TEN-CENT FLOWERS AND OTHER TERRITORIES - CHARITY E. YORO

This is an example of the principle of, “if I know you in real life, I will read your book” which is to say that I know Charity, aka Cha-Cha, personally, we met during the Peace Corps. I did not know at the time that Charity was a poet or even interested in poetry, which I regret, had I know I would have tried to talk poetry with her. I haven’t seen her or spoken to her in person since we hung out a decade ago in the highlands of Madagascar but it seems like since then she’s gone on to start a family and get a degree in poetry. This seems to be her first book. Obviously, given my personal connection, I was most interested in the poems that revolve around her experience in Madagascar. This is a minor concern in the collection, only one of the poems seems dedicated to the subjects, and it’s a concrete poem (i.e. the poem itself is in the shape of Madagascar) which I thought was interesting. Like me, she seems ambivalent at best about her time there and wonders about how much good she was doing versus how much she extracted from the experience. She calls herself out as being no better than the French minors (tho, to quibble, while the French are the historical colonial overlords and the present-day sex-tourists, the mining is mostly done by Rio Tinto, a British/Australian concern) which is a hard sentiment I can get on board with, though one I wish she explored deeper. However, I get that this isn’t the main concern of the collection, no matter how much I wish it was. She mostly focuses on her home state of Hawaii and what it feels like to be from a place that is mostly thought of as vacation destination and a “paradise” but which, in reality, is a deeply exploited colony and imperial holding of the USA. Having someone tell you that where you're from is their “least favorite island” must be a mindfuck. Likewise for seeing rich tourist after rich tourist engaging in a weird simulacrum of your culture while your home becomes too expensive for you or your family to live in. Yoro does a good job rendering this, I could sense the rage and hopelessness in the poems. However, while a native of Hawaii, in the sense that she was born and grew up there, I don’t believe that Yoro is native Hawaiiin, at least not fully (given her last name and having met her in person, without seeming too out of school, I assume she is, at least, partly Filipino. I could certainly be wrong about that and if so I apologize) and I would have liked more poetic investigation of that particular standpoint, i.e. not YT colonizer but also not fully native. That’s a pretty interesting place to be in my mind, there’s a subtlety and nuance that’s really tricky and hard to address clearly, and I’d like to think more about it, tho this collection seems more oriented around a “native” viewpoint. Irregardless, I liked the collection overall, the stuff about being a mother and parent was fascinating and engaging, the parts about being upset and impotent in the face of colonialism hit home and her facility with form was admirable. I hope she’s able to keep writing interesting poems.

KNOT OF THE SOUL - STEFANIA PANDOLFO

I’ve had this one on the to-read pile for a while. I’m not sure where I first heard of it but I’m glad I finally got around to it. This is very much my shit. Pandolfo is an anthropologist and thinker who embedded herself with a Moroccan psych hospital as well as a milieu of traditional Moroccan healers and faith leaders who all tackle questions of mental health from a non-European and Islamic point of view. If, like me, you’re interested in, but deeply skeptical of, psychology and psychiatry, this a wonderful jumping off point for thinking about these issues. Psychology and psychiatry (especially the latter) make pretty bold and universal claims about the nature of the mind and mental health which are obviously overstated and untrue. Culture and communal notions of health and wellness are vitally important to how we treat and think about things like schizophrenia or depression. Pandolfo gets deep in it, she manages to speak to French trained Moroccan doctors who are quite fluent in Western notions of mental health and sits in with them as they treat people from across the Moroccan countryside. She also travels into these countrysides and speaks with traditional faith healers who treat mental illness by reciting the Koran, view most mental illnesses as jinn-caused and have an entirely different but consistent worldview that calls for completely different treatments. Interestingly, these two groups do seem to have a deep understanding and appreciation for one another, often patients travel between the two for relief from their suffering and neither seems to view the other as “wrong” but merely working from a different set of assumptions and using a different set of tools. There is less of the arrogance I associate with Western mental health professionals. Most usefully, the traditional healers are very insistent that these mental health challenges are deeper than the suffering individual, that they involve the community and the material conditions of the afflicted and have a spiritual component that can’t be reduced to taking the right medications. She gets very deep into traditional Islamic notions of the soul and what it means to be a balanced and healthy person. Like when reading about Indian faith traditions, the technical jargon in non-English languages (here, in Arabic) can be tricky to parse and keep straight, she includes a lot of Arabic, which I don’t speak, and I spent the whole time feeling a depth that I’m unable to plumb. But it’s a masterful book, unlike a lot of anthropology, I do get the sense that she actually really deeply understands these worlds and can converse with her subjects on a very deep level. It’s always a relief and a breath of fresh air to get outside of the Western paradigm that insists that it is all and there is nothing outside of it besides barbarism and ignorance and to see that not only do different traditions have different ideas about things like the mind, they have deeper and more interesting things to say.

