For Grass and Galeano.

Two men born in the century of the wind that sought life on paper pages. Such a fragile thing was paper in the century of the wind.

One was born in the old world. The old world he was born into had become sickened with war, racial fear, economic disasters, political utopianism, and paranoia. It was in the grips of the of the spirits unveiled by the events of Paris 1919. He grew up in a city that became captured by the cultists of a man born of the bad eggs of the wounded old world. He joined the children's crusade, marching like a tiny soldier thrown in the ranks with the old and the forgotten. The cultist warned that the barbarians would come, and come they did. An army that moved on rape, plunder, and gasoline thundered across the old world, driving tanks over refugee columns, crucifying and hanging people, and planting red flags across the lands squandered and poisoned by the cult. This man dreamed of a boy who refuses to grow up, pounds on a metal drum, and screams to shatter glass. He dreams of his country and the times it endures, as it births the new.

The other man, this hopeful believer in pen and paper as icons against the monolith of greed and insanity at the heart of the century of the wind, was born in the new world. He was born in a land especially filled with promise, culture and riches. It was compared to the old world, which this man felt a little apprehensive about as he knew there were  wonders here that could never be replicated in the frozen ways of the old world. The economy began to suffer and his country started to get rigid and fearful. Students claiming they had the spirit of Tupac Amaru retreated and began to buy guns, training themselves as urban guerillas. The state formed an army to fight its own people and the streets shook with the martial columns that moved down them. Torture chambers grew like fungus everywhere darkness lingered. This man began to fear his own country and clutching a couple notebooks he fled. This confirmed his dread of patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacists, and the the envoys, prophets, and yes man of the great machine to the north. This machine controlled the new world by owning its loans, and soon it ruled over the old world when it collapsed in rot. His only weapons was history, writing utensils, and his own imagination. This connected him to the man who crawled out of the collapsed and putrid body of the old world, pushing through its dark and frenzied convulsions like a maggot through forlorn meat.He saw new orders born and died, and he wrote fables to explain them to those in remote future ages. He drew grotesques that only hinted at the madness loose in the century of the wind.

Both these men died in the age of distraction, their messages clearly written for those with the time and patience to read them. We find it harder and harder in this age to find time for such things, we risk losing the histories of the century of the wind. What lessons and horrors could be repeated when the distractions fades, when history returns to the ever present now?.

A brief history of aerial bombing in the United States of America

We fought gladly and to the last drop of blood for America

-WEB Dubois

  The history of aerial bombing in the United States of America is a history of racial tension and class struggle, like many of our histories. It is also filled with rumor and myth, another trait of American history.

The first incident occurred just months before the second in the year 1921. Aerial bombing had been invented just years before, in the rush of invention to create new technologies for slaughtering people, in what was then  referred to as the Great War or the war to end all wars. Left over armaments from that conflict played a role in both the first two incidents.  The first incident is what is called the Tulsa race riot. This incident at the end of May of that year resembled the “race riots” of two summers before, the “red summer” where murderous racial violence exploded across the country. The Chicago riot of “red summer” occurred the same week a dirigible exploded over the city, raining fire and bodies on office buildings below, but this similarity is accidental. But like many of the race riots before, a simple incident between a black male and white woman  got out of hand and fueled local racial tensions leading to a larger gathering of armed white men who assaulted the Greenwood district in Tulsa, then the richest black neighborhood in America sometimes called the “Black Wall Street”.  Both the besieged and the attackers were well armed, but the blacks were at the disadvantage as their businesses and homes were set on fire, devastating the district. Six biplanes left over from the world war were dispatched to fly over the conflict. White officials claimed these were merely spotter planes there to prevent a wider uprising. Eyewitnesses reported the planes were employed to drop firebombs on the district and to snipe at the besieged.

The catastrophe of the First World War and the extraordinary spiritual malaise that came afterwards were needed to arouse a doubt as to whether all was well with the white man’s mind.

-Carl Jung

The second incident was mere months later in West Virginia. This almost mythic event called the battle of Blair Mountain has been regarded as one of the largest armed civil conflicts in the United States since the Civil War. The United Mine Workers fought a pitched battle with local lawmen and Baldwin Felts strikebreakers for five days. This episode was one of many incidents in the bloody “Coal wars” of the previous decades. The strikebreakers hired private planes to drop bombs left over from the world war on the strikers, sometimes indiscriminately releasing them on villages.  When the army arrived to conclude the hostilities in the favor of the mine owners they also employed bombers as surveillance planes and some said intimidation. The miners captured one of the unexploded bombs the strikebreakers had engaged and later displayed it at a trial.

