CONTENT - KATE EICHHORN

Another quick little summer read. Grabbed this at the Lawrence Public Library and read it by the pool. Eichhorn is a media professor and tried to create a little introduction and float some theories about digital culture and the definition/role of “Content” therein. Going in, I assumed the word was typically used to mean anything available online. From old movies you can stream, to people’s tweets, to photos you up on Instagram to 1,000 page pdf files. Eichhorn, I think rightly, pursues a narrower definition. She sees content as the extra stuff, meant only to generate attention, while actual art and more thoughtful digital expressions would be something else. So if a celebrity is tweeting a lot and going on podcasts and appearing in a lot of youtube videos, that’s content, the movie that might stream on some service later isn’t, since it has a higher artistic purpose. I think Eichhorn is right to be suspicious and think this is really bad for us as a whole. She does a good job tracing the evolution of content on the internet, and explains how the incentives of the internet bend it towards stupid, “optimized” content that everyone hates and, yet, is ubiquitous. I wish she’d gone a little wider and speculated as to why these forces are arranged in this way, but what can you do. Likewise, she interrogated the ways that content, and it’s variant, fake news, twists and distorts politics, especially electoral politics, and especially around Trump. Here’s another place where I could have used a wider view about the historical uses of dis-info and fake news for political ends. This book, through omission, suggests that this sort of weaponized content is a Russian invention and technique, not something the US is quite familiar with. Likewise, I found the suggestions at the end, ex. Increase media literacy, to be a bit bland and below the scale of what were dealing with. Overall, a good excuse to think about content and the implications of all this, but didn’t go deep enough into some key areas.

EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN - JAMES BALDWIN

There has been a bit of a Baldwin renaissance over the last few years. He was one of the Black writers who was chosen by the YT liberal PMC class as an essential writer that one had to read in order to “do the work” (which of course, means to do nothing material) in the midst of the summer 2020 protests. Typically, folks recommend The Fire Next Time, I hadn’t even heard of this book until very recently. I knew that Baldwin had also written a book about Hollywood but not that he’d written this short book on the Atlanta Child Murders. Since the ACMs are quite interesting to me and, to my mind, strangely under talked about given America’s love of Serial Killers (there’s a whole other essay on this website about that dynamic), and since Baldwin is such a talented and original writer, this book was pretty narrowcasted to my interests. It did not disappoint. I really like the format of this book. It's a long essay, about 125 pages, but short as a book. It isn’t true crime, in the sense that Baldwin is trying to give you a blow-by-blow of the crimes and investigations and trials, and while he does discuss the crimes and gives his thoughts and feelings about the guilt of Wayne Williams (the person who sits in prison for these crimes) as well as his ideas about some of the other major theories about what the fuck was going on in Atlanta. Mostly, he digresses and loops around and goes on beautifully worded tangents where he discusses US race relations since the late 60’s, family dynamics, the nature of evidence, relationships between men and women and a million other things. It’s one of the most engaging and well-written essays I’ve ever read which really shows the strength of the form and illustrates how, when you’re a genius, you can weave anything together. As far as the crimes themselves, I know that Atlanta is currently reopening the cases, so maybe someday we’ll learn something. Baldwin seems very dismissive of the idea of ring of folks trafficking in kids, with one of these traffickers at one of the nodes killing because they’re a sadist, one of the main alternative theories (and for this, look no further than the John David Norman connection between John Wayne Gacy and Dean Coryll) but he also doesn't believe the main Wayne Williams centered narrative. Baldwin does a brutal and bare examination of Williams but he doesn’t believe he’s the main killer. He runs through all the other major alternative theories, Klan involvement, never really ended, multiple people involved but if you’re looking for a real deep dive into the crimes, this ain’t that. To my knowledge, that book hasn’t been written, though I’d love to read it. This is great though, I wish more writers worked in this form, and were as good at it as Baldwin was. Great summer read.

BELOW AMBITION - SIMON HANSELMANN

Saw this the very last day I spent in Chapel Hill. I went to the library, saw it on the shelf and sat down right there to read the whole thing. I do love Megg, Mogg and Owl, and the greater Hansel-verse, one of the drawbacks of living overseas is limited access to that sort of stuff. So I have to try to cram it in when I’m back in the states. Anyway, I’ll approach this one with a big “spoilers” warning. M,M&O is really serial or sequential, sometimes characters die and come back, it’s not clear what order events are happening in, etc. However, characters have changed and deepened in specific and lasting ways, we are sometimes given flashbacks that explain some of the character dynamics and, generally, there’s now a good amount of lore about all the major characters. This book is short, Hanselmann claims in a short essay on the back cover that this whole thing was a warm up to a much larger piece, and punchy. It contains a lot of the more extreme “gross” stuff that this comic often gets into. It centers around Werewolf Jones and Megg touring with their noise band, Horse Mania. They constantly get dangerously fucked up, they taunt the audience and staff at shoes. They have all sorts of crazy sex and don’t move the “main” story along very far. That being said, there is a flash-forward at the very end of the book, which I don’t think we’ve ever seen before, which really, to my mind, changes the way one reads the comics. It’s revealed that Megg, at some point in the future, has a daughter and seems to live a somewhat comfortable and normal life. Basically, she gets it together to some degree and gets out of the depressing miasma that the comic typically chronicles. The fact that Megg could always die (earlier in the comic, she “jokes” about killing herself) or just be a fuck-up forever, is one of the major sources of tension in the comic and it feels weird to know that it works out, at least for Megg. Something to ponder. Anyway, the rest of the comic is quite funny. Hanselmann really nails the milieu and vibe around a DIY noise show. The Werewolf Jones and Megg banter on-stage is really funny and Hanselmann has gotten really good at ratcheting up the grossness and absurdity then cutting to a panel of someone’s mad and/or horrified face. He pulls this trick a few times and it was always funny. No Mogg or Owl or much of the other characters, which makes it feel more minor, but I really enjoyed my afternoon reading it. Cannot wait for the bigger story.

