BLIND JOE DEATH’S AMERICA - GEORGE HENDERSON

A light little book after some heavier fair. I’m typically not a huge fan of guitar-centric music, though I make an exception for John Fahey. I’m not sure where I first heard of Fahey, he’s a bit obscure, and can be a bit of an acquired taste. He’s a guitar player who plays these long, solo, instrumental pieces that interpolate classic folk/blues tunes and twist and expand them into these hypnotic, sprawling, shimmering wonders. It’s really good chill-out, vibe-out, pondering music. He’s also a pretty serious blues scholar, he rediscovered several important players and records and wrote a well-received phd thesis on Charley Patton, who was deeply involved in the 60’s explosion of YT interest in the genre, tho he has a pretty antagonistic relationship with the scene. Actually, a lot of the book is about exactly this tension. As someone who loves hip-hop and listens to it all the time, I’m also constantly considering and made uncomfortable by both my own, as well as YTfolx in general’s, love and obsession with the genre. There are similar issues relating to the ways that Black pain is transmogrified into authenticity which is can itself become a source of money (often not for the artist themselves). There’s a ghoulishness, a sort of Black-death-spectacle (to quote Parker Bright) involved in both fandoms. A quote from the book reads, “they wanted access to the emotionally sincere, masculine, rebellious, darkly erotic world of the 1920’s Delta” that could easy be written today about YT fans obsessed with any number of rappers who now come complete with youtube documentaries speculating on the exact number of murders they’ve committed. Fahey is a good cypher for these issues, he wrote deeply about them. I actually didn’t know before reading this, since I’ve only listened to him online and I’ve never owned a physical record of his, that his albums are famous for their long liner notes that touch on all these issues, often satirically. Sometime he makes a point that strikes me as insane, like when he suggests there are no “political” Delta blues songs, since the music is inherently apolitical, and doesn’t consider the idea that maybe these Black men in interwar Mississippi might have maybe thought twice before committing any song like that to wax. One of the reasons the Blues is so interesting is because it is coming towards the beginning of widespread recorded music, as such, there must be so much that only existed live and that we’ll never hear. That being said, I wish there was more in this book about the actual music itself, like what themes from what songs are in which Fahey compositions, how he settled on his style, how it changed over time, which recording are the best (he has a huge discography). The book makes it clear that there are other books on these subjects more specifically, so I’m asking for something that does exist, it just isn’t this.

GLASS BEAD GAME - HERMANN HESSE

Been a while since I’ve read a novel like this, by which I mean, a classic, capital “N” Novel. The type about big ideas and clear allusion and metaphors without any postmodern trickery or playfulness. Something straightforward, a Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain is the book I kept thinking about when reading this, they’re incredibly similar) or Dostoevsky novel. I’ll get back to something weird soon but this was a nice little break. It’s a classic “college novel” but one I never read as a younger man. I’ve never read any Hesse actually. The book concerns a society sometime in the future where Europe has a province, called Castalia, which is focused on cultivating academic pursuits in a sort of monastic or classical university style. The people here don’t do any practical labor or engage in any real politics, they devote themselves to running boarding schools and training teachers and, especially, training players and teachers of the titular glass bead game. The game itself is never really spelled out, it seems to literally involve glass beads and to center around finding connections between different areas of study, say, between music and classical languages. So players have to be as erudite in as many fields as possible to be good at it. The novel follows one man (all the players are men, more on that later) as he grows up in the order and eventually becomes the magister ludi (game master). Since it’s a real “ideas novel” he has all these long conversations about the nature of learning and knowledge and whatnot with various people who represent different ideas. There are priests and guys really into Chinese philosophy, and outsiders who think the game is silly and other players and whatnot. The book has one of the funniest endings of any book I’ve read in a long time, which I will spoil here, in case you want to read the book for yourself. The main character slowly comes to believe that he must leave the ivory tower of his life as game master and engage with the real world to really give something back to humanity. He goes to be the tutor of the son of his friend who is not from the order and immediately drowns in a lake because he doesn’t really know anything about the real world. A very funny and abrupt ending for a book that took this character and idea of such a knowledge-priesthood very seriously. Definitely made me enjoy the book much more, before I was a bit turned off by the whole concept. I’m not huge on the idea of these peopel who seem kinda like parasites on society, they don’t really do or contribute anything and their game seems silly and inaccessible without dedicating your life to it. Characters occasionally brign this idea up but it usually gets glossed over, tho the ending acts as good commentary. Also, as I mentioned the book makes clear that only men are allowed in this order, and that the scholars are allowed to get pussy, but cannot marry, but this too is a bit of an aside. In reality, can you imagine how much boy-fucking would be going on in Castalia? A hierarchical, secretive, all-male society that takes young boys away from their families? It would make the catholic church blush. Anyway, a good, straight-forward story.