I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know all cops carry guns with triggers

-Ralph Ellison

The third major known incident of aerial bombing in the United States of America took place some six decades later. This third and final event under discussion involves the conflict between the city of Philadelphia and the organization known as MOVE. MOVE, a black liberation organization with back to the land overtones started by John Africa (all members of the group employed the surname Africa) had a previous violent conflict with the city in 1978 where the unsanitary nature of their compound and incidents with police led to a raid. A policeman died in the firefight under unclear circumstances and several of the members of the group were charged with his death. The even more embattled organization (as the founder John Africa insisted they be considered. Many argued convincingly that MOVE was a cult, some called them a terrorist organization) moved to a working class black neighborhood which they came in conflict with, setting up two bunkers on the roof of their house, occasionally gesturing with weapons, and blaring profane political speeches through loudspeakers at all hours of the day. This mixed with compost, feces, gathered wood that filled the compound, alongside concern for the treatment of the numerous children that MOVE had, all lead inevitably to another conflict with the city in 1985. The police moved in (many of who had been involved in the previous confrontation) and surrounded the house and then evacuated the area. They issued a communique to MOVE that had curious language.

Attention MOVE, this is America.

Soon tear gas and two high powered water jets were turned on the compound. At some point heavy gunfire started. There is been much debate which side did most of the firing, though the police at one point ran out of ammo. The police commissioner citing the tactical advantage MOVE had with the two bunkers on the roof decided to employ a drastic measure. He had a police helicopter drop a satchel bomb on the roof of the house. It failed to destroy the bunkers but started a fire.  A decision was made to let the fire burn. The water jets were turned off. The fire destroyed the compound; only two people left it and survived an adult and a child, five other children and six other adults died including John Africa. There were rumors that the police fired on anyone trying to leave the fire. One adult was seen by witnesses leaving and then running back in for an unknown reason. The ensuing blaze also destroyed three blocks of the neighborhood.

This for the moment is what we know of aerial bombing in America by Americans.

If this is Peace, it is peace with gothic undertones, as if the ghosts of the past might be appeased for a moment but never exorcised in their entirety

-Max Roach

The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail

 I dedicate this review to 70,000 missing migrants, to the 100,000 dead from the Mexican drug war and the 8 out 10 migrant women who are raped as they travel el norte. It is a small witnessing, but I do it for you.

As the lights flicker a little bit in the American empire, we see the cracks in facade, but we must remember that we still cast a very large shadow, and we must remember those in the shadows. There isn’t a more forgotten or scorned people on this continent than the central American migrant, and Oscar Martinez gives us a tour of their world. This tour is the tour of hell.  The horrible fates along this trail rival Dante and the violence seems pulled from the pages of Cormac McCarthy novel, but this is reporting, and Martinez reports it with compassion and humanity. This hell is ruled by the indifferent and at times hostile gods of the U.S. and Mexican governments and populated by more active demons like MS13 and Los Zetas, and “The beast”( a vicious almost legendary train that migrants need to hop). We start south in the violence wracked and collapsing countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. We learn the stories of those who travel north, many not just seeking a better wage, but actually fleeing for their lives. Then we travel through the desolate regions of Chiapas where the migrants are prey to bandits. Then to the ‘the beast”, descriptions of travels on the train are unreal.  Bandits jumping on or being attacked with convoys of trucks, people trying to jump on and not get mutilated or killed, and once there on having to cling to the train for dear life while fighting off sleep.  Then to the ghost towns and desolate regions of the border or “wall”, the deadly Rio Grande and deserts, and the hell of Ciudad Juarez. There the migrants are caught between the border patrol, the narcos, and their own coyotes. Martinez is in the Ciudad Juarez during the height of the drug war and his reporting is frightening, a city of pure fear and violence, a near civil war. He rides with the border patrol, the migrants, and those who few who try to help them without financial motivation, and those who prey on the migrants. He lets all of these voices speak. He is reporter and provides no real solutions to the disasters he witnesses, but we owe these who are among the most forgotten people in the Americas at least to hear their stories. Martinez tells it so well if you can stomach the subject matter it is a joy to read, and you will not forget it.

 

Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him

The Henry Brothers have done the world a favor with this beautiful book. It is a work of history, sociology, a critic of pop culture, and a prose poem, and it is very readable with poetic moments. It is unsentimental about its subject, the brothers are unapologetic though in their defense of Pryor’s genius though. They are equally unapologetic about Pryor’s dark side, his damaged psyche, abuses of woman and drugs. This book enters some almost terrifying moments, but it never feels exploitive, just the bitter truth. Paul Mooney as usual almost steals the show. The book in the end is a celebration of an American genius and his brief fulfilling of his promise and his long decline and neglect of his vibrant and important voice. He spoke a truth and then silenced himself with money and terrible movies.  This celebrates that short moment when Pryor showed us something about our country, the people he worked with and knew (and abused), and the world that created him. This book is must for fans of Pryor, standup comedy, pop and social culture of the 60’s and 70’s, and historians of those turbulent decades. It also stands as terrific literary artifact worthy of its subject.