IF WE BURN - VINCENT BEVINS

An amazing book. Truly one of the best things I’ve read all year. Bevins’ last book, THE JAKARTA METHOD, was one of my favorites from a few years ago and I believe this one tops it. This book is pretty incredible in scope, seeking to cover various protests movements across the world during the 2010’s and provide some insight into why none of them seemed to really work. Why, from Egypt to Brazil to Ukraine to Turkey, the situation after the uprisings become more authoritarian and less free. Bevins does briefly touch on Occupy in the USA but he wisely chooses to focus elsewhere. However, as someone who was very involved in protests in the US during this decade (and who attended protests in Mexico and lived in some pretty unstable places during that decade) the conclusions he draws are incredibly useful and insightful for us here in America as well (full disclosure, I don’t live in the US right now). In many ways the book is a response to David Graeber, a writer for whom my love is well-documented and deep, and ideas about horizontalism and anarchism for which he is the premiere English-language spokesperson. Bevins shows again and again, in different situations around the world, protests and mass-movements spring up, organized without leaders, often using social media tools, which are able to shut things down and attach a ton of attention and create genuine revolutionary moments. However, because there is no leadership or organization a bevy of problems quickly emerges. First, since the movements are focused on size, anyone with any vision of the future can show up and hijack the momentum on the street. Which means that protests that start one way can be co-opted by better organized groups, as happened in Brazil and Egypt. Secondly, since there are no official spokespeople, since that would be a form of hierarchy, the media can talk to whomever the want, which practically means someone who is more middle-class and articulate and/or someone inflammatory and entertaining, and this person can give whatever impression they feel like regarding the movement as a whole. Likewise, when it comes time to negotiate with those in power, in order to get some concessions and get to the next level there is no one who is able to do this. If you don’t have a transparent structure and democratic way to pick spokespeople and leaders, since you oppose these positions on a theoretical level, it’s not as if you won’t have them, they will simply emerge based on things like people’s personal connections and charisma and desire for control, some of the least democratic ways to choose these people. If one is able to create a situation that weakens those in power, you need to realize that even if you have misgivings about power generally and hesitate, someone else who is better organized and doesn’t have these misgivings will not hesitate to take this opportunity. As he says himself towards the end of the book, “I have come to the conclusion that horizontally structured, digitally coordinated, leaderless mass protest is fundamentally illegible.” I saw every single part of this play out in Seattle in 2020. The inability to pick people to negotiate when we had the upper hand, the hijacking of the movement by people who were more comfortable with being in charge even if they were exactly the sorts of people who should not have been in control. The refusal to build structures which lead to unofficial and opaque means of control. The inability to get on the same page about what was next. It was all there, and there are two full long articles on this website about my experiences and thoughts w/r/t those events. It was amazing to see them connected so clearly to a decade of similar actions across the globe. I wish Graeber was alive to have seen the CHOP, I wish he was alive to debate Bevins and his calls for a revived Leninism. I would say that he shies away or deemphasizes some of the more “deep politics” related issues or US covert meddling in these events. It’s beyond the scope of the book I suppose, nothing in here is deeper than what you would read in the NYT. He does say, “I focused on…things that we already know. But if the past 70 years are any guide, then it is safe to wager that over the next few decades we will begin to learn about secret foreign interventions and provocations that will be shocking, if not in their effectiveness, then in their deviousness.” Which is certainly true. Even since this book came out, we’ve learned, for example, that the sniping in Ukraine’s Maidan protests were carried out by US backed protesters, not Russian backed Ukrainian forces, as we were initially told. All that being said, I wish more journalists and thinkers were this clear-eyed about our current moment. I wish we could all take a look at where we are and change up our tactics since what we (as people globally who wish for a better world) have been doing hasn’t been working and there are much bigger fights on the horizon.