SONGS OF KABIR - KABIR trans. By ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA

I just had a brief personal debate about how to even title this entry, since it isn’t totally clear who should be credited as the author of this slim volume. Obviously it’s by “Kabir” but as the two intros make quite clear, Kabir is some sort of collection of poems, authored by many people and groups, sometime from the late 1300’s to early 1500’s in Northern India. On top of that Mehrotra gives a very eclectic and idiosyncratic translation including references to “Sing Sing” and using phrases like, “a bootlicker’s smile” that makes the poems feel more visceral and less like an assignment. But they do make them a product of Mehrotra’s artistry as well. I would definitely like to seek out more translations of Kabir after this, the poetry is really striking and spiritually charged. Given how popular Rumi is in the West, I’m pretty surprised that Kabir isn’t well known here. Hell, I only picked up this book because it was short, I wanted to read some poetry and I’m always interested in whatever Wendy Doinger has to say, and he wrote the preface to this book. Kabir tills much of the same ground as Rumi does, the poems are about spiritual truths beyond Hinduism and Islam, the major forces in Kabir’s India as well as two systems that Kabir has a deep understanding, respect and criticism for. “What’s your problem muezzin? / Can’t you see you’re a walking / Mosque yourself?.../Cut the throat of desire, / Not a poor goat’s, if you must.” Sentiments in that vein. Kabir is also deeply interested in a form called ulatbamsi which Mehrotra renders as “ poetry in an upside down language” which is very full of paradox and contradictions like, “a tree with flowering roots'' or “Fish spawning / on treetops;”. enjoyed the combination of light and breezy language and verse, packed with nonsense and profundity. Nice little break from the head-y stuff, some of these lines will stick with me for a while. Would love to read more Kabir and more Kabir by different translators.

THE SANDMAN (BOOK 3) - NEIL GAIMAN, et. al.

The great reread of The Sandman is now almost over. There remains only one volume left, which I’ll be able to read when my wife finishes it. As always, the art is varied and incredible. There are a handful of artists represented in this volume, all of whom preform wonderfully, though I especially enjoyed P. Craig Russell, Jill Thompson, and Vince Locke’s sections. This volume balances the “main story” about Dream and his family members alongside a handful of one-off episodes that only somewhat tie into the main storyline. As always, the one-off stories are a bit hit or miss. Some of them are really great, I’m partial to the one about Baghdad, while others are sort of meh. The main story here is progressed further than in any of the other story lines. I only vaguely remember what happens with this stuff, based on my original read. I remembered that Dream had a family member, Destruction, abdicate his duties and that he went on a quest to find him, which does happen in this book. However, it remains unclear what abdicating means in this world since things are obviously still being destroyed. It actually calls back to the earliest sections of this work where Dream himself is imprisoned, tho dreaming still occurs in the world, he’s just not incharge of it. It all makes it a bit unclear as to what these personifications actually do and are. Perhaps it will be explained further in the last volume. But light criticism aside, this book is really a masterpiece. It’s beautiful, the stories are great, the characters are so original and interesting, it’s easily a top 5 comic.

LEASH - JANE DELYNN

A nasty little book. I believe I heard about this book in the context of a discussion erotic novellas. Like THE STORY OF THE EYE, this book benefits from being a short little novel that rockets through the plot and headfirst into an insane ending. The basic plot is simple (and reminiscent of FIGHT CLUB). A modern upper-middle class cosmopolitan woman is bored with her humdrum life and basic girlfriend. She reaches out through a personal and eventually gets in touch with a mysterious, compelling stranger who slowly takes her down an increasingly deranged and perverted exploration of BDSM. Eventually this stranger and the sort of sex they are having together consumes every aspect of the narrator's life and, like I said, it culminates in a sort of narrative zoom-out and an extremely fucked-up event that really rounds the book out. The whole time as the sex-acts get more and more extreme one wonders, “how the fuck will they top that one? How will this book end?” and, to my delight and chagrin, DeLynn pulled it off and conceived a satisfying and profoundly perverse ending. The book touches on all sorts of themes around pleasure and desire, as might be expected. However, it’s also heavily interested in modern ennui and boredom and power. There is some interesting stuff about race (which is more teased at then fully explored) and some at-times-terrifying episodes about and featuring pets. I haven’t read a lot of lesbian erotic fiction but I feel confident saying that this volume is among the most perverse and entertaining. It’s short and disgusting, it’s a fun little read on a long afternoon. 

TO LIVE AND THINK LIKE PIGS - GILLES CHÂTELT, trans. Robin Mackay

Quick little number I polished off while some longer pieces are in the works. I’m not sure where I first heard of this book or what I thought it was about. It does have an intriguing title and it is relatively short. Gilles Châtelet, who I’d never heard of before, is a French mathematician and political theorists who was active from the 70’s until the early 2000s. This volume came out in 1998 and seeks to chart the situation, in the West generally but France in particular, since the uprisings and rebellions of the late 60’s as they were swept up in the neoliberal counter-reformation (his term) and destroyed. Parts of it are fascinatingly precinct and spot-on, especially given that he wrote them at the very beginning of the internet age. He really nails the idea of turning everyone into a monad, a disconnected individual who, thanks to the cybernetics of the internet, can work (and be surveilled) from anywhere in the world. “Cybercattle, the sucker-nomad” as he calls it. He points out how this makes various cities around the world, the global cities, into flat mirrors of one another, merely places to check-off and say you’ve been without ever really being there. He nails the way that individual poverty is now a personal failure, a lack of hustle and grind, while this push to be a unique individual and to cultivate an authentic identity is weaponized to destroy solidarity and the possibility of political change. He also calls Satre and Foucault, “narco-lefitist pedophiles.” All good stuff and, again, amazing he was able to see this from the vantage point of 1998, it seems much more relevant now than the time 25 years ago when he wrote it. The last sections of the book are the strongest, it’s a bit to rambly for me for the first couple chapters. Also, it is very French, there all all sorts of references to French characters, real and fictional, that are briefly touched on in footnotes but were unknown to me and play big roles in his thinking. I felt like I was missing a lot of context in these sections. That being said, parts of this were among the most scathing and insightful passages I’ve read about the purpose and function of neoliberalism. A pretty good bird’s eye view level take on the whole phenomena.