Matt Taibbi

Taibbi’s reporting drips with caustic humor and intelligence. I picked up several of his books and worked through them and found an account of current history from the Kerry Bush election up until now through the lens of that reporting. Elections, the financial crisis, war, Katrina, immigration, stop and frisk, and corruption of our political order and imbalance of our legal system are all given a review. We can see the transition from a democracy to an oligarchy.  People may find Taibbi’s voice cynical and anarchist, but I find it mostly refreshing as he takes no prisoners and finds both parties at equal fault.

The Divide is the most current and the most important as it shows, to crudely paraphrase Taibbi’s thesis, the move of America towards a dystopia. An oligarchy that is criminalizing being poor by intertwining the social safety net with law enforcement and at the same time refusing to prosecute financial crimes criminally (only seeking fines). Taibbi gives us a tour of the bureaucracy of welfare, stop and frisk, immigration laws of Georgia, and other idiocy. He uses situations that seem worthy of the fiction of Heller and Kafka, a largely computer and statistical model  referencing bureaucracy gone amuck, serving only its illogical needs. Then he counters this with the inadequate prosecuting of financial crimes. HSBC bank can launder $100 million for the mass murders in the Sinaloa cartel without a single person going to jail but a homeless man caught with a single joint gets to serve 40 days in jail. The grotesque onslaught of short sellers on Fairfax Financial is particular bizarre episode. Case by case Taibbi goes through this surreal tilting of justice. A country where violent crime is on the downswing but prison populations are exploding. Those who suffer mostly are blacks and Latinos and some whites, but main the trend is towards the poor being the brunt of this upside down world of justice where crime is only prosecuted for one population. a population without a voice, a population the majority of Americans despise and fear. Fear that they will be there soon.  Whole communities are turned into occupied territory where the stupidest little mistakes that all kids make during adolescence, can pull you into a system that can grind you into nothing. 

Griftopia is Taibbi’s sour take on the financial crisis and its aftermath. He reviews what he calls the “grifter era” where everyone in government and business have moved towards seeking a fast buck instead of long term planning. Pennsylvania attempts to sell its turnpike, and Chicago does sell its parking meters to fill a one year budget gap(for a 75 year lease)  This resembles the sacking of a crumbling empire rather than a plan for continued business. He treats the bailouts, the Tea Party, Affordable Care Act(which has done nothing to break up the insurance cartels and is many ways a gift to them) with scorn, disgust and also compassion. The consensus between the two parties to back up business at every turn while keeping people squabbling over social issues is creating a culture of cynicism and corruption, truly alienated from democratic impulse.

The Derangement is about the loss of a collective public narrative during the Bush era. People on the right and left started to use Taibbi's wonderful term “reality shopping”  to find their own narrative. He explores and infiltrates Pastor Hagee’s megachurch and the 9/11 truth movement. He finds an America disenchanted with its political options, seeking easy superhero narratives (the Matrix and V for vendetta being common touchstones), and mostly very lonely. I found this book deeply sad, the optimism of the conspiracy theorist (even though they think they are facing a truly evil and murderous foe) versus the cynicism, disinterest and shabbiness of reality is deeply depressing. Taibbi finds humanity in both of these camps and avoids easy humor, even though he exposes some troubling beliefs and subtexts in the current era of popular movements.

Episodes or dispatches from the disasters of Bush’s second term. Taibbi retains interest whether reporting on the corrupt do nothing congress, or reporting from where the thin veneer of civilization is wiped away to reveal the uncaring face of reality. For these later parts his trip into post-Katrina New Orleans with Sean Penn is a piece of reporting worthy of Heller or Thompson, a piece of apocalyptic comedy equal parts satire and deadly serious, and three surreal days in Abu Ghraib.

This earlier work covering the 2004 election is his busiest writing, filled with skits, jokes and lots of gonzo antics like drug taking and wearing silly outfits. Its thesis, that Taibbi delivers in more nuanced fashion in later books is of the presidential election as an elaborate version of the third world military parade. He heaps endless scorn on all the candidates and both parties, and the reporters who give it such an air of importance. The only politicos he retains any love for are Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders, which seems about right.  This book is cynical and disgusted, but in the end whom is more cynical, the pageantry or the one who exposes it.

  