TRACES OF HISTORY: ELEMENTARY STRUCTURES OF RACE - PATRICK WOLFE

I got this after seeing that Wolfe is considered a prominent voice in and one of the creators of the academic discipline of Settler-Colonial studies, which is an interest of mine. Additionally, he’s an Australian academic and I don’t usually hear from our Aussie siblings, which is a shame since they clearly have a long history of genocidal settler-colonial activities that should be considered alongside the ones I’m more familiar with in the Americas and Europe. Also, I’m constantly being mistaken for Austrainl here in Japan so it’s really been on my mind recently. Wolfe makes a bunch of really interesting and useful points in the book. He looks at a different situation in each chapter and highlights the ways that race is used as a tool in settler-colonial regime. As he points out, again and again, race is a tool, it serves a purpose and is put to use, “race is colonialism speaking” as he so memorably puts it. For instance, he points out how in the USA there are two large colonized groups, Native Americans and Blacks. First, we can see that one name refers to their land and the other two their body, which is what the YT regime is looking to take from each. Indigenous people are assigned to vanish and an imported labor group is destined to work this newly freed up land. This also explains why blood quantum laws are used to take people out of the category of Native, i.e. it is possible to not be Native enough, to be diluted into YTness, while the one drop rule means any percentage of Black ancestry renders one, functionally and legally, Black. This is because they need a large and clearly defined Black labor force and they need the Indians gone. He then pivots to Brazil to show how the reality on the ground effects race, not vice-versa, since there there are dozens and hundreds of very nuanced racial categories, because the goal is not to unite a YT majority (like it was/is in the USA) but rather to fracture a non-YT majority into competing factions. The book was full of interesting insights like this. Like I mentioned, it was interesting to read about how all this played out in Australia, it was fascinating to see what this meant in Brazil and elsewhere. There was a whole chapter about Israel which was quite illuminating in light of current events. Sadly, he writes that “Since even Israel couldn’t continue to rely of Western support if it embarked on a full-scale campaign of direct physical annihilation…” which has been proven untrue. He brings up a theory I’d never heard before from Arthur Koestler and Shlomo Sand that the large part of Ashkenazi population is descended from Khazar conversations in the 8th Century CE, which would add all sorts of layers and ironies to their history that is a bit mind-bending to fully consider. I’ll have to look more into that. Overall, I’d highly recommend this, especially if you’re from a settler-colony of any sort. It’s one of the clearest-eyed and insightful things I’ve read on the subject.

