2024 Notes
Worse Angels
Notes:
A dark, fun, and well-written mystery with some strong supernatural undercurrents that imbues the landscape of Central New York with richness and menace.
I managed to read the “last” of the Isaiah Coleridge novels first, but honestly, it didn’t really matter. I love Barron’s horror fiction, and particularly his tight, economical prose. This book shows his real range as an author, with a much more elaborate Chandler-esque prose propelling the narrative.
The basic plot is that Isaiah Coleridge is a private detective and ex-mob enforcer, living in the Hudson river Valley of New York. At the urging of an old friend who is about to be arrested, he agrees to look into the suspicious suicide of the friend’s nephew, which took place in an elaborate scientific research facility in western New York, in the (very real) village of Horseheads. Along the way, he tangles with a wealthy and violent cult, explores the landscapes of the Southern Tier, reckons with his own mortality, and tries to be a better man to his partner Meg.
There are connections here to other characters in the Barron-verse, particularly the eccentric anthropologists Toshi Ryoko and Howard Campbell, who show up in a variety of Barron’s other fiction. But the whole conceit of the Mares of Thrace, the cult that seems to run Horseheads, is remiscient of Barron’s mythological “Children of Old Leech”, and the cosmic nihilism of that framework.
The third book references events and characters in the previous two, and rather than feeling lost, the gripping story and complicated, interesting world just made me want to go and read the other two! This book is also a great tour of central New York, from the Catskills to the Finger Lakes. The whole landscape of the Southern Tier region is beautifully evoked, and stoked with the kind of menace and mystery that Barron has mastered.
Music is History
Notes:
A book that combines biography, music history and criticism, and philosophy, but in a way that felt like an unwieldy amalgam of each.
There are probably few people more knowledgeable about the history of 20th and 21st century popular music than Questlove of the Roots. He’s been at the epicenter of the some of the most important music and [musical spaces)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okayplayer] of the 21st century. He’s passionate and thoughtful about music and society and his own place in it.
The two words in the title intertwine with each other, through the chapters, which take a year in Questlove’s life (1971-2002). Accompanying each year-chapter is a framing statement about history, and Questlove uses the issues raised by music or events of that year to contemplate how history is written and experienced. He connects cultural events to songs, albums, films, or images, and then uses those connections to ruminate on the way that history is told and experienced. The chapter on 1987 uses Prince’s remarkable 80s output and the tendrils he had in other funk and R&B albums during that time to ruminate on the “Great Man Theory of History”. The 1975 chapter takes Al Jarreau’s “You Don’t see me” as a jumping-off point for thinking about who gets to be seen and appreciated in history, and who gets shoved to the margins (or left in the archives). There are characters who appear in multiple chapters: the Roots deceased manager Rich Nichols, Duke Ellington, J Dilla, Stevie Wonder, and of course, Prince, who Questlove has long been fascinated by The topics stray from music into a wide variety of other fascinating historical and cultural events, processes, and movements. He discusses the notion of “black cool”, the origins of the protest song, the history of the sampler, the impact of the atomic bomb and the cold war, and much more. Other themes float through the album itself: the tensions in writing history between narrow and broad sweeps, and from the social center or social margins. The tone is conversational and playful. Questlove cracks jokes, makes snarky asides, and inserts subtle references to songs, movies and more.
In between some chapters there are thematic playlists, including great songs in the key of E Minor, great songs that Questlove discovered when they were sampled by other artists, and cover songs that surpass the originals, to name a few. These are an opportunity for fun asides and quick analysis. They were some of my favorite parts of the book.
Sometimes he’s emphatic that we seek the hidden and the disregarded of the past. Other times, he centers his own story in the most significant names in the present, as in the long section in the last chapter where he discusses DJing for Barack Obama and then again for Jay-Z and Beyonce. When I first finished the book, I was really bothered by this indeterminacy. As I was re-reading it to make these notes, I found it a little more palatable. But it also seemed to me that, if there’s any place for someone of Questlove’s brilliance, knowledge, and stature to make a profound point beyond “history is complicated and messy”, it’s a book about Music history. And I didn’t come away with that, particularly when the book is full of generic platitudes or confusing sentences like “History…resists sameness. It embraces change. Sometimes it forces change.” (P. 19) Take Questlove’s discussion of the way that the passage of time gives us perspective, on p. 304. “When you’re refusing to make a definitive statement on objects in the mirror because they’re too close, what counts as too close?” (p. 304) A reasonable question, maybe, but earlier, he pointed out that the settling of history into consensus usually leaves people out–his fascination with the contradictions inherent in the book “Unseen: Unpublished Black History from the New York Times Photo Archives” (p.54) points to the contradictions of consensus history. So, is analysis of history simply about the passage of time and accomodation, or is it a selective process done at every moment, and accountable to current social and political trends? Questlove never really answers this question definitively and this gets to my basic problem with it. The book’s wide range felt almost too eclectic, too scattered. I kept waiting for Questlove’s thesis on history or on music, and I didn’t really get either beyond “There’s just no way to recapture the past in all its richness and contradiction” (P. 320) This may be true, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t worthwhile to try.
Riot Baby
Notes:
A harrowing and haunting book about the escalating violence of white supremacy and mass incarceration in America, seen both through the lives of one of its victims, and from someone born with the power to escape and destroy it.
The narrative orbits the lives of of Kev and Ella, two black kids who grow up in the 1980s and 1990s (Kev is born on the night of the 1992 LA uprising, hence the title). Kev is a technically-minded, sensitive kid who experiences racism, police violence, and their repercussions early in his life, and ultimately does time in Rikers. Ella, his older sister becomes increasingly aware that she possesses vast psychic powers that both manifest the suffering around her in her heart, and also give her the power to end it. It is through their two viewpoints; one angry, incisive and resigned, the other omnipotent and empathic, that the everyday experience of white supremacy and racial oppression are made viscerally manifest. But the book moves from the past into the future, following both of their lives as they travel a country where technology, conservative racial politics, and capitalist inequality lead to an increasingly dystopian surveillance society. There is a hope at the end of the book, but it’s murky and uncertain, mirroring the world from which it springs.
I listened to the audiobook, read by the author, and found it astonishingly moving, terrifying, and insightful. It sits with the best socially-critical science fiction that I’ve read, reminding me of Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ, and Lauren Beukes, to name a few.
A Cosmology of Monsters
Notes:
A character-rich horror novel that is simultaneously a love-letter to horror culture and fandom.
The novel makes clear from the beginning that it is a recounting by Noah, the main character of his family’s life and history from the 1960s to the present. Mother Margaret and Father Harry come together over an attempt to escape their difficult family lives, and ