Silicon Valley before his downfall and his very tight relationship with Bill Gates. There’s some information about his apparent “two-tier” system for women, one that seemed to involve simply underage sex and disposal and other where he groomed women to become wives and girlfriends for the wealthy and powerful. There’s an excellent final chapter on Palatir, an under-discussed super-evil project of Thiel’s that has a large building here in Japan near my house. Overall, the book is a great resource. I’m going to keep it and anytime someone comes up in various “spooky” news stories, I’ll hit the index real quick to see what Webb has dug up on them. I hope that people keep digging into the Epstein issue, I would read another book more narrowly focused on him. Webb has set the bar quite high.

THE PASSENGER - CORMAC MCCARTHY

I wasn’t going to read this one, the first in a two part series, until I came across a review claiming the book was “too bleak” which piqued my interest. McCarthy is just about the bleakest contemporary writer I know of, so if one of his books is bumming out a professional reviewer, it’s probably up my alley. I would say I’m a medium to strong McCarthy fan. I’ve read Blood Meridian and Suttre, both of which I consider perfect classics (BM is one of the top 20 books I’ve ever read and the ultimate Western, I agree with Bloom that it basically renders the genre “finished”), as well as The Road, No Country for Old Men and part of Child of God (which I should revisit) so I think I’ve read enough to definitely say that you don’t go to McCarthy for feel-good vibes. And The Passenger fits firmly in this camp, it is certainly gloomy and a bummer. As a late work, and McCarthy is in his mid-80s so who knows how many more we’re going to get, The Passenger does a great job merging the two major strains of his work. Much of the early McCarthy takes place in Appalachia or the south and has more of a Southern Gothic and at times funny-in-a-grotesque-way feel while the later stuff takes place in the America West on the Border with Mexico and features the tropes and themes you’d expect from that landscape. The Passenger has a main character named Billy Western who spends most of his time in Tennessee and New Orleans, and who, like the main character is NCfOM, gets himself involved in something malevolent that is much larger than him. In this case, Billy is a salvage diver who finds a downed plane in the Gulf of Mexico that seems to be missing a passenger and appears to have been tampered with. He’s then followed by government agents of some sort who think he knows something he’s not supposed to. His father helped create the atomic bomb, which seems to put him under extra scrutiny and he spends most of the book fleeing (ending up in Ibiza, before it’s a rich people party island) these shadowy forces. He spends his time speaking with his dead-beat buddies (including a trans figure who, I found, very sympathetically drawn and well-conceived. You hear that an 80-something year old YT guy author is going to try to write a trans character and you hold your breath) in sections that really reminded me of the best parts of Suttre. Like in Suttre, they bluster and joke, but ultimately commiserate that they don’t understand life at all. He also spends his time missing his dead sister, who he is clearly in love with, Alicia, who was beautiful, a physics genius and profoundly mentally unwell. The book is interspersed with all italics sections that recreated the sister’s hallucinations, which involve grotesque “entertainments” and spectacles but largely revolve around her conversations with a character called “The Thalidomide Kid” or just “The Kid.” This is significant for two reasons, first, “The Kid” is the only name given to the main character in Blood Meridian, so it seems insane to not consider that McCarthy is asking us to connect them (added to this, at one point the book directly calls him a Djinn, which is often how the other main character in Blood Meridian, The Judge, is described). Additionally, the book is partially obsessed with the power of science to do evil, Billy and Alicia’s father’s work on the Atomic bomb comes up often and at one point McCarthy refers to “Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the sister events that sealed forever the fate of the West.” So naming a demonic figure after a drug, Thalidomide, that was developed by Nazi war-criminals who had escaped justice since they were deemed “useful” to the West and went on to hideously deformed 10,000-20,000 people seems very much in keeping with this theme. McCarthy is famous for spending all of his time these days at the Santa Fe institute, talking to scientists so he seems particularly tuned into their capacity for evil. As a final aside, I was also intrigued that this book contains a large, ~20pg section about the Kennedy assassination. His take isn’t wild or anything, he blames the Mafia, especially Carlos Marcello, and the CIA but it does strike me as interesting that, like Bob Dylan, he’s bringing up that killing at the end of his life. Prehaps people of that age have a good sense now of what was lost and how badly we, the USA, have fucked ourselves and the rest of the world by not really getting to the bottom of that event. Overall, I really enjoyed it, where else are you going to get lines like, “Life. What can you say? It’s not for everyone.”