Other Latin American authors

While I was sick last week of I have a dim memory of being asked by my wife Mariel to write a tribute to the then recently deceased Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Why the one of the 20th Century’s greatest writer’s legacy needs more noise from me I couldn’t wrap my head around. But, then I thought of the great heritage of writers from Latin America that people either don’t read or have never heard of. So I thought I could put together a list of ones I have read and reviewed in the past. This is my list it is not intended as critical overview of the whole “Latin American boom”, I am forgetting all the beautiful poets and most importantly I am lacking any female authors. Is this my fault or are other factors at work. I usually read a lot of female authors(Carter, O’Conner, Ducornet, Rhys, Bowles, Dineson, Spiotta, Joy Williams, Unica Zurn, Brontes, Djuna Barnes etc.) so who know where the failure is, probably my own ignorance. There is of course Isabel Allende who is almost as famous as Marquez, but I have never reviewed her, though am annoyed that her work get derided as historical romance, which I have feeling if she was Llosa, Marquez, or Fuentes this criticism would never come up. There is also the brilliant Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector but once again I have no reviews, I might right that wrong in the future as her work is definitely recommended.
A brief word on Marquez himself. I first read his work in the strange city of Chicago (a city both over commercialized and decaying) living off punk rock, free jazz, beer, and burritos (didn’t even have to leave my building for a $3 one). I was out of the habit of reading and remember being pulled into a full reality, like I discovered a bible from an alternate reality. Many of the writers on this list cannot be described as “magical realism” but most combine the traits of the 19th century novelists to take in the whole of society, the surrealism of the European writers, and their individual take on their culture. Bolano in fact speaks against the term, whether this is a genuine feeling, attention seeking behavior, or a case of kill yr idols is lost without context. But all these writers influenced or were influenced by Marquez (whether or not if it was to reject him or embrace him). For direct influence from Marquez I look more to work of Rushdie, Okri, Grass, and Pynchon who used his work as model.


I will go from the most obscure to the more accepted and recognized of these authors.
First up is the oddball Uruguayan writer Felisberto Hernández. He is known if at all as an influence on Calvino, Cortazar, and Marquez.
I would not be the writer I am today. Because he taught me that the most haunting mysteries are those of everyday life. -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
His most widely available collection is Piano Stories. Here is my review of it.


The weird world of Uruguayan fantasist Felisberto is like one of his book flaps states, a look into "slightly different but parallel dimension", oddball humor meets phantasmagorical prose. Bizarre sketches etched with autobiographical authenticity that resemble Proust's capturing of time and memory, automatic writing of the surrealist school, and the goofball antics of silent film comedy. The highlights are definitely "Daisy Dolls" and "The Flooded House". The former takes place in weird house next door to a mysterious factory, and filled with eccentric servants, mirrors (which one of the characters is terrified of) and lifelike human size dolls (some in display cases acting out scenes which reminds of Raymond Rousell's Locus Solus") It is a full plunge into a world of erotic pathos and very bizarre ideas. The missing link between Hoffman's "The Sandman" and Landolfi's "Gogol's Wife" The latter is another odd dream were a possibly blind, obese women has an author slowly paddle her around her designed flooded house where she occasionally holds her own wake and waxes eccentricities about the nature of water. Other stories feature men who think they are horses,ushers whose eyes glow in the dark, companies that inject commercials into you by syringe, and a woman who can never leave her balcony.
Next is the equally odd Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera. A vegetarian and open homosexual whose writing style was surrealist, savage, and blackly comic. He did not fare well under Castro and there is the story (maybe apocryphal) of Che throwing his books across a library in disgust. His collection Cold Tales and bizarre novel Rene’s Flesh are recommended. He would be called ‘transgressive” or other such garbage if he had written more recently. sadly the editions imaged below are not the beautiful Eridanos editions I read. Here is my review of novel.



Piñera crafts an odd allegorical novel. A parody of coming of age novels or the novel of education, he has his young man Rene coming to self-realization in a very twisted version of our own world, where people are obsessed with eating meat (Piñera was a vegetarian I believe), a school teaches its students to suffer in silence (electrocuting them in chairs with muzzles on), murder is legal, people are paid to be surgically rendered as people’s identical doubles (also everyone seems to have a mannequin), and secret societies fight over the distribution of chocolate. A parade of grotesque characters (Skeleton and Ball of Meat, the king of meat), odd encounters, a surreal dead pan orgy out Marquis de Sade, and general absurdity is the state of affairs in this novel. Resembles very little, except possibly Kobo Abe’s bizarre novels of the seventies (Box Man, Secret Rendezvous) and Burroughs (though more linear). Not for the faint of heart.

This book by obscure Argentinian author Leopoldo Lugones Strange Forces is a wonder of weird gaslight science fiction and horror stories.

Adolfo Bioy Casare's Invention of Morel is haunting and singular fable that sticks in ones mind.Source material for the movie Last Year at Marienbad.




Brazilian writer Ignacio de Loyola Brandao’s wild and angry novel Zero is another neglected classic. Here is my review.


Zero is a wild, profane, irreverent, surreal novel written in Brazil’s years of lead during a repressive military dictatorship. The author uses collages, random illustrations, textual experiments, cinematic technique, faux documentary and textbook appropriations, advertisements, hilarious footnotes in an exuberant style that resembles Dos Passos , the over the top dark humor of Vonnegut or Pynchon, torture sequences worthy of de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius adventures, and foreshadows Junot Diaz, while creating a funny vibrant, and very black humored indictment of his time period that still feels fresh.

Columbian writer and poet Álvaro Mutis was friend of Marquez and wrote one of my all-time favorite novels (or series of novellas) The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. My review.