REFRACTIVE AFRICA - WILL ALEXANDER

I don’t read and review enough poetry so forgive me if this is stupider than usual. I’m not sure how I heard of L.A. poet Will Alexander, I know I was trying to get my hands on a book of his called, “Asia & Haiti” but so far I’ve been unable to download or buy a physical copy. This book popped up though and after seeing that it had a poem dedicated to Amos Tutuola and another to Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, I knew I had to cop. Turns out that this book is only three poems long, the two aforementioned poems about these great African writers and a third, and the longest, about the Congo. I don’t think I’ve been sent to a dictionary this much from something I’ve read in a while. Alexander drops some wonderful poetic phrases like “vitreous owls” and “aleatoric electrification.” He also chooses very concrete and “real-world” issues to tackle in his poems. I feel that poetry is often, at its worse, navel-gaze-y and self-centered. Focused on individual diffuse feelings and unattached to material reality. Alexander picks very concrete subjects and creates poems that often seem to verge into essays; not in style, the whole time he remains in the highest, most erudite poetic register, but rather in insight and clarity. This is poetry as critical review. I’m pretty familiar with Tutuola, I’ve read maybe four or five of his books and really like his stuff so it was easy for me to follow and appreciate what Alexander has to say about his work. Tutuola is criminally underappreciated and this is the first thing I’ve come across that treats him like the major writer and genius he is. I love his insight about how Tutuola writes about worlds and characters who have never come into contact with modern or colonial bureaucracy, that’s such a good way to put the particular world that he conjures. Sadly, despite Rabearivelo being Malagasy, I haven’t read any of his work (primarily because he wrote mostly in French) so I can’t as much speak to the insights that Alexander brings up there but I will say the poem was luminous and beautiful. The Congo one in the middle was perhaps my favorite. I’m pretty familiar with Congolese history in the 20th century (not as much as I should be but more than most people, I could identify most of the political figures he mentioned without the aid of the notes in the back of the book). Alexander really nails the particularly hellish reality of the Congo’s history and the ways it has remained a sort of laboratory of colonial and Capitalistic evil. The place on Earth where the mask really comes off and the true manifestation of European then American desires is visible. “Alive in a morgue that creates planetary finance” as he puts it, or, to quote another line, “between the living & the living dead / profits accrue” While dark and depressing, the effect didn’t feel preachy or lecture-y to me. I found it serpentine and complicated and linguistically impressive. But, again, I don’t read enough poetry. That being said, I hope to read more of Alexander’s. 

RAP CAPITAL: AN ATLANTA STORY - JOE COSCARELLI

As you might be able to tell looking back over this blog, I read a lot of books about hip-hop. Just this year I’ve read 2 books about J Dilla and one about DJ Screw (as well as a Eshun book that was partial about rap music). As anyone who listens to rap knows, Atlanta’s got something to say. Arguably the most important rap city of the last 2 decades, the music that is made out of Atlanta is consistently the most popular, interesting and influential music in the genre. Coscarelli, an NYT reporter (which I’ll try not to hold against him), embedded in Atlanta for the last couple of years, riding around with rappers, talking to the people behind the scenes, learning the history and thinking about the music itself and came away with a book that is trying to be many things at once. Firstly, it’s a history of Atlanta rap music and the ways that this music intersects with the history of the city itself. It’s also a chronicle of QC music, the group he spends the most time with. He also tries to put on his cultural critic hat and discuss the trends and meanings woven throughout the music. In that first part, he brings up some interesting tidbits and brings in some fascinating history. I was pretty surprised he begins the book talking about the Atlanta Child Murders, one of the strangest serial-killing incidents in American history that positively radiates with sus vibes (if anyone wants to talk ACM, hit me up, it’s such a weird rabbit-hole), he finds an amazing quote of W.E.B. Debois calling Atliens, “vulgar money-getters”, he briefly explains the history of Freaknik, and outlines, in board sketches, the history of Atlanta music before this current era. Outkast is my favorite group of all time and the history of Atlanta is fascinating (like I said, can never get enough ACM content, Coscarelli doesn’t even bring up the weird Biggie line that alludes to the murders) so I wish this section went on longer. The second major aspect of the book, the one that centers around his time riding around with actual rappers and behind-the-scenes music people (like Coach and P of QC) seems closest to what he does as his day job, ie profiles of musicians. He manages to find a pretty fascinating trio of folks to cover for a few years. I embeds with Lil’ Baby, right as his star is rising, chronicling him going from a relatively unknown local rapper to a total A-lister pop-star who reaches outside of the genre. He also follows Lil’ Marlo, a friend of Lil’ Baby’s, and Lil’ Reek, both of whom try for years to break in a major way and never quite make it. Lil’ Reek seems somewhat locally popular but never really gets the hit he needs to really jumpstart his career. We see him sign record deals, get dropped, work independently, hustle his way into studio time and opportunities and it just sort of fizzles out for him. Lil’ Marlo has a more dramatic story. He, like so many Atlanta rappers, has actual street credentials, so much of this book is about the intersection of street culture and the rap industry, and tries rap as a way to make legal money that will better his family’s predicament and keep him out of jail. But, while his friend Lil’ Baby, who he was friends with during their mutual hustling days, takes off and makes millions and is, by all accounts, able to leave the streets alone and focus on music, Marlo doesn’t really pop like that and his constantly tempted back to the streets, where he can make a ton of fast money, even with the risks involved. The Marlo story is heartbreaking, Coscarelli follows his back-and-forth struggles over the years before Covid really shuts the industry down, especially for someone at Marlo’s level, which sends him back to trapping and ultimately leads to his murder. Coscarelli doesn’t try to really explain the ends and outs of his killing, tho there are countless videos and interviews online that seek to do just that, however he does relay a scene where Marlo confesses to his dad that he killed someone and is worried about the repercussions. There is no discussion about the morality of including this moment. The last part, the more high-minded discussions of the music and culture could also have used more fleshing out to me. Rap, during the years covered by this book, took a very street turn. Because of Youtube and podcasts and instagram live, it became de rigor and necessary for rappers to flaunt their street ties and casual fans were able to really dig into actual crimes that these people were associated with. This had lead to an unprecedented number of violent deaths and prisons sentences of rappers in the last few years (2 major figures from the book, Young Thug and the Migos, are currently on trial facing life and have had one of their members murdered in the last year, for example) and I wish Coscarelli had spent more time thinking and offering theories about why that is. Is this a label thing, are they pushing this sort of content? Is this due to streaming predominating, giving listeners more of a choice in what they want to hear? If that’s the case, why is this sort of content so appealing right now? This sort of music isn’t new but it’s hold and ubiquity certainly is. Anyway, overall it was a well-written and engaging book. I wish it had gone deeper into a handful of aspects but I appreciate how much ground Coscarelli was trying to cover.