SEVEN AMERICAN NIGHTS - GENE WOLFE

I went back and forth on whether or not to include this since it is technically a novella, at around 60 pages, and I don’t review things like long articles or short stories. But, it is a fully contained story, I read it twice back to back, and, ultimately, who cares? If your a Wolfe-head (in the Wolfe-pack?) you know the thing that makes his shit special is the puzzlebox quality of his stories. There is always the story itself, which is always wildly inventive and incredible, and then there is the mystery of “what is really going on.” One technique that he likes is embedding issues of authorship into the text itself (i.e. one of the characters in the story is “writing” the story you’re reading, though it’s often of question of who exactly as well as their motives and biases). This text does that, the story is the journal of an Iranian tourist who is visiting America in the far-future, when it is a mutant-plagued wasteland. But the journal admits that some of the pages have been removed, though it isn’t exactly clear where. There are only 6 nights described in the book, but the title tells us one must be missing. Additionally, the character buys and does some sort of drug during his time in the US, but he takes it Russian Roulette style so it’s not clear when he’s dosed and when he’s sober (he also might not ever take it? The book is a mind-fuck). Anyway, like all Wolf stuff, it causally and quickly hints at much deeper doings than what’s on the surface. There’s a fun game to play where you try to identify the locations in DC the character are at based on the ruins he describes. The Washington Monument being mostly pulled down and the scattered stones being used as tables in a large bizarre was a nice touch. There’s tons of gross deformities and (maybe?) werewolves. There’s Iranian moon bases and chemical warfare. There’s hints of a sinister plot to “make America great.” After reading it twice, I looked at some theories online and thought more about it; there really is a feeling of trying to piece together the “deeper” or “true” story that you only get from Wolf. If you’ve been interested in him but the 12 volume Solar Cycle seems like too much (and I’ve only read that once, and, given the “to read Wolfe is to re-read Wolfe” you could argue that I haven’t even read it for real) I’d say this a pretty good starting place.

INSIDE THE CIA’S SECRET WAR ON JAMAICA - CASEY GANE-McCALLA

Another short little one to sort of clear the palate after THE ROYAL FAMILY. I’m, as is quite clear from this website, pretty interested in CIA history and, like anyone with ears, I’m interested in Jamaican culture and this seemed like a good way to marry these two interests. This book covers the involvement of the CIA in Jamaica during the 70’s and 80’s, with slight digressions before and after this period, and illustrates the ways in which the CIA deployed a strategy of tension to undermine and eventually oust Micheal Manley, a pretty milquetoast social democrat, but one that was friends with Castro, the CIA’s ultimate enemy. Typically, that term, “Strategy of Tension,” is deployed to explain Italy during this same period, where the CIA and others ratchet up the violence, both political and “regular” to create a sense of chaos and unease that would encourage the population to abandon leftist politics and embrace a US approved strongman, but we see here how that same playbook was deployed in Jamaica to the same ends. If you know anything about Jamaican history of if you’ve listened closely to Jamaican music or read that popular novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings” you know that Jamaican public housing complexes are associated with political parties as well as underworld “Dons” who de facto run these areas, administer a sort of street justice, who are likewise plugged into these political factions. The JLP, the CIA and USA’s preferred Jamaican political party was (is?) associated with Lester Lloyd “Jim Brown” Coke’s famous Shower Posse gang that reigned chaos across the island for over a decade and was heavily, heavily, involved in the cocaine trade during the crack era of the 80’s. At one point, the AP estimated that over 80% of America’s crack trade could be traced back to the Shower Posse. This, obviously, ties right into the more famous Webb discoveries about the crack trade on the West coast running through Freeway Ricky and the CIA supported Contras. So there’s heavy CIA involvement on at least 2 major crack routes, though for whatever reason, this one is much less known. Dozens of Shower Posse members have stated consistently and under oath that they received CIA training as well as drugs and weapons. Jim Brown himself was set to do some telling himself before he got the Epstein treatment; someone burned him alive in his Kingston cell awaiting extradition to the US. Pretty fascinating stuff overall. The book stays away from more speculative stuff (aka the Bob Marley Cancer conspiracy stuff, though the book does go into the Marley shooting in a pretty well sourced way) but it’s pretty short and towards the end it spirals into a few chapters about the various actions of the famous anti-Castro Cuban terrorists whe supported in general, as well as a lot of time spent on the Bush family (HW in particular) and all the shady shit in his life. It’s still interesting, but I’m familiar with a lot of it, this telling is pretty clipped and most of it doesn’t directly tie to Jamaica. But overall, a very interesting rundown on a very underappreciated aspect of CIA fuckery and a really succinct look at a strategy of tension in practice. There’s a much larger book to be written about the 80’s cocaine explosion on both coasts and how this connected into CIA evildoing in Latin America plus how the cocaine violence in Black communities in the US was itself a deliberate strategy of tension to sort of place a death knell in Black Power politics in the states. There’s a lot there and I always feel like I’m glimpsing part of it without fathoming the whole.