A beautiful and comic voyage of a book that at different times will evoke Heart of Darkness, Greek tragedy, Moby Dick, Sinbad’s voyages, King Solomon’s Mines, narratives of Proust and Nabokov, the rogue casts of Pynchon and Dickens, Don Quixote, Journey to the End of the Night, and Borges. These seven novellas form one novel are filled with stories that are comically absurd, fraught with menace or existential doom, and or both at the same time. The at times anachronistic feeling of the narrative, mix with the timelessness of the themes in a very effective way, and its underworld setting of rotting ports, abandoned and deadly mines, steaming jungles, whorehouses, army outposts, and rusty tramp steamers with its cast of terrorists, suicides, dreamers, psychopaths, homicidal dwarfs, drug dealers, soldiers, and the blind, are an endless riot, Adventure stories fill with wide eyed wonder but wrapped in a dreamy melancholy with ontological concerns. One of the great books of our time which I recommend wholeheartedly.

Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano’s Memories of Fire trilogy is a monumental work. It is a blend of documentary and more fantastic impulses. Here is my review of the first volume.




A beautiful book that exist in the strange ground between Howard Zinn”s People’s History and Borges’s Brief History of Infamy. It featured the rage and the unpeeling of the veneer of nostalgia and romance of history of the former and the irony, pocket novels, morbid humor of the latter. This is not a scholarly or popular history though the author does show his research, but more in the realm of epic poem and Borges, a savage and beautiful book.

Roberto Bolaño (from Chile, but lived in Mexico and Spain after fleeing the coup) has been getting a lot of attention recently for his posthumously available work. There have been some excellent novellas (my favorite Amulet is about the Tlatelolco massacre) but his most impressive is the novel 2666 which is almost a masterpiece. Each section builds in menace and weirdness until section called “Part about Crimes” which is a hellish noir abyss up there with Cormac McCarthy and James Ellroy, a witnessing of the murders of woman in Ciudad Juarez (renamed in the novel) that is harrowing. A pointless section tacked on at the end blunts the impact of the book.






Borges is everything; no writer has altered my vision or reality and literature in quite the same way.

Argentinian Julio Cortázar is nearly up there with Borges. His novel Hopscotch is playful and sometimes obnoxious reordering of the novel and his short stories are sometimes as brilliant as Borges or Kafka. My favorite is the absurdist Cronopios and Famas. He had a story of endless traffic jam which I’m sure influenced Godard’s Weekend and Ballard’s Crash.




Carlos Fuentes is probably the most famous Mexican novelist internationally. His work is ambitious, widely varied in tone and quality, and at some points bristles with political anger (long stander on the left, he was at the barricades during 1968 May revolts in Paris, I wonder if that saved him from Tlatelolco?) As I said he can vary from ambitious work such as Christopher Unborn, Terra Nostra, and Where the Air is Clear, and Years of Laura Diaz to lighter and shorter works. For an intro to his work I suggest one of both, the weird gothic novella Aura and the ambitious Death of Artemio Cruz

Aura
A 2nd person nightmare by Fuentes...terrifying and gripping and near genius.

Artemio Cruz
70 years of Mexican history are covered in Fuentes’ fever dream of a novel. Featuring narration that’s part Beckett, part Stern, and part Citizen Cane, Cruz recounts his life while rotting on his death bed with first person morbid reflection, second person rants, and third person remembrances. Bitter and profane at times and pretty relentless dark, but this is such a thoroughly realized book with the experimentation serving the ideas at every chance.

Mario Vargas Llosa the famous Peruvian novelist and now noble laureate. His work is as vast as Fuentes though Llosa moved to the right over the years. You can find epics, tales of dictatorship (Feast of the Goat, Conversations in the Cathedral), to lighter works and even comedies and romances. His masterpiece without a doubt is War at the End of the World, I also enjoy his story of Peru’s horrible civil war Death in the Andes. These are good intro to his work.



Another tale of mayhem, history and the macabre from Vargas Llosa. Whereas Death in the Andes was compared to a Diane Arbus styled portrait the visual artists this book evokes is Heiryonmous Bosch or Breughal. A medieval meets the wild west landscape(turn of the century Brazil) of prophets, bandits, water witches, droughts, a storytelling dwarf, flagellants, miracle healers, madmen, plagues, vultures, rats, a revolutionary phrenologist, pariah dogs, Barons whose time has past, circus freaks, a utopian colony, and marauding destructive army. Festooned with grotesques and corpses this is a book of violence and horror but it is a conflation of real history and not fiction. A historical novel in the tradition of Tolstoy, McCarthy, and Lampedusa. Exhaustingly long but worth it.