ENDLESS HOLOCAUSTS: MASS DEATH IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES EMPIRE - DAVID MICHAEL SMITH

As part of the “Blame America First” crowd, this book really spoke to me. It’s a sort of history book slash thesis that seeks to count up all the deaths the US has been responsible for over its history. Smith hits the big ones right off the bat, the indigenous holocaust that began before America proper and continues to this day, along with the slave trade. Both of these events are pretty hard to quantify accurately. There’s a fascinating overview of the scholarship in these two areas. Smith quotes various academics who have tried to estimate the total number of Natives in North and South America before Columbus as well as folks who have tried to not only calculate the total number of Africans enslaved and shipped out of Africa but also estimate how many must have died in during the raids and transportation to the coasts, before these people even got to the boats. Obviously, these are two numbers that are near impossible to know for sure and are both subject to future scholarship, multiple books have been written on both topics but Smith manages to give a good overview of the current thinking. He also dives into a long discussion of the various wars and military encounters and coups and genocides the US has been involved in directly or funded. This part of the book is all short little hits. A coup in Brazil here, a genocide in Indoneisa there, all of this adds up. I’m pretty interested in US history so most of this was not new to me but it was handy to have it all laid out in one spot. Each of these events deserves their own books, and these books do exist (I’ve read dozens of them) Smith is going for a bird’s-eye view so he only spends a page or so on each. The book has hundreds of pages of notes so there’s ample resources to dive into at the end. He really gets in his bag when he attempts to quantify and lay out all the deaths associated with unsafe working conditions and harmful products and labor strikes associated with America’s particular brand of capitalism. This section, which he calls the Worker’s Holocaust, is also quite thorough and interesting. Again, if you’re familiar with something like A People’s History, you probably have heard of most of this stuff but it’s pretty mind-blowing to see it all laid out so clearly and easily in one spot. It’s a depressing read overall, he puts his total number of deaths in the various American Holocausts at around 300 million people in the US’s history, but it’s pretty vital. I’d recommend it for people looking to get into American History. 

SEXUALITY BEYOND CONSENT: RISK, RACE, TRAUMATOPHILIA - AVGI SAKETOPOULOU

I read this one because a podcast I like is doing a series on it. The title itself is quite provocative and I’m, generally, interested in, if skeptical of, psychoanalytic stuff, so it seemed like this book would be a good quick read. The book is by a practicing psychoanalysis named Saketoploulou who works in NYC with diverse (tho it seems mostly queer) clients and has built up a number of theories and ideas based on actual experiences she’s had in therapy sessions. Her argument, at its most broad, concerns our current cultural concern (in mainstream, liberal spaces) over “informed consent” and the idea of boundaries and safety. Saketopoulou points out that this way of framing human sexuality isn’t in line with the way that real life works, and that the most transcendent and interesting experiences one can have in these realms are ones that overwhelm and touch something deep and, by definition, can’t be totally consented to since you don’t know what they will entail before they happen. The first two main examples in the book are pretty pedestrian, both involve gay men, in the first scenerio, a sort of bougie upper-class guy is in a sex club in another country and gets fucked hard by some smelly ugly guy, the second guy is at a piss-party where he only intended to be pissing on people but someone else pisses in his mouth without his consent. In both cases something that wasn’t necessarily agreed to ends up being really amazing and boundary pushing, in both cases these men have their world’s rocked and reevaluate what it is they want and think they can get out of sex. This line of thinking seems to grow out of the Bataille’s notion of “sovereign experience” and Foucault’s idea of a “limit experiment” both of whom she draws from directly. Basically, you agree to push past the point you can really agree to, into an actual unknown. The last half of the book is a little more gnarly. It concerns race-play in sex as well as a literal play called “Race Play” that ran in New York a few years ago and with which Saketopoulou became obsessed. She saw the play dozens of times, went to discussion groups about the play, read everything about it and generally spent tons of time thinking and considering it. The play itself, which I haven’t seen nor had I heard of before reading this book, is about a group of interracial couples that have moved to a real plantation in the south to get sex-therapy that involves acting out slavery-based sex scenes. Obviously, this would tap into a trauma, which Saketopulou thinks allows the sex to access something deep and fundamental in a person. This is a interesting line of thinking, I would personally not do this, I can’t imagine any desire to cross the wires of sexual desire and (in my case as a YT man descended from Confederates) profound historical shame, and I wonder if Saketopoulou, as a non-American (Greek Immigrant) YT, really gets the impact of slavery on those of us with that in our history. Her theories about trauma, how it imparts an enigma within us that can only be understood through a “translation” which will, by definition, be incomplete  and these engagements with the trauma, through things like sexual play allow us to retranslate and monkey around with this trauma. Not to solve it, the enigma of trauma can’t really be solved, but to translate it in different ways. I think that’s pretty fascinating, especially given how popular the idea of “trauma” has become. Once, not 10 years ago, this word was reserved for combat veterans and the victims of the most horrible sorts of sexual assaults. I think this expansion is, overall, good and useful but it does mean we all have to think about ways to deal with, transform and move past our traumas, wallowing is not great. I’m skeptical and think it’s sort of theory-brained to think that one can undo the trauma of slavery with individual sex-play, that seems pretty neo-liberal and silly to me.