A SHINING - JON FOSSE

I might have recently bit off more than I can chew, book wise. I’m in the middle of 4 very long books that are sort of stacking up against each other and proving somewhat hard to make real headway on. Plus, my life is a little crazy right now, and my patience is not where it needs to be for reading long tomes. But, that being said, I saw this super short volume at the English language bookstore here in Tokyo, where they had a lot of Fosse in these beautiful Fitzcarraldo Editions, and, knowing that he’d just won the Nobel, I decided to pick up the shortest one to see what was up. This thing is so short it’s borderline cheating to include it on this list. It’s between a novella and a short story, clocking in at under 50 pages. The whole thing is one long paragraph and a stream of thought narration from an unnamed man who (spoiler) wanders into a snowy forest and freezes to death. Or, at least, that’s one way to read it. It’s very strange. Fosse does an amazing job conjuring an atmosphere of listlessness and strangeness and, in his words “fear without anxiety.” The man never knows why he’s doing what he’s doing. He doesn’t know what’s compelled him to drive until he gets to the edge of the forest or why he enters it at dusk without any goal in mind as it begins to snow. We never learn much about him besides that he seems disaffected and alone and confused. He encounters various visions beyond his understanding, including an entity that speaks to him without being very helpful, an apparition of his parents and the titular shining, a bright supernatural light. The text is the man’s thoughts as he tries to understand what he’s seeing and why he’s doing what he’s doing. There’s no real closure or explanation, just a sense of shimmering strangeness. I really enjoyed it. It was digestible in a single sitting at a nice coffeeshop. It really nails a specific vibe and feeling, at once lonely and sad and spectral. I’m not sure if Fosse hits this tone in his other works, I know he’s referred to as the Beckett of the 21st century which suggests to me that he does, but I look forward to reading some more of his stuff. 

BLACKACRE - MONICA YOUN

Gotta be honest with you, this one did not hit for me. Typically, when a book isn’t really connecting with me I simply stop reading it, which is why almost all of my reviews are positive with a few very negative reviews wherein a book was so bad I wanted to finish it to trash it. This book falls in the middle and I probably would have stopped reading if it wasn’t so short. I did enjoy diving into it right before bed, the best time for poetry, and I wanted to like it, but none of it ever really clicked for me. This book, like Voyage of the Sable Venus, was given to me by a friend of mine who knows much more about poetry and is much more plugged into current verse. Youn is, technically, a talented poet. Formally, the poems are interesting and novel. Her command of rhythm and language are admirable and apparent. She does interesting things like include a cycle of poems focused around hanged men, or poems that respond to an Antonioni film. Nevertheless, while clever, the poems never seemed to tap into anything real. She plays with images of barrenness and emptiness but it always seems cerebral and theoretical, I didn’t get the sense that a real human was feeling these things, more that a very smart person was alluding to them and playing with them in a clinical, detached way. Occasionally there was some interesting imagery, like:

a woman

wearing a steel

collar, wearing

a stiffly pleated

dress, which lifts

to reveal nothing

but fabric where

her body used to be.

But mostly it seems like a high level exercise, which isn’t what I personally want out of poetry. Give me intensity. On the other hand, I say all of that but I have found myself returning to the book, picking it up at random and reading a page or two, so perhaps it’s growing on me and in a month or two I will have really gotten it and will love it. Who knows, poetry is more fickle to me that other sorts of literature. 