A masterful meditation on violence and its roots in politics, poverty, sex, and folklore; and a portrait of the mountain people caught between government indifference (and malice), the seemingly irrational violence of the Shining path rebels, and the harshness of the landscape. Told through flashbacks, and variety of intertwining stories this book has a love story, murder mystery, the bizarre tale of a Dionysian cult , and a dozen or so little stories thrown in, which makes the book sound really dense and complicated but the story telling is so effective I didn’t really notice. The title of the book must have been given in translation because the Spanish title is Lituma en los Andes (Lituma being one of the characters), but it works since it evokes both Agatha Christie and Thomas Mann, as this odd book should.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

I was a little worried for a while reading this book, the seemingly overly precious title (which when explained in the book is a pretty effective metaphor), the heavy leaning on past masters such as Heller and Marquez (despite the interplay of the text with Tolstoy I didn’t see much of him in these pages), the really awkward POV switches where we suddenly get the future story of an incidental character, and the whole baggage of an outsider writing on a conflict that he wasn’t personally connected to. These concerns disappeared as I read the book though, the unbearable tragedy, humanity, sadness, and brutality of this novel were impossible to deny whatever rickety framework the author presented it in, and thankfully delivered with enough humor and wonder to ease the sourness and bleakness. The ending may attempt a bit of crowd pleasing note and tries to pull off as happy as an ending as possible, but for a debut novel this a very impressive work, a work that shines light on the dead and departed of a totally ignored conflict, a witnessing that alone makes this book worthwhile. This book is filled with humanity and humor but be warned it contain horrifying scenes of torture and general bleakness of a cruel war so this is not one for the fainthearted, but is beautiful enough to deserve reading.

Dissident Gardens

Lethem’s new book is in theory a sweeping story of a couple generations in a family and through them a history of the American left from the thirties on, maybe in the style of Doctorow’s Book of Daniel. One can imagine what that book would be like, filled with thrilling set pieces, historical cameos, and the word epic included somewhere on the jacket. Lethem delivers a book spikier, more interesting, and that is a little bit off putting and inaccessible. Bitterness, regret, miscommunications and lost connections, and tragedy couched in Lethem’s excellent grasp of history and pop culture and the ways memory and childhood create our worlds. His characters are so miserable and petrified by their pasts that without Lethem’s careful constructions and fiery prose this book would cross the line into a miserable wallow. He ruthlessly mines his late mother’s life for the character of Miriam and since he has already published that material in an essay it brings up the thought whether or not Lethem himself is paralyzed by his own past. This book might mark a transition in Lethem as it feels different and is constructed contrarily to anything else he has produced. He has created a kind of anti-epic eschewing the expansive for claustrophobic portraiture.

Bleeding Edge

Pynchon presents a book somewhere between his lighter cartoony romps (Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice) and his more epic works. A strangely accessible work that parodies some recent crime fiction and cyberpunk, but is still recognizably Pynchon and shows off his obsessions with paranoia, secret worlds, and the fading of promise. He fixes on the dot com crash, the internet and 9-11 as the moments where an irreversible change occurred in our world and I find him profound as ever if a little goofy in the virtual reality parts. The cultural references were strange in this one I could have been convinced a Gen x writer wrote this or maybe William Gibson. The conspiracies surrounding 9/11 made me fear for a second that Pynchon was handing us a “truther” manifesto, but as usual resolution and clear political agenda are not Pynchon’s game, and every clue and hint is another sign in his labyrinth of elusive meaning and shadows. A book easier to digest than most of his work and one as filled with little shards of dissonance to ponder over.

Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984

Punk has gotten too many histories and This Band could be your Life gave a history of the American Post hardcore, but my favorite moment in the history has been relatively undocumented until Reynold’s brilliant book. The collision of some of my favorite literature (Kafka, Ballard, Burroughs, New Worlds Science fiction), and music (Krautrock, Roxy Music, Bowie, Captain Beefheart, dub reggae, Parliament/Funkadelic,) the energy and DIY aspects of punk, and the pessimistic political situation of the seventies created some of the most innovative music of the 20th century. The Pop Group, This Heat, The Slits, The Residents, Pere Ubu, Devo, DNA, The Contortions, Mars, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Raincoats, Gang Of Four, Public Image Limited, Joy Division, Mission of Burma, The Fall, Cabaret Voltaire, and Throbbing Gristle are the canon as far as I am concerned. Reynolds is passionate, erudite writer who captures the narrative perfectly and makes this an irresistible book. Obviously some people are going to disagree with some of his statements (I for one find The Pop Group’s albums brilliant messes rather than ambitious messes and wish Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Birthday Party weren’t discussed only briefly and only in the context of Goth), but for the most part they are well thought out and worth grappling with. This book also provides a backdoor history of the era it covers which is equally fascinating as the music content. I lost a little attentiveness as the music starts to lose interest for me in the early eighties with New Pop and the early MTV generation, it’s sad to see the envelope pushing fade to boring pop and visuals, but Reynolds writing helped me push through. This book is a treat for music lovers and those curious about an era whose influence continues to reverberate. A great book on an exciting era of music and a great book of the how the despair and the hope for reinvention of the seventies gave way to the image based, money obsessed, and conservative eighties.