BEYOND BLACK - HILARY MANTEL

A fitting title for sure, this book is bleak. I read Mantel’s novel about the French Revolution like a decade ago and remember really liking it. I remember being struck by how good the writing was, and thought I’d give another of her novels a chance. She’s most famous for her historical fiction, though I thought I’d try something else from her. After hearing she’d written a ghost story, I set my sights on that. This book lived up to expectations, it is indeed a very dark ghost story. The novel centers a woman who works as a psychic across suburban England. Psychic might not be exactly the right word, she thinks of herself as a “sensitive” which basically means someone who can see and talk with ghosts. She makes her money performing in front of audiences and working with clients one-on-one where she speaks to the dead and relays messages back from “Spirit” the books term for the afterlife. This woman, Al, teams up with the recently divorced Colette, a woman who does not have any of these powers but who helps manage the business end of things and helps them get moderately successful. The book is funny in a British way too, there’s lots of short, brief asides about the bleakness and ghastliness of British food and the British suburbs. There is a whole side-story about the fortune-teller psychic “scene” (including a pair of feuding male psychics named Merlin and Merylin) and the ways that they all use their abilities to try to make money. Colette is mean, especially about Al’s weight, and curt while Al is kind but obvious. At first this dynamic is confusing, why is Al keeping this mean woman around, but as the book delves into Al’s childhood, it becomes clear why she seeks out this dynamic. It turns out that the ability to speak to and see the dead is a terrible curse. Death doesn’t improve anyone, people are just and mean and petty as they were in life and Al is constantly the target of their abuse. She’s often cleaning up and censoring what the dead are actually telling her to make her clients feel better. There’s a general satire in the book about modern Britons not wanting to really know anything about the past, from living in totally new suburbs, to not knowing their own grandparents’ names. Slowly, as we learn more about the spirit world and how monstrous and horrific it actually is, it becomes clear that Al’s spirit guide, Morris, and Morris’ friends, the ghost she sees most often, are actual figures from her horrific, rape-filled childhood. They’ve continued to torment her from beyond the grave. The afterlife in general is vague, Al doesn’t seem to fully understand it either, but it seems that only the petty and evil are sticking around as ghosts, the good and virtuous are elsewhere. Also, there are references to the literal devil, but Mantel keeps this tantalizingly obscure and confusing. While I think these ghosts do work as a metaphor for trauma and childhood adversity, the book makes it pretty clear that the ghosts are real, they aren’t just in Al’s head, which I found a really refreshing choice. Too often in horror there is a final twist where we learn the Monster wasn’t real, that it was just some trauma or psychological block or all in a character’s head. The last portion of the book, where you finally figure out exactly what has happened in Al’s past, is amazingly dark and feels well earned and impactful after 300+ of getting to know Al as an adult. There was an early section where she does past life regression stuff and receives an in-womb memory of her mother trying to abort her with a knitting needle, to give you a taste of what sort of stuff is in this book (it gets much worse than that). Overall, the book was quite good and engaging. It was a bit long and repetitive, though if it was shorter the shocking information towards the end might have been seen as shocking-to-be-shocking so perhaps the length was needed. Again, the writing was some of the best I’ve ever read, it maintained a consistent spooky vibe with some mordant, wry, humor and on a sentence-to-sentence level, it was beautiful. I cannot stress enough how well she describes various utterly disgusting British meals. I’m not sure if I’m really interested in her Oliver Cromwell novels, though if she writes another ghost story, I’m there. 

THE SANDMAN (pt. 2) - NEIL GAIMAN, et. al.

The reading has, shamefully, slowed down but not stopped. I’m slogging through a couple of long, complicated volumes, perhaps too many at the same time, and I needed a shorter, familiar thing as a sort of pick-me-up or pallet cleanser. Like I said with the last review of The Sandman, I read these things over a decade ago (maybe 20 years ago now? fuck) and this is a reread spurred on by my wife getting into the series and reading them for the first time. I read them in bed, right before I fall asleep, which is fitting given the topic of the book. Or the ostensible topic, actually, the lack of Dream, the main character of the series, makes this installment much weaker for me than the first one. As I noted in my review of the first volume (this is the second volume of a 4 part completion, I originally read the trade paperbacks, so each of these reprints is 3-5 of those collections) I remembered many of those stories, but this time that was not the case. I remembered the strongest arch in this collection, which is the storyline about Lucifer giving the keys to hell to Dream, who was attempting to free a woman he’d condemned to hell millenia ago. This story is Gaiman at his best, it’s weird and wide-ranging, it smashes a bunch of different mythological figures together, it allows for beautiful and strange art, it largely coheres into a satisfying story. I remembered the storyline about famous local yokel Emperor Norton, though that storyline is much shorter and involves less pay-off than I had recalled. Sadly, the rest of the volume was closer to that. The Cuckoo storyline, which introduces a whole new slate of characters and situations that are not really connected to the main Dream-storyline at all, besides Dream himself entering as a sort of Deus ex Machina at the very end, fell flat for me. It’s a sort of fantasy pastiche that doesn’t play with the cliches it’s highlighting enough to warrent their inclusion. There’s a trans character that is treated better than I would have guessed, given that the thing was published in the 90’s, outside of a weird episode that suggested the Moon itself was transphobic. There were sections about Dream’s son, Orphesus as well as a story about Augustus Caesar that were good but too short to have a big impact. I know it seems like I’m slagging it off, so let me reel it back a little. The series is still incredible, the originality and strangeness and incredible art is on a level that is largely unmatched in comics. The stuff with the Endless, Dream’s siblings is great, though I remember feeling it didn’t pay off on my first read through. I enjoyed reading it for sure and I’m excited to finish the series. All that being said, the first volume had the more memorable archs.