ONE NATION UNDER BLACKMAIL pt. 1 - WHITNEY WEBB

Alright, now we’re talking. Getting into a year of long books, this one was 450 pages and is only part 1 of a series. And, really, this is an intro volume. The nominal topic of these books, Jeffery Epstein, doesn't really appear in this volume at all. After Epstein’s bizarre death in 2019 I, like many people, was deeply interested in what was going on with that guy, the deeper you looked into him, the stranger and stranger it got. His involvement with both Clinton and Trump are on the surface, but when you’d look further you’d find connections to Bill Barr and his father, Alan Dershowitz, basically all of Harvard and MIT, Chris Tucker, Adnan Khashoggi, Victoria’s Secret and the Limited, Too (big brands from the malls of my childhood), The Mossad and CIA, the list got longer and longer the more you looked into it the weirder and darker it got. Sadly, the whole affair has been basically ignored and shit-coated with right-wing conspiracy stuff that just adds his death to the #clintonbodycount and this gets non-right wingers to dismiss the whole thing, but I think there is a general consensus that something fucked up was going on with him that, briefly, gave us a window into the parts of the world we’re not supposed to see or understand. One was always hoping that someone would try to make sense of the whole thing, put all the pieces together into one place. Well, Whitney Webb is the first to try and, boy, did she come out swinging. Like I said, this book doesn't even really get into the Epstein stuff directly, instead, it begins around WWII and tries to trace various networks and overlaps between intelligence, both national intelligence agencies as well as private firms (which, as we see, significantly overlap), and organized crime. She starts with opium dealers who supported the KMT in China and the help they received along with Operation Underworld and the wartime collaboration with the Jewish and Italian Mafias to fight the Axis powers. The book follows these threads through Iran/Contra, the Inslaw affair, various drug running schemes, the Franklin Scandal and much more. Most importantly, it shows how these various scandals include the same interlocking cast of characters and, given the Epstein focus, it pays special attention to sexual blackmail. The stuff about various parties, from the Mafia to Trump Mentor Cohn having photos of FBI director Hoover sucking dick in a dress is a good example of this. There was a lot in the book that I knew about but much, much more that I did not. It is basically an encyclopedia of deep politics, and almost too handspinning to read straight through. The number of characters to keep straight and interlocking plots is tricky to handle, the book is constantly mentioning someone then saying that they will be discussed further in chapter so-and-so which makes the whole picture tricky to put together. However, that seems to be the point, all of this stuff can go on precisely because it is so complex and inter-locked, there’s a fantasy that there’s a grand-boss at the top pulling all the strings and if we could just understand them we’d have the whole thing figured out. Sadly, the truth is that there are hundreds of people and institutions all with competing interests and outlooks, all fighting and teaming up and backstabbing and blackmailing and scheming to increase their power and wealth. Webb has done a great service here, this book will be great to use as a resource to look up folks whenever one comes across a news story that seems “deeper” so to speak. Like I said, as a stand-alone book it’s a bit unfocused, jumps around a lot. As I understand it, it was supposed to be only one book but it would have been too long at ~900+ pages so this part is basically the background, giving a hint at the milieu that Epstein arose from. So maybe it will be possible to just read part 2 by itself, we shall see. Either way, I’m excited to read part 2 and get into the actual Epstein stuff.

WITCHES, WITCH-HUNTING, AND WOMEN - SILVIA FEDERICI

2023 was supposed to be the year of longer books, and it will be, I swear, but I decided to start it off with something quick I could get through while I work my way through some doorstops. Its hard to believe that Caliban and the Witch came out in 2004, something about it seems so timeless and monumental that the idea that it was published when I was in high school (tho, this really might just be a comment about how old I am) is sort of mind-blowing, given how fundamental the framework Federici presents is. This book is a sort of extra chapter to Caliban and the Witch, which if you haven’t read, is absolutely mandatory. It’s a study of the European witch-hunts and its main thesis might best be boiled down to a quote from this book: “What remains unacknowledged is that, like the slave trade and the extermination of the indigenous populations of the “new world” the witch hunt stands at a crossroads of a cluster of social processes that paved the way for the rise of the modern capitalist world. Thus there is much that can be learned from it concerning the preconditions for the capitalist takeoff.” (italics in original). This book rehashes and sharpens these insights then seeks to take these findings abroad. The last few parts of this quite short book are about the rise of witch-hunting in parts of Africa and India as well as the monstrous femicides in Mexico and Central America. In both cases, Federici is able to resist the common, racist, mistake of saying this is “just part of their culture” and instead show how the social changes wrought by capitalism are creating the conditions where women are being accused of witchcraft and violently murdered. Further, she shows how these exact same changes, the social dissolution and increased exploitation required and produced by capitalism, created the exact same femicidal fury in Europe a few hundred years ago. Short, punchy and perfect. I’m not sure it would totally work without having read Caliban and the Witch, which goes much more into the European history and “proves” more of its theories, it, rather, provides sketches and insights into how this framework and understanding the the misogyny at the heart of capitalist transformation can be applied in locations beyond Europe. Each little chapter in this short book could become its own large work, and hopefully there are historians and theorists working on just such books as we speak. In the meantime, we can read and reread Federici and be amazed and horrified at her insights into how our world really works. 1271 Witches