THE ROYAL FAMILY - WILLIAM VOLLMANN

Now we’re cooking. I’ve read a handful of Vollmann before, some of his shorter stuff, both fiction and non-fiction, along with most of his huge book about violence, and I’m fascinated by him as a real-life character. I came to this interest through a short-term roommate, back when I spent a summer in Frisco, who was obsessed with Vollmann and claimed to have met him on the streets of the Tenderloin when they were both looking for prostitutes. This is the first of his major novels I’ve ever tackled and it certainly delivered on its promises. Vollmann has a handful of themes his always interested in and this book allowed him to really deeply dive into a few of them. He’s got an insatiable appetite for destitution and street life and this book really wallows in it. Ostensibly, the novel is about a private investigator who is tasked with finding the Queen of Whores in the tenderloin district of San Francisco and how his life slowly unravels, but, in reality, the whole thing is pretty plotless and meandering. Occasionally something resembling a plot with begin to snap into place, there’s an evil developer who is opening legal brothels that allow abuse and murder by saying all the girls are virtual and “not real” which isn’t true, there’s tension between the main character and his more upstanding brother and a tragic love triangle involving said brother’s wife, there’s a mystery towards the beginning about whether or not the queen exists. But all of these plots, such as they are, dissolve into the background and prove unimportant. What Vollmann is actually interested in is rendering the milieu and lives of these people, who he calls Canaanites since they all have “the mark of Cain” which is his term for people living outside of regular society. Born losers. Back when I worked at a homeless shelter, we’d make reference to people suffering from SLS, or Shit-Life Syndrome. Not only prostitutes and their Johns but pedophiles, train-hoppers, the homeless, pimps, small time crooks, illegal immigrants, etc. are all explored, some at great length. The writing is beautiful, Vollmann is quite skilled and you can tell he has a deep appreciation and love for these people and a fascination for these sorts of stories. It’s very lurid and dark, as you might imagine, and it meanders like crazy. This book could have been 300 pages shorter or gone on forever without much changing. There is a whole 200 or so pages towards the end where the main character is hopping trains and moving around the country which takes the action out of the Tenderloin that I felt could have been excised. I understand that Vollmann loves train-hopping, in fact he has a whole book on the subject which I read in college and is quite good, but it feels like he’s just shoe-horning all of his interests into one book. Likewise the subplot about the legal brothel, called The Feminine Circus, is there to try to show some of the ways that sex is used in broader society and critique these mores but it never really coheres for me. Everything outside of the Tenderloin was cuttable in my opinion. Likewise, the book touches on but could have gone deeper with racial issues (for example, the Queen is a Black Woman named “Africa”). That being said, the swirling stream of characters’ backstories and tricks and drug use and lives worked really well for me, it was fascinating and beautifully rendered. The book could be a slog at times, just given it’s insane length, but every time I’d catch myself zoning out a new section would pop up that was so bizarre and beautiful that I felt compelled to continue. Vollmann is one of the few writers who does not compromise at all, in terms of editing and length, to the point where he loses money, and I admire that. Someday I’ll get to his huge Native American novels but for now I’m sure I’ll be thinking about this one for a while.