REVOLUTION’S END: THE PATTY HEARST KIDNAPPING, MIND CONTROL, AND THE SECRET HISTORY OF DONALD DEFREEZE AND THE SLA

This one was wild. As I continue my slog through a handful of longer books, I decided to take a minute and read something quicker and easier to digest. The whole SLA, Patty Hearst thing is not something I knew a lot about. I knew the basic outlines, I knew about the kidnapping and the bank robbery. I knew a little about the SLA dying in a shoot-out with the LAPD. I’m half-Californian, on my Mom’s side, and I’ve been to Hearst Castle and know something about the Hearst family. I knew about the very cool SLA logo and the general sense that there is something sus about the whole situation. This book really filled in lots of the blanks. It connected really well to the larger story about US conter-insurgency/Domestic GLADIO/CHAOS that I’ve been following and putting together from a number of different books over the past year or so. It helps if you’re already familiar with what was going on with Phoenix during this same period and characters like Colston Westbrook, Jolly West, Karanga and the various Panthers (both LA and Oakland). It contains a lot of good information about the Prison movement and the attempts to derail this movement. The book makes a strong case that DeFreeze, a life-long snitch and informant, was manipulated, through drugs and other MKULTRA/MKSEARCH tactics into forming a radical group that could be nudged and controlled to act in a way that would further the ends of the state. Firstly, by killing someone like Marcus Foster, the Oakland Public Schools superintendent  who was friendly with and sympathetic to the Panthers. Secondly, by acting as a sort of trap for YT radicals who were willing to commit violence and, finally, by committing acts so outrageous it would push the general public to distrust left-wing militancy. On that level it seems somewhat analogous to the operation that seems to have gone on with Manson (who has a cameo in this book, DeFreeze snitched on him in LA) that O’Neil outlined. The stuff about the US organization was also useful and interesting; Kwanzaa remains a profoundly sus institution. Overall, the book is a helpful addition to the para-histoircal (or deep-history) project I’ve undertaken the last few years to understand the history of the United States. I don’t think we can move forward until we understand what’s really happened and gone on here, especially since the end of WWII. In terms of domestic ops, the SLA was one of the most brazen and clear-cut. Put in the pantheon with OKC, 9/11, the 60’s assassinations, and Epestin. I would definitely recommend reading in alongside CHAOS. 

DEATH’S END - CIXIN LIU (trans. Ken Liu)

Well, I finally did it, I’ve made it through the Remembrance of Earth’s Past series. I’ll cut to the chase, this last volume is by far my favorite. In general, I come to Sci-Fi or Fantasy or whatever genre for far-out plot and mind-bending concepts. This series of books really ramped it up over the three volumes. The first, THREE-BODY PROBLEM is very grounded and, by comparison, normal seeming, it’s basically a mystery with some sci-fi elements that mostly play out at the end of the book. The second book starts from a more sci-fi place, with a futuristic setting, but really gets exciting and introduces some strange, cool concepts in the last portion of the book. This final novel follows that format as well. It starts fairly normally for a book set hundreds of years in the future. It plays with the same dynamics and ideas that Liu had established in the early novels. However, by the end of this 700 page book, in the last third, it really goes wild and speculates into the far, far future. The book does a good job constantly increasing the scale and scope of what it is talking about and considering until the end when the nature and fate of the universe itself are the main driving plot points. Like the second book, alien weapons are some of the most innovate and interesting concepts the Liu plays with, he clearly has thought about this a lot. Like the Solar Cycle, there is a portion of the book that revolves around interpreting an allegorical story told by a character, which makes me wonder if that series (which, ultimately, for me, remains the Sci-Fi high water mark) is available in Chinese. Like the first, book, this volume includes a single section written from the point of view of an alien civilization which was pretty engaging and interesting. I wish Liu had gone deeper into these parts, they were quite cool but could have been weirder. As for the humans, well, it’s not really what I come to sci-fi for but even so, I found them pretty weak. I appreciate the most driven and psychotic character is a former CIA director but towards the end he acts in a way that seems uncharacteristic. Most of the other characters, including the main one, mostly seem to observe and deep freeze themselves, then thaw out and observe more, they clearly aren’t Liu’s main concern. It was interesting, when considered as a Chinese novel, how un-communistic and unconcerned with politics these novels were. Like the human character, the political questions seemed somewhat half-baked. In the future, the government seems like the US now, to a large extent, with powerful corporations and very wealthy people. There seems to be a much more robust social safety net but Liu seems pretty uninterested in exploring that part of his story. On another note, there seems to be several misogynistic passages and ideas, he frequently notes how feminized and weak future mankind becomes and how a woman is unable to make the hard but necessary choices for our long-term survival. He paints a pretty grim and dog-eat-dog picture of the universe as a whole. Either way, I quite enjoyed it, consistently engaging and surprising.