THE CYBERIAD - STANISŁAW LEM

I’ve never read any Lem. Sadly, I’m pretty unversed in the non-American SciFi world. Early this year, I worked my way through all of the Three-Body Problem novels, which were quite good (reviews are obviously up on this website). I’ve heard of Lem, he’s probably the most famous non USAian SciFi author from my vantage point, and I love Solaris (the movie) and I’d heard that this was one of his best works. It did not disappoint. Lem actually solves the Superman problem, ie how do you write a story about a character(s) who have god-like powers, since, it would seem, that these powers would remove all the tension from your story. The Cyberiad takes this on from the very beginning. The book is a basically a series of short stories that follow two “constructors,” named, Trurl and Klapaucius, who are robot-wizards. This means that they can basically build anything they can imagine, at one point they rearrange the stars themselves to advertise their services, and who spend their time working on commission for various entities across the universe. Almost all of the characters in the book are robots or intelligent machines of some sort and they all seem to inhabit a sort of fantasy society of kings and knights and castles, just in space and with machines. Each of the stories cooks up an ingenious scenario to test these robots, from building a predator for a hunting-obsessed king to hunt, to escaping pirates, to meeting the civilization of highest possible development, to building a machine that can write poetry. Given how heavy at least the movie version of Solaris is, I guess I was expecting something more tonally bleak, but this book is all goofs and laughs and silly stuff. Even the language is really punny and full of internal rhyme, which raises some questions about the translation. “Fee-fi-fo-fum, plu-to-ni-um” and the reply: “one moment please, we are the Steelypips, and we have no fear, no spats in our vats, no rules, no schools, no gloom, no evil influence of the moon” is a typical example, this stuff is non-stop. Either way, it was a great light read. Trurl and Klapaucius are great characters who inhabit such a fun world I could have read a 10 book long series of these things. It would make a great goofy TV show.

THE VOYAGE OF THE SABLE VENUS AND OTHER POEMS - ROBIN COSTE LEWIS

Got this one from a friend of mine as part of a book trade when I asked him for some poetry. I didn’t know it at the time but apparently this book is quite famous by modern poetry standards and Lewis is a bit of a celebrity in the poetry world. I’m glad it was suggested to me, I’m not sure I would have found it otherwise, given how little poetry I tend to read (something I feel bad about and would like to change). But let’s get into the book itself. The book is 19 shorter, more “standard” poems wrapped around a large, 70+ page central epic, “The Voyage of the Sable Venus” which is the main course, so to speak, of this book. TVotSV is conceptually pretty brilliant, Lewis spent years going to art museums and looking at catalogs online to find any art that featured Black women, in any capacity. She then took the titles and descriptions of these pieces and rearranged them into the poem. The effect is mesmerizing and slowly builds tension. It takes the airless and aloof tone of this sort of writing and asks us to pay close attention to what it’s actually saying, allowing the horror, the monstrousness, or Dracularity (to steal from Pynchon), that lies at the heart of “Western Civilization.” Typically, this sort of writing is only encountered when the work of art it’s describing is nearby, it’s supplementary by it’s very nature. Lewis is making it the main event, we have to imagine the art being described (tho, I suppose one could look up each piece, she does include a long list of what works’ descriptions she drew from), which is unsettling and foregrounds exactly the sort of lacuna she’s exploring w/r/t Black female representation. I found it pretty powerful. That being said, I actually think I enjoyed the other sections of the book, the more “conventional” poems more. There’s a beautiful poem towards the beginning about being stuck in a car in India while a herd of cows blocks her way, that is both transportive and sad. There is a poem towards the end about child abuse that is likewise effecting and lingered with me. Lewis is a great poet. She’s conceptually interesting and has the confidence and skill to pull off a something as formally complicated as the main poem here and she’s also got the skills to break your heart with a standard poem. I’m looking forward to more work by her. 