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

It’s fitting that a sequel to John Dos Passos’s renowned USA trilogy is a non-fiction book. Dos Passos’s work is a mix of brilliance and overreach, the newsreel, camera eye, and bio segments read as well as if they were written yesterday, but some of the fictional arcs drag which cannot be said for Packer’s continuation of it. The original trilogy covers the three decades in which America moved from a developing country towards empire, and Packer covers the three decades were America seems to be attempting to reverse this process. I am sure there is a collection of writers and journalists kicking themselves for letting Packer beat them to this idea, but one wonders who else could pull it off. This book I found at a luck day (2 hard to get titles for three weeks) rack at my library, and decided if I was bored once I would return it, needless to say I did not find myself bored for even a minute. His short bio pieces and newsreels are well handled but where succeeds the Dos Passos doesn't cut it anymore is in the key stories, he finds fascinating characters whose transformations and tragedies bring home the broad sweep of his portrait. We get to see the rise of Silicon Valley, the foreclosure crisis (his surreal descriptions of the failed suburban ghost towns of Tampa resembles Ballard more than Dos Passos), tea party movement, the occupy movement (providing great reporting on this showing starkly how Hedge’s and Sacco’s recent book failed in this regard), the scary divisions in our society, and the collapse of our industrial sector. Libertarian computer nerds, conservative movements that destroy infrastructure in their own communities(with money provided by rich industrialists), community organizers, dreamers and con men, billionaires and people left with five dollars after bills for a whole month are among the cast that Packer humanizes in these pages. I am intrigued how this book intersects with Simon Reynold’s Retromania and what many in the science fiction community having been harping about for a while is our mass inability to visualize any kind of a future anymore. I have had many bones to pick with Packer on issues in the past but have always respected him on his thinking even if I find some of his conclusions jarring, here his love for portraying complex characters and for wrestling with his beliefs in regards to the realities of our situation, and his rage at how deeply we have been cheated by the current system all serve to make this a remarkable summary of this nation’s current crisis. I fear the future will require a sequel.

Death and the Penguin

Post-Soviet Ukrainian existential and absurdist noir is new genre for me and one I think Andrey Kurkov owns, Kurkov crafts tales worthy of Kafka but with warm humanity and humor and plotting that are definitely his own. The hero is a writer with writer’s block and a pet penguin (gotten from a defunded zoo) and while this combination at first seems a little bit precious but their melancholy day to day is described with well-placed rhythms and details and is never too cute. The events get both sinister and humorous as the protagonist accidently gains a family, writes obituaries for living people that then die, and is forced to attend gangster’s funerals with the penguin in tow. Death and the Penguin is a beautiful and amusing book with a sad sack sense of humor, affection for absurd and ominous situations presented in clear language, and humanity.

Predator Cities #1: Mortal Engines (Predator Cities)

Harry Potter and Dark Materials started the recent movement of YA titles that could be enjoyed by adult audiences as thoroughly as their target audience, but no title deserves this distinction more than Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve. A thoroughly unsentimental, cliché rebuffing, and occasional brutally dark novel that still revels in wild adventures, crazy machines, Dickensian names and characters, and the full screen sense of wonder that belongs in a YA title. This book came out in 2001 not sure if before or after the events of September but it seems infused with the crazed atmosphere of that year, the mad march for war, the feeling of besiegement and blind trust in misguided leaders. Philip Reeve wrote the book that Mieville probably wanted too with Railsea, in fact the future wasteland of Reeve’s work is undoubtedly an influence on that book. Reeve creates a book that evokes Gilliam, Dickens, and Vance, and is overflowing with puns, references, and jokes about our time (my favorite being a character named Nancarrow and an airship called the 13th floor elevator), and filled to the brim with undead killers, giant machine cities, pirates, mad, old tech from an insane era of war, desperate atmosphere, villains that are ruthless but still human, an airship piloting spy named Fang, and two believable, unlikely young heroes. Reeve knows the trick to keep audiences on edge, make every character a full and believable character and be willing at any moment to kill one of them. The myth of protagonist’s invulnerability, revenge seeking, happy endings, the idea that a character has a destiny, and other atrocious tropes and clichés of fantasy/adventure stories are thoroughly skewered by Reeve along the way. He has created a unfriendly world ruled by force, accidents, and chaos that the character have to fight for survival in, but he has filled it with the warmth of a realistic view of humans, they can be cruel, selfish and self-involved and live in desperate times but they are recognizable human. If this series retains half the success rate of this initial volume it will be the YA series I point to above any other.

The Tribes of America: Journalistic Discoveries of Our People and Their Cultures

Wonderfully balanced dispatches from the start of America’s culture wars. Cowan is an worthy writer that takes some from the new journalist school with little of their self-indulgences, focusing on the subject and issue at hand. He reported on most of the significant battle fields of the seventies as the heroics of civil rights soured into busing and housing scandals and issues of urban crime, the start of a populist evangelic movement (in a violent conflict over school textbooks), immigrants and illegals and the border patrols on the Mexico-America border, and violent union strikes. Much of this is still with us or was for the last couple of decades and Cowan examines it with great sense of balance and willingness to let every side speak its piece. What could be depressing is thoughtful and evocative.