“In other word, women were charged with witchcraft because the restructuring of rural Europea at the dawn of capitalism destroyed their means of livelihood and the basis of their social power, leaving them with no resort but dependency on the charity of the better-off at a time when the communal bonds were disintegrating and a new morality was taking hold that criminalized beggina and looked down upon charity, the reputed path to eternal salvation in the medieval world.”

“Capitalism was born out of the strategies that the field elite - the Church and the landed and merchant classes - implemented in response to the struggles of the rural and urban proletariat that by the fourteenth century were placing their rule in crisis. It was a “counterrevolution,” not only suffocating in blood the new demands for freedom but the turning the world upside down through the creation of a new system of production requiring a different conception of work, wealth and value that was useful for more intense forms of exploitation.”

THE CRYSTAL WORLD - J. G. BALLARD

Last book of the world, I think it’s an even 75 this year, with most coming from my time in Togo, where reading during leisure time was much easier. I decided to read this book now because it’s quite short, to get another one in just before the new year (I’m hoping to focus more on longer stuff next year), and because I’ve never read any J. G. Ballard novels before. I remember reading a short story of his in college about people forced to stay awake 24/7 as part of some experiment, who then go insane, and I remember liking the story but never picked up anything else of his, despite his stellar reputation. This book was only okay. It is about a swampy forest in Cameroon Africa crystallizing along with everyone and everything in it. Into this milieu we follow a doctor who is trying to reach a leprosy clinic in the jungle who gets involved with various YTs, a diamond miner, a priest, an architect, ect. We slowly learn more strange things, like the fact that jewels liquify the crystals for some reason, or that the crystals seem to preserve, perhaps eternally, whatever they encase, or that this process is also happening in the Everglades and the Soviet Union, and we never find out why. The crystal stuff is really excellent and the best part of the novel, Ballard’s descriptions of the crystallized jungle is consistently deeply evocative and striking. It was really easy to visualize these strange and other-worldly scenes. Likewise, I appreciate that while some characters tried to philosophize or speculate as to what the crystallization was happening, Ballard resisted the urge to answer these questions or turn the process into a clear metaphor for something else. That being said, sadly the stuff around the crystallization, namely the interactions between the characters, was boring and forgettable. All of the main characters are YTs in post-colonial Africa, and while there were many secondary African characters, I believe only one of them was named (and even then, only in the last 3rd of the book). But even the YT characters were pretty cookie-cutter and forgettable. None of them or their desires or plotlines ever affected me or made me feel anything besides a desire to get back to descriptions about the forest. There is a compelling motif where many of the characters (including many African characters, though we never are allowed to know there feelings on the matter) are drawn to the idea of purposefully going into the forest to be crystalized but the characters themselves never made me care about their individual fates. Either way, the images of a crystallized forest, my favorite probably being a partially-petrified snake with crystal eyes tho there are dozens to choose from, will stay with me for a while. 1960 Crystals.