KILL ANYTHING THAT MOVES - NICK TURSE

Back on my bullshit in 2024. I’ve never been a huge Vietnam war guy, probably due to my disdain for the Boomers. However, despite the fact that they’d love for us to forget about it and how a group of peasant farmers in Southeast Asia triumphed over the leaders of the free world, it does loom large over American culture and the American psyche and it’s something I’d like to know more about. This book goes a long way to settle the major liberal critique of the war. Basically, the right-wing take on our defeat is that the army wasn’t allowed to really go out there and win, that “wokeness” (tho they would not have used that term at the time) prevented an all-out victory. A sort of Rambo take on the whole thing that was more prominent in the 80’s, when the wounds of that war were fresher. Slowly a more Ken Burns style critique has crept in, one that says that we meant well and we were trying to help but mistakes were made, and we’re very sorry. Our heart was in the right place but we fell short of our values. This book makes it clear what the Vietnam war was, a series of massacres and bloodbaths and industrial scale rapes. Turse catalogs how a military appearance, headed by former Ford man and proto-wonk McNamara used “data” to show how the war could be won by focusing on “body-count” stats. This, of course, trickles down to grunts as a directive to collect scalps by any means, especially since the incentives were such that one needed only to show that there were kills, no one was checking to see if those killed were VC. Which is how you end up with hundreds dead in actions but only 3 weapons found. Or the idea that anyone running is a military target. Which ends up in things like My Lai. Actually the My Lai section was interesting, not just in the horrific facts of the case but for the way it was spun and weaponized. Essentially the military (including a young Colin Powell) tried to minimize it before admitting it did happen and sort of pivoting to making sure that since it was so big (500 civilians) and so outrageous (war rapes, burning villiages) that it was posited as the only incident of it’s type. It’s the only one you ever hear about, though Turse points out there was a similar massacre on that day by another company in a different region of the country. Terse highlights actions like Operation Speedy Express that killed around 7,000 civilians in a 3 month period that never get talked about. He lists so many mass rapes and incidents of child “prostitutes” (a horrific turn of phrase) on army bases that part of the book reads like 2666. Very interesting stuff, very chilling. Important to teach yourself American history and to see what the cost of maintaining an empire actually is.

GHOSTS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD - WALTER HATCH

My favorite thing about this book is probably the format and set-up. The author set out a very interesting yet specific question, gives important background and set-up before answering it with a well-considered theory in about 150 pages. I wish more books would be set up this way, a sort of long essay with a real opinion and point of view. I don’t mean that as a backhanded compliment, to say my favorite thing about the book is the format, this book was genuinely interesting and Hatch seems like a smart guy, just that I liked how focused it was. This book seeks to explain why Germany is integrated into Europe and seems well-liked, according to polls in Poland and France, while Japan is not thought of this way by Korea and China, despite both countries having committed horrendous crimes within living memory in these places. As someone who lives in Japan, and doesn’t really care about Europe or Germany, I’m more interested in the Japanese part of this equation, though the question as a whole is interesting. Hatch puts the emphasis on institutions like NATO and the EU for integrating Germany back into the greater Euro-sphere, while the lack of such institutions in NE Asia has hindered Japan. He points out the fact that this is the result of the cold war and America’s racism, in that they care more about a YT Europe than Asia. I obviously think he could have gone harder on the USA. In the aftermath of the war, we managed to effectively build the 4th reich and create the actual East Asia Co-Prosperity sphere. What happened to all countries in this book is all in service of that goal. Likewise, I think he downplays the isolationist instinct in Japanese society. True, they did try to build an empire in the early 20th century. Before that they tried in the late 1500’s, but otherwise, their history is very isolated and places a great deal of emphasis on local matters. Even now they have the strongest passport in the world and one of the lowest rates of passport ownership. It’s also true that most Japanese, at least when I speak to them, so take this with a huge grain of salt, don’t really understand or accept the extent of the atrocities they committed. Now, this is also true of Americans and the British, to name two non-Asian examples, but the Germans are very big on apologizing for the Holocaust (which has its own function in on-going genocide machine, tho this is a topic for another time) and I think Hatch underplays how much that matters. Anyway, an interesting little book to think about, I’ll be in Korea next week so I’ll see how this dynamic feels on the ground.