TRANS GIRL SUICIDE MUSEUM - HANNAH BAER

This is the second book I’ve read in the last months that comes from a meme-account admin. Perhaps I’ll seek out one more and make it a trifecta sometime soon. That being said, this book is much more famous in its own right, as well as much better, than THE LIFESTYLE ZOO. Both books are mostly memoir with some musing on modern online life and contemporary lifeways thrown in for good measure, which seems to be the dominant genre of book these days. TGSM is, as you might expect from the title, largely about the author’s life and experiences as a young trans woman. As a very specific type of young trans woman. The book opens with a sort of disclaimer, about how rich and privileged Baer is and how her experience is not like the experience of the vast, vast majority of trans people, either in the US or abroad, but it still reads, to me, as quite shocking throughout the book. I’m guessing it came off that way to Baer as well, and she put in the disclaimer after reading a draft and seeing how she comes off. Baer is the child of two rich YT people, a “marxist” college professor at a ivy league school and a professional of some type (I forgot what exactly), they aren’t transphobic in any traditional since, they come off as confused and clueless and Baer does a good job rendering the tension she has with being annoyed with them while also being aware how much worse the majority of trans people have with their parents (of all the trans people I’ve known or know in my life well enough to know what their relationship is with their parents, a sample size of about half a dozen, I only know one who even speaks with their parents). Baer travels around the US, from Philly to NYC to New Orleans and beyond and parties and fucks people and does lots of drugs. She’s smart enough, and socialized in the right ways, to get into grad school (business school for organizations, which struck me as a supremely weird choice) off an interview she attends directly after a bender. She doesn’t seem worried about money at all, which again is different that literally every single trans person I’ve ever met (and, like, 90% of the people I know period) and seems really connected to and valued by this sort of rich kid-cool, queer, artsy, activist-y scene she’s built up. She comes off, to me, as pretty unlikable, which isn’t really a problem, I don’t mind an annoying or unlikable main character. The book was still pretty engaging. There is a long passage about wandering around, very high on K trying to find a Juul which is incredibly well written and vivid and one of the best things I’ve read in a while. In fact, all the stuff about K is good and engaging and insightful. The disconnect for me has to do with how quickly she shifts into self-loathing or feeling like she needs to kill herself since, from the evidence she’s given us in this book, her life seems objectively very cool and fun and without the sorts of issues that plague most young people, let alone most trans people. That aspect did not connect for me. Either way, she’s a good writer, the book was short and punchy, her memes are good and I hope she writes another book, just one where she isn’t the main character.

PIRATE ENLIGHTENMENT, OR, THE REAL LIBERTALIA - DAVID GRAEBER

The last of the Graeber stuff is slowly coming out. I have no idea how much stuff he left behind after his surprising and deeply tragic death 3 years ago, he was quite prolific so I imagine it is a lot, though I also do not know how much they intend to publish. It’s such a shame we were robbed of another 30 years worth of his insights and output. So it goes, I suppose. That being said, I’m quite excited that one of his last books centers on a topic near and dear to my heart, Madagascar. Having lived there for years, I’m always interested in any English language work on the Malagasy people (less so the wildlife, which gets most of the attention) and Graeber is one of the greatest and most interesting anthropologists of his generation so this was a real match made in heaven for me. This short book focuses on what is something of a legend in Madagascar, the Pirate Utopia of Libertalia. The basic idea is that in the golden age of Piracy, a number of pirates camped out on Ile St. Marie, a small island off of Madagascar's East coast where they hung out and established a sort of radically democratic quasi-state. Despite not being all-the-way true, this idea has been quite sticky and shown up in all sorts of places and there really were pirates on that Island, their graveyard is still there. Graeber uses this legend as a jumping off point for discussing what actually went down during the late 1600s and early 1700s on Madagascar’s East coast. He traces the enlightenment era ideas and values that some of these pirates held (see Marcus Rediker if you want to know more about that) and how they were understood and integrated into Malagasy society, especially the Betsimisaraka confederation that formed during this time. Graeber, as always, is great about centering the non-Europeans and treating them as real people with ideals and goals and intellect who are trying to figure out and shape their world. He makes sure to emphasize the back and forth of exchange and the ways that ideas move and change in the world. This book is sort a case-study for the thesis he lays out in his long essay, “There Never Was a West” which I recommend to people often. If you’re interested in Madagascar, I’d dive into this for sure. It’s a lesser Graeber but we’re only getting the leftovers at this point so I’ll take what I can get.

JAPANESE IMPERIALISM TODAY - JON HALLIDAY & GAVAN MCCORMACK

As Kuznets, a man who I’m not really a fan of, once said, “there are four types of economies in the world: Developed, Undeveloped, Argentina and Japan” which, while simplistic, is a pithy way to explain how weird the Japanese economy and political system can seem to an outsider. As someone who now lives in Japan, I’ve really been trying to understand the country and history more and when I found this book in a bookstore here, it seemed like a real blessing. McCormack and Halliday are Marxists and thorough, this book is full of tables and charts and real, materialistic analysis. It draws political conclusions and highlights implications while grounding itself in actual facts and figures. In this way, it really reminded me of Nkrumah’s Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Beyond their shared commitment to deep analysis, both books were also written in the period between the end of WWII and the neoliberal turn in the 70s and 80s, so while both are excellent, they are missing a more current piece. JIT came out in ‘72, so it’s out of date in many ways but still quite fascinating. It was very telling to read how quickly Japan fell under US control was was used as a tool for American imperialism post WWII. It was telling to see how important Japan was in backing up Indonesia and South Korea, both major American projects (and both sites of enormous American-lead genocides). It was fascinating to see how Japan collaborated on the Vietnam war as well as “aid” schemes that trapped East Asia in conditions favorable to Japan and the US. It was illuminating to see the ways Imperial Japanese bureaucrats were folded into the new political order, like the Nazis of West Germany. The book is very clear-eyed and informative about Japanese Imperialism from Korea to Okinawa and beyond. It’s good at showing how this type of imperialism has a long history in Japan and how it functions today. It’s always so devastatingly sad to read about the early decades of the Cold War, to see how brutal and monsterous the US and its allies were and to imagine what sort of world we could have had if some of our leaders weren’t so committed to a political and economic reality that demands so much of the world live terrible conditions. It’s interesting to think about where Japan went after this book was finished. This book focuses on the time after WWII and the ways Japan rebuilt itself politically and economically. Shortly after the book was published, by the 80’s Japan was so strong economically that people in the US were afraid they would become the world’s superpower. In the decades since then, for the last 30 years or so, they’ve basically been stagnant and experienced no growth. Likewise, these days it appears that US global hegemony is weakening and we’re moving to a multi-polar world, in terms of power. If that happens Japan will be an interesting case, given its ties to both the United States and China. I can’t pretend to know what will happen there, I would love an updated version of this book to help me think through how this might go down. Tho, until I find that book, I will remain thankful to Halliday and McCormack for providing clear material analysis of the place I live.