PSYCHOPOLITICS: NEOLIBERALISM AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES OF POWER - BYUNG-CHUL HAN

Still on that short book kick described in the previous post, looking to get a couple more in at the end of the year before dedicating much of next year to some longer works. This time, instead of a short novel, I figured I’d knock out another Byung-Chul Han work, since all of his shit is short and sweet, almost aphoristic, which I very much appreciated. This book and THE BURNOUT SOCIETY, the last book of his I read could certainly have been one book, since he’s circling the same set of ideas. Namely, he’s trying to explain and account for the ways that capitalism has changed since the neoliberal turn in the 70’s and how this change affects our lives and alters the contours and effects of power in our society. His big insight is around the ways that power has moved inside of us. Now, instead of getting disciplined through school or the military or a corporate job, we’ve moved all of this inside and rethought ourselves as entrepreneurs, each responsible for fashing ourselves into the sorts of happy, productive, fulfilled people we’re told we can be if we just work hard enough. Once you think of the world this way, you see it everywhere, from the manosphere types imploring you to adapt a gorilla grind-set to crush your goals, to the yoga-prenur types coaching you on self-care journeys to really “find yourself,” to silicon-valley folks talking acid and gathering data to optimize their output, even to the HR racial sensitivity White Fragility types who see racism as a personal project that everyone must addressed individual (coincidentally, in the context of expensive seminars that they run), this mindset is everywhere, in every political direction and always leads to the same dead-end. Han has a bit of academic-brain when he suggests that, “In fact, no proletariat exists under neoliberal regimes at all. There is no working class being exploited by those who own the means of production,” obviously, these people do exist, they just live in the global South, this ideology came into prominence at exactly the moment they started moving these jobs away, a sort of ideology that makes solidarity and mass-action unthinkable. I’m very sympathetic to these ideas and thought this book was quite good, especially when paired with Burnout Society, I sort of wish he’d put them together, and expanded on his intriguing idea that the so-called Big Data movement of today is similar to the birth of statistics in the 18th century, which he throws out towards the end of the book but deserves a lot more consideration. It’s a great way to think about the way the world works now, I’ll keep this framework in mind for a long while, I suspect. 1 neoliberal regime

“Today we deem not ourselves subjugated subjects, but rather projects: always refashioning and reinventing ourselves.”

“As a mutant form of capitalism, neoliberalism transforms workers into entrepreneurs.”

“Power relations are interiorized - and then interpreted as freedom. Self-optimization and submission, freedom and exploitation, fall into one.”

“Emotional capitalism is the gamifying of life and the working world…A person playing a game, being much more emotionally invested, is much more engaged than a worker who acts rationally or is simply functioning.”

THE BRAVE AFRICAN HUNTRESS - AMOS TUTUOLA

Finishing up a few small books before the end of the year, just to pad the end-of-year book count total, since I think I’ll concentrate on some longer things next year. Tutuola is great for this, his books are all short and punchy, wildly imaginative and one-of-a-kind. His stuff is very grounded in particular, Yoruba, folk-milieu but very much its own thing, in some ways, I think of him as Nigeria’s Calvino. Like the other novels of his I’ve read, this one is outside of typical novel structures. Nominally, it tells the story of Adebisi, the titular brave African huntress, who journeys into the jungle to prove her might and rescue her brothers who have gone missing in the preceding years on hunting trips. In practice the story is very episodic and strange. Each chapter is a sort of mini-adventure or set-piece. Like his other books, which also typically follow this same format of someone traveling to a strange land (like the Bush of Ghosts) and having weird adventures and meeting strange people and creatures, this one feels like the episodes and creatures in this book could have been put in basically any order and/or swapped out with chapters from other books of his. None of that’s to say that this book wasn’t exciting or fun to read. There’s a talking gourd (spelled “guord” in the book, is that a British/Nigerian thing?) and a creature with lights coming out of its eyes that Adebisi kills, decapitates and then uses the head as a sort of flashlight for the rest of the novel. There is the signature Tutuola style where he twists standard English into a more Nigerian shape, with lots of unusual usages and constructions (lots of -ing verbs, repetition, understatement, a very colloquial style that mimics being told this story in person, etc.). It is somewhat unique how aggressive and violent this protagonist is compared to the other Tutuola books I’ve read. Typically, in his stuff, the main character is sort of detached and, even if they have a quest, they sort of float by and take in these experiences and have things happen to them. Adebisi in this book, being a brave huntress, is constantly fighting and killing people and animals. By the end of the novel she has killed as many animals as she possible could have in this forest and almost totally whipped out the pigmies (spelled like that, without the “y,” also, some of them are described as quite tall, so perhaps pigmy in this sense means “person who lives deep in the forest”) in a borderline genocidal rampage. These pigmies were holding her brothers hostage and had killed others that had wondered into their forest, but still, it struck me as a bit of an overreaction. Overall, excellent, a great end-of-the-year read. Tutuola remains undefeated. I’ll get through his oeuvre at some point. 4 dark jungles.