WE ARE HERE TO HURT EACH OTHER - PAULA D. ASHE

End of the year book extravaganza. Not sure where I heard of this one but I’m always looking to read more horror and spooky shit and this one had such a good title I couldn’t say no. Ashe is a good writer, the prose remains interesting and the styles of the different stories are varied. Often in genre fiction the idea or, to be less charitable, the gimmick, of the story is the star and the writing itself is secondary. Which isn’t always a problem, PKD is very guilty of this and I love him. Ashe manages to have interesting, original story ideas and good writing. The horror here is sometimes supernatural, sometimes more reality driven, almost always gory and bloody and 100% bleak and pessimistic. There’s not a hint of light in these things. My favorites were the more supernatural, Clive Barker inspired joints. There’s an epistolary short story featuring a drug named after Carcosa that makes you feel dead and is connected to a suffering -focused cult. You can tell she loves Hellraiser. I hope this lady writes a novel, I think she could really do some damage going deeper into some of these scenarios.

RISE AND KILL FIRST - RONEN BERGMAN

You can probably figure out why I decided to read this one. Typically, I, as an Amerikan, focus on Amerikan history and deep politics. If I had all the time in the world I’d dive deeper into what France has done/is doing in Afrika or what the Brits are still up too or how the Chinese and Soviets fit into all of this but I’m only one man, and I have a real job so choices have to be made. Amerika is the hegemon, the great Satan if you will, and I’m in Amerikan so I feel that it behooves me to focus on actions that I have some part in. But, Israel is the little Satan and deeply connected to the US, it’s our unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Middle East, to quote noted friend of Epstien’s RFK jr. and right now they’re preforming a genocide in front of everyone so it seemed as good a time as any to familiarize myself with their history. This book is quite good. Bergman is an Israeli and a journalist who got tremendous access. He is respected enough to get interviews with dozens of Mossad, AMAN, Shin Bet, IDF and political figures in Israel, including several former PMs. He starts before the founding of modern Israel, tracing the way various Jewish militants used assassinations against British forces in what would become Israel. He then thoughtfully and thoroughly traces decades of Israeli efforts to hunt down and assassinate their enemies, both across Israel and then around the world. There are killings in Europe, in Africa and across the Middle East. They send commando teams, lone assassins, and snipers. They use poisons, exploding phones, car bombs, and pioneer the use of drones. Bergman claims that the total figure of assassination operations since Israel's founding is somewhere around 2,7000 with many more than that being killed. You can see how perversely addictive this ability becomes. Israel has very complicated and thorny political issues it needs to sort out, it’s responsible for some monstrous crimes and has opponents who have legitimate positions and goals. But why make concessions and really deal with these complicated concerns when you can just kill your opponents? Especially when you develop the ability to kill basically anyone in the world at any time. There is a dark parallel with the US here, as we can really see how Amerika has being hypnotized by the siren song of drone bombing and commando raiding our way out of every problem, instead of seeking a politica, long-term solution. The perverse irony is now playing out on the news every day. Israel assassinated and kills for decades, taking out leaders and crippling organizations in the hopes that they will prevent a larger-scale war, all while clearly making a war inevitable. They’ve never been more isolated and hated in my lifetime, we’ll see where this goes. There are some choice bits of history in here. I was amazed to read that not only was Fatah’s head of security and Black September member Ali Hassan Salameh a CIA asset, the CIA arranged for him to visit Disneyland on his honeymoon, as a gesture of good will. The Israelis blew him up in Beirut but man, it’s amazing that anyone works with Amerika. Likewise, the book strongly hints that Israel killed Arafat, the author literally writes that he is not really allowed to publish everything he knows after giving us all this circumstantial evidence of Israeli involvement which is quite the accusation. Overall, an amazing book with a harsh lesson.

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.