THE SANDMAN (book one) - NEIL GAIMAN (artists, SAM KIETH, MIKE DRINGENBERG, MALCOLM JONES III, KELLEY JONES)

I got this for my wife since she’d never read the Sandman series. She likes Gaiman’s other stuff, I’ve read American Gods but I wouldn’t call myself a real Gaiman-head, and this seemed very up her alley. I remember reading these books maybe 20 years ago at this point, in the early 2000’s when I first started reading comics, especially “adult” comics, and this, along with the Alan Moore stuff, had all the buzz in the world among the comic-book guy demographic who were helping me find the good stuff. I read these originally in the trade paperback versions, this book seems to be a collection of the first three of those and seems connected to the Netflix series that is currently airing. I’m not sure the TV show could be very good, I haven’t seen it but the comics themselves are very vibes-based, it’s basically all about the world and milieu of the characters and the “plot” elements of the book are pretty slow and unimportant. For instance, dream visits hell early in the comic, the purpose of this isn’t really important (why does he need a special helmet to do his job?), what’s cool about it is seeing the depiction of hell with the Mick Jagger Lucifer and the crazy vistas and demons. Likewise with the chapters around the serial killer convention. Nothing all that important “happens” at this setting, the appeal of the comic is Gaiman’s imagination in rendering these scenarios and the incredible illustrations. Like the Alan Moore stuff that this series so clearly draws from (Dream is a real Dr. Manhattan-type) what’s so cool about this is how totally it utilizes comics as a form, doing things that wouldn’t really be possible in any other medium, from straight literature to cinema/TV. I was surprised at how much of this I remembered from my original reading over a decade ago. The serial killer convention, the part in hell, the opening arch about Dream being imprisoned by an occultist, the guy who lives forever that we meet every 100 years, the Shakespere thing. I’m wondering if that means I remember more than I think I do or that Gaiman’s most memorable episodes are all towards the beginning of this series. We’ll see. It’s been a nice break from the longer stuff I’ve been working through, I’ll have to wait to start volume 2 until my wife finishes it first, they are technically gifts for her.

THE DARK FOREST - CIXIN LIU

Now this is what I’m talking about. The first book in this series, the shorter THREE BODY PROBLEM, was definitely sold as sci-fi but was, for most of the book, a mystery. Sure, the mystery had an alien solution and set up the rest of the series to be much more sci-fi-y but that book itself mostly took place in our recognizable world and did not involve too much of the far-out trappings of the genre. This book corrects that. As always with these reviews, spoilers will be included. Most of this volume takes place about 250 years before the present day. The books are still building towards the final climactic battle between the Trisolarians and Earth, but this volume manages to throw in an interesting handful of twists to keep it interesting. First, we get to see what Earth is like 250 years in the future and get an abbreviated history of the time in-between. We learn that things went to shit right after our era, when Earth was convinced they were fucked. Things got really bad and tragic, but then humanity sort of snapped itself out of it and focused on creating a better world and better weapons for the Doomsday battle. By 250, the pendulum has swung the other way and Earth is cocky. They have massive cities underground, they have a space-fleet and stations around Jupiter. They have the ability to cure most diseases and a seemingly excellent living standard and government. These portions of the books were among my favorites. I liked the concept of giant tree buildings where each “leaf” is an apartment. I liked the everything is a touch-screen aspect. He briefly hints at the way social relations have changed, i.e. there seems to no longer be families in our 21st century sense, but Lui doesn’t dwell on that and seems much more interested in the science-y stuff. I wish there had been more of that, but what can you do? He was smart to use the concept that the alien Sophons were preventing any major breakthroughs on a physics-level so all of the tech is what we have taken to its outer extreme. Liu clearly loves thinking about this stuff and it really shows. After this sort of exploration of the future, we get a sort of preview battle as the real heart of the book. The humans are arrogant and expecting victory. The main Trisolarian fleet is still about 200 years away but they send out a probe. Predictably, the probe is actually a weapon and it easily destroys everything. We then get the sort of twist of the novel, where we find out why the main character, Luo, is so important. He’s been a sort of hapless layabout for 2 books now, but the Trisolarians really want to kill him (not clear why the Sophons can’t just give him cancer) and he’s the main character so something must be going on. Turns out he invents the idea of a “Dark Forest” universe where there are dozens of super-advanced civilizations and, due to a sort of grim game theory, they have to destroy any other intelligent life they discover, to prevent said life from destroying them. As such, Earth can pursue a sort of Mutually Assured Destruction tactic with the Trisolarians by threatening to broadcast their cosmic location, ensuring that a race more powerful than them discovers and destroys their civilization. This idea seems fairly obvious to me, I’m not totally convinced that it makes sense that Luo would be the only one who could think it up, but it’s an interesting twist that sets up the last, even longer book, to be interesting. I hope we go further into the future, since that sort of speculation is the most engaging to me. I’m expecting a handful of new twists. I enjoyed the brief diversion onto a generational ship, and wish that would have stayed part of the novel. Basically, as the middle book in the trilogy, I think it did a good job setting up the next one but how I ultimately feel about it will depend on Liu’s ability to stick the landing. Lots of promise.