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

Second nonfiction I have read recently that has evoked Dante’s inferno for me. Sacco and Hedges takes the reader on a tour of our sacrifice zones. Areas that capitalism and other forces (racism and classism mainly) have made into third world failed states that exist in the borders of the world’s number one economy. Pine Ridge reservation, Camden, New Jersey, West Virginia Coal country, the produce fields of Florida, and finally the Occupy protests. These pieces are intended as both prophesy of unfettered capitalism and a shaming for our collective turning of the back. In other words this is muckraking piece in the classic style. There is a tension between Hedge’s manic street preacher of doom delivering an erudite and passionate sermon that critiques history and safely held preconceptions with Sacco’s more humane and thoughtful portrayals. This tension gives way in the last and weakest section on the Occupy movement as Hedges turns most of the piece into a plea for revolution (without any real answers though many of his critiques seem trenchant) which makes it the weakest section, as good reportage on the Occupy movement is needed more than his rant.

Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love

Dante is often quoted (I paraphrase) as finding heaven the hardest to write of all the sections of his Divine Comedy. I wonder if the writer Talbot had similar difficulties on certain sections of this exuberant popular history of one of my favorite cities, San Francisco during the sixties and seventies. His writing about the utopian early hippie days and an attempt at redemption in an effective stint at mayor by Diane Feinstein and a good 49ers season (I did find the section on the city’s response to the AIDs epidemic inspiring compared to the cold shoulder New York gave in the same era.), are overshadowed by the middle section. This section is the inferno. Talbot calls it Terror. Here is a city at war with itself in the dread seventies. Hard drugs take over the Haight, the Altamont disaster spoils the mood and the revolutionary movements move towards rage. These changes happened all over the country in the Nixon years but San Franscisco seemed to be hit the worse, the Red Queen section of the wonderland replete with death cults, violent revolutionaries, mad bombers, and assassinations. Talbot’s portrayal of S.L.A., the People’s Temple, and the Zebra murders are chilling and compulsory reading, but thankfully also nuanced and fresh takes on these horrific events.

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

It starts with a riot and ends in an elegy, a deep feeling of loss. In between is almost nonstop frantic energy and bad moods. This is not a biography of Nixon, though he broods and connives throughout like Milton’s Devil, this book is a panorama or Boschian landscape of the era that brought this deeply paranoid, inferiority complex plagued man to power. The title of Nixonland is taken from an Adlai Stevenson quote, “a land of slander and scare, of sly innuendo, of poison pen and anonymous phone call and bustling, pushing, shoving-the land of smash and grab and anything to win.” Civil Rights, and populist backlash against it, the restlessness of the baby boomer generation, the reckless and worthless escalation of the war in Vietnam created a confluence of factor that led to a civil war within the Democratic party, breaking the back of the New Deal (though ironically elements of it still continued in Nixon’s domestic policy). A revolution was also brewing in the Republicans as Barry Goldwater’s failed campaign left in its shattered wake a takeover by the conservative elements of the party. Arguably Perlstein is presenting nothing new in this book but he synthesizes seemingly everything in a thoroughly novelistic narrative. My Lai, race riots, the start of the culture wars, terrorist attacks, Attica, The Siege of Chicago, Nixon’s brilliant campaigning and crippling doubt, LBJ’s hubris, the turbulent presidential campaigns of 68 and 72, the assassinations, hippies, political trials, all get pulled into an entirety. He makes some mistakes along the way (the New York and L.A. Times reviews are good sources on these), but when juggling this much I will forgive him for a dropped ball or two. He is very fair when addressing all the various political factions and personalities in this narrative. He in the end has provided a riveting history of a turbulent era whose mistakes and children are still with us.

The Rise of Ransom City

Following up his Half Made World, Gilman does so in unpredictable style. Or maybe predictably unpredictable as Gears of the City his follow-up to Thunderer went totally postmodern. Here following Jeff Vandermeer’s Shriek: an Afterword and he presents a memoir that is edited by another, a mix of Nabokov’s unreliable narrator and Borge’s faux non-fiction with a healthy dose of Mark Twain’s picaresque wit. This is also one the most aggrieved skewering of Horatio Alger since Nathaniel West’s Cool Million. With references to Twain, Alger, and the continuing quasi-western milieu obviously this is fantasy novel with its eyes set on American myths. Some would argue that the style would keep much of action distanced from the reader, but I found this an interesting literary gambit that paid off more so than Vandermeer’s similar book. Gilman remains one of the most fascinating of contemporary fantasy writers to me. Where will he go next? I’m interested. On a side note how did he get Gordon Lish to blurb this? Weird. On another side note, is there a revival of the Western going on right now?