BLACK FLAGS: THE RISE OF ISIS - JOBY WARRICK

ISIS is a perennially interesting subject to me, their rise and brutality really helps illuminate and sharpen a number of contemporary trends. It helps one think about quasi-state and non-state actors, there is a through line between their filming of brutal beheadings and those done by various Mexican drug cartels (tho, I believe the cartels were first). Their funding and origins remain somewhat mysterious and shrouded in the sort of mystery that we won’t see the answers to for a dozen or so more years. They ways the Kurds were used by Western forces, and specifically Western media, to help halt their advance is another story that I’m very interested in and confused by. The way they act as a stand-in for Obama, Mr. I-believe-in-smart wars aka Mr. Nobel Peace Prize, is also very helpful as a tool to think about the modern world. So, as you might imagine, I was pretty excited to read this book. Sadly, it did not really deliver and mostly infuriated me. Warrick is a WaPo reporter and a Pulitzer winner, so I guess I shouldn’t have expected something really thought provoking and incisive, but this was one of the most morally cowardly books I’ve read in a while. Not to say that it was all bad, it’s well-researched and he’s a good writer. There are interesting anecdotes, like McChrystal feeling like maybe he was a bad guy while he watched an Iraqi family, with hate and fear in their eyes, held at gunpoint while Special Forces goons “searched” their house and another story about him showing his commanders “The Battle of Algiers” (what the fuck does he think the moral of that movie was?). The book is also somewhat misleading since, based off the title, one would think it was mostly about ISIS, when, in fact, ISIS features briefly towards the end and the vast majority of the book is about Al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorists who fought against the American occupation at the beginning of the decades-long Iraq war. Again, that’s not my problem with the book, Zarqawi is a fascinating figure who deserves books written about him, my issue is the tone of the tome. I guess I’m surprised the mainstream consensus on the Iraq War, apparently, remains, “tragic and honest mistakes were made by Americans who were trying to do their best but, gosh darn it, just didn’t understand these confusing and brutal Arabs.” This is the grossest sort of propaganda. The war was a bloodthirsty genocide, American troops and their allies routinely massacred civilians, engaged in torture and rape, killed without remorse or consequences and all in the service of lies and nothing more noble than a desire to increase American hegemony. These weren’t honest mistakes made by good men, which we knew at the time and we know even more clearly now. So when Joby writes things like “Checkpoint sentries reflexively shot at motorists who approached too quickly or failed to heed warnings shouted at them in English” he’s being really weasley (lol at “reflexively shot at”) to obscure the reality that American troops were routinely executing civilians for the crime of driving in their country. “There had been many instances in U.S. history where well-intentioned decisions to arm a guerrilla movement had horribly backfired” is another great example of giving the US the benefit of the doubt when a sober reading of history absolutely gives the lie to this world-view. Likewise, multiple times he refers to the Libyan intervention as a success, which is also an insane way to view the complete destruction of one of Africa’s most prosperous countries, the fallout from which we are still seeing as just this week the Libyan death-toll from flooding has climbed above 20,000. I could go on, but the review is already too long. This book is a good overview of some of the issues surrounding ISIS. It is insufficiently ‘noided on a number of topics (the gassing, the Nick Berg stuff, the early funding for ISIS), but that is to be expected. The tone towards America’s involvement and conduct in the war was truly shocking and disgusting to me. I guess that's why this guy has a job working at the WaPo but it was really depressing.

ORDERS TO KILL: THE TRUTH BEHIND THE KILLING OF DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING Jr. - WILLIAM PEPPER

I’ve been asking Boomers recently about their memories of the 4 major 60’s assassinations. Typically, remember that Boomers are definitionally YT (explanation in another essay on this site), they don’t remember the Malcolm X killing, the JFK one made a big impression since they were so young, the King assassination is remembered as a huge blow and scary given the riots afterwards and the RFK killing is seen as sort of the end of the hopeful part of recent American history. That’s a lot of high profile deaths in 5 years, it clearly fucked them up as a generation and they and we haven’t really processed what it all means. Especially given how fishy and suspicious each of these deaths were. For the record, I don’t believe the official account of any of these killings. At this point the FBI and NYPD has admitted that they helped frame 2 people for the X killing (which obviously implies that they were covering something else up), the JFK and, to a lesser extent, RFK killings have spawned an enormous corpus of work in all media trying to get to the bottom of what actually happened with those deaths. At no point has a majority of American believed the official JFK story (tellingly, college educated YTs are the only demographic wherein over 50% of those polled believe the official story) and there’s a general consensus that looking into any of these event with any degree of seriousness and open-mindedness leads one to believe something besides the government version. The MLK killing is surprisingly less remarked upon. I’ve never met a Black person who didn’t believe that the government had something to do with it while almost no YT people I know have thought about it very hard. This is interesting given the mirrored paths MLK and JFK’s legacies have taken since the 60’s. On the JFK side, he was beloved when alive and seen as genuinely hopeful and since his death there has been a clear propagandistic effort, often by folks on the Left (Chomsky is a great example of this), to downplay his importance and make it seem like there would be no reason for the deep state to kill him since he was just a war-mongery and savage as them. I’m no lover of JFK but this view is ahistorical, stupid and clearly a tool to deflect. King on the other had was largely disliked by YT Amerika at the time of his death but has gone on to become one of the most widely praised and beloved figures in American history. Racist politicians now have to pretend to agree with him (they love the “content of his character” line), he has a Federal holiday and it would be political suicide to suggest that you disagree with him in any way, even if someone who’s dedicated your political career to erasing his legacy. It’s a remarkable transformation and one that is particularly interesting given how little national interest there is in his assassination and the government’s clear role in it. Pepper is a lawyer who spent decades trying to get the truth about the King killing out there. He successfully sued Lloyd Jowers, a Memphis restaurant owner who was, by his own admission and reams of evidence, involved in the conspiracy to kill King and put on a TV trail for the patsy, James Earl Ray, who never got a real trial (the guilty plea is addressed and explained at length in the book), and he has compiled his decades of digging on this issue in this book. It’s pretty amazing. He amasses a tremendous amount of information to show that the official story isn’t true. I won’t recap it all here, you should look into the issue yourself and ask if a government that admitted to illegally wiretapping, blackmailing and attempted to induce suicide in King would really balk at killing him, especially after he began to broaden his critique of America, the Vietam war, and capitalism. The book slightly suffers from CHAOS syndrome where a lot of it is about his quest to figure out the information and put on the TV trial rather than just giving us the information. Likewise, he might be wrong about some of the specifics of his version of the killing (he learned later that one of the people he suggested was involved wasn’t dead like he originally printed and vehemently denied the role Pepper assigned him), I’m sure he was fed misinformation and was fucked with while writing and investigating this. But, to me, that doesn’t really matter. He doesn’t need to solve the crime perfectly himself, he merely needs to show the official version isn’t true and show us some version of the truth. I think he’s done that. I think it’s insane that we don’t care enough as a country to solve this crime for real. I think it’s insane that this death isn’t seen as equally or more suspicious than the Kenndy killing. I think it’s insane that we let politicians and especially the FBI pretend to mourn and miss Dr. King when they very clearly were involved in his death. Something changed permanently and for the worse in Amerika with his death and it isn’t getting better until we address it.