DONUTS (33 ⅓ ) - Jordan Ferguson

Knocking out some shorter books right here at the end of the year, figured that since I read that long DILLA TIME biography it made sense to read what I believe to be the only other treatment of Dilla in book form, this 33 ⅓ addition about his magnum opus, Donuts. Obviously, this book suffers from having read the longer Dilla piece first. I don’t think Ferguson anticipated that someone would be writing a 400 page biography of Dila that really digs into every aspect of his sadly short life, so when he includes a 50 page version I’m sure it seemed like it would go down as the final word and he spends too much time on it. I would have preferred the book be just about Donuts, the album and music itself. Ferguson tries to place the album within the larger context of Dilla’s life, which is a good idea but is done much more exhaustively by DILLA TIME. Which is not to say that there wasn’t a few bits of info that were new to me. I didn’t know that Dilla’s very last recording was a flip of “America Eats its Own” by Funkadelic, or that Pete Rock was the first producer to use a producer tag. There is a much more in-depth discussion here of exactly where the samples in each record on Donuts are from and what techniques he’s using to bring them all together. This was the stuff I was really here for, and for the second part of the book, Ferguson delivers. He is also big on the “this record is about dying” theory which I hadn’t really considered before DILLA TIME. The case is pretty strong, given the circumstances of its creation. However, as a listener who went over a decade before hearing this theory, I find the album melancholy and laid back, more than morbid. If it’s about death it’s more in a “turn off your mind, relax and float downstream” sort of way, a melding with an afterlife where his perfectly selected and flipped samples live alongside one another forever. A musical Elysian fields, if you will. I think Ferguson oversells how much the album shifts moods, I find the vibe very consistent. Ferguson writes, “Each beat can be plotted with a graph with “skullkicking” on one axis and “heartbreaking” on the other; with each track containing both colors in varying opacities,” which seems strong to me. I don’t think of any of the beats as fully “skullkicking” or “heartbreaking” at all, they all seem blunted, ethereal and untouchably cool. Even the tracks he thinks of as harsh and challenging, like “Glazed,” I still get lost in and spaced out on. But that’s just me. Ferguson has a ton of interesting stuff to say about this album, which truly is the greatest beat tape of all time and is a top 10 hip-hop record. There deserves to be as much writing on this as there is on Dylan or Springsteen or Lou Reed. Obviously, DILLA TIME is the book to read if you wanna understand Dilla but if you’re not read for the 400 page commitment that that entails, this is more than an acceptable place to start. 31 perfect tunes

OUT - NATSUO KIRINO

Doing my best to read more Japanese stuff and decided to branch out from simply history into some crime fiction. My understanding is that Natsuo Kirino is pretty popular here, consistently wins awards and is considered a leading proponent of a wave of female crime-fiction writers. Since I’m reading in translation and as someone who lives in Japan I was as interested in the background stuff about Japanese life as I was in the story itself. Though, the story itself was quite engaging. The novel is about 4 women who live depressing lives as night-shift employees at a Bento box factory. They each have fucked up home lives in their own ways, from living indebted from being overly materialistic to having sons and husbands who don’t talk to them to having to look after a grandchild and a mother-in-law without a husband. All of the husbands in this book are absent or very shitty and the book is largely about how awful and impossible life as a Japanese woman is, with an incredible amount of obligations and expectations but with dwindling social support. Anyway, the crime part of the book revolves around one of these women impulsively killing her shitty husband, who has spent all of their savings on bar girls and baccarat, and then the other 3 eventually, either for money or a sense of obligation, helping cut up and dispose of the body. As you can imagine the plot thickens from there. They blackmail each other and wrestle with what they’ve done and try to keep it all secret from the police. At the same time the police start to suspect a gangster/pimp who got in a fight with the husband shortly before his death. This guy, who has his life ruined by the investigation, also starts to track the women down for vengeance. The plot itself is pretty interesting and exciting, it continues to provide new twist consistently. There is a B-plot about a Brazilian-Japanese coworker at the Bento factory who becomes infatuated with one of the women which doesn’t really go anywhere. It was interesting to see what life would be like for a not 100% Japanese person in Japan, there is a whole community of Brazilians in the book, but his particular arc wasn’t very satisfying. The stuff about the gangster was quite interesting to me, it touches on some Japanese underworld stuff that was very interesting, and it helped explain the Girls’ Bars that you see everywhere here. However, part of the novel centers around the fact that the gangster had committed a really gruesome rape/murder earlier in his life, served less than a decade and is back out, and it doesn’t seem to me that the Japanese penal system is that lenient. It’s also interesting to read crime fiction about a country where murder is so rare that it’s a big national event when one occurs. Despite a disappointing ending the novel was really engaging and interesting. The main women, and especially Masako, the leader of the group, were incredibly well drawn and fascinating. The sense of suffocation and dead-endedness in their lives was really compelling and sad. 2004 chopped up bodies.

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