RATNER’S STAR - DON DELILLO

A victim of the Kindle. I think this book took me 2 months to read. Not that it was too long, it’s about 500 pages, but because I kept interlacing it with other books and then, while on vacation in the United States, I switched over to physical books since I had access to a library and prefer to read that way. I’ve always been a DeLillo fan, I’ve read more than a half dozen of his books and he’s an author I’m always checking for and trying to keep up with. However, this is the first book of his I’ve read from the first half, pre-White Noise, of his career. All of the DeLillo-ism are already present. The most striking of which is his signature dialogue style. DeLillo characters don’t speak like the vast majority of folks in real life. In fact, when you encounter a DeLillo character in real life, as I have a few times, it’s always a strange and wondrous event. His characters speak past one another, they speak gnomically and cryptically, their syntax is strange and jarring, they make pronouncements and float theories instead of simply conveying information. This manner of speaking actually makes more sense in this book than his others since Ratner’s Star’s characters are all genius scientists. The book follows a 14 year old math prodigy, named Billy, who is selected to work on a government project in a top-secret lab that involves deciphering a message from space. Billy spends most of the book interacting with different scientists and thinkers who work in this complex and listens to them ramble and rant about math, truth, theology, science, kabbalah, technology, language and all the other things that occupy DeLillo’s mind. The book is very episodic and is basically a parade of these absurd and erudite characters lecturing and interacting with Billy, who is sardonic and precocious. I’ve long known David Foster Wallace was a big DeLillo fan, and you can tell in his writing, but this book is really the blueprint. Billy is very similar to IJ’s Hal and a sort of smarty-pants zaniness pervades both works. In the zany vein, this book also recalls Pynchon, especially when DeLillo decides to add some Pynchon names like Calliope Shrub and Elux Troxl. Also, like Pynchon and that recent McCarthy novel, this book plumbs the philosophy of mathematics and pontificates on the relationship between math and language, which is a very common theme for a certain type of YT male author. I’m not sure that overall this is my favorite DeLillo, it might have the highest highs though. Some of the speeches about math and truth and language really hit and resonate but some are tedious and boring. Reading it over such a long period also made it all run together a bit, which might have done the book a disservice. All that being said, this is the DeLillo-ist book of DeLillo I’ve read, all of his obsessions and quirks as a writer on their most naked display. If it was a bit shorter, I’d recommend it for first time DeLillo folks to really get a taste of what’s up with him. There are some parts of this book that I’m sure I’ll think about for the rest of my life while most of it has already slipped into a sort of undifferentiated haze. Excellent overall, but I need to pick up my reading pace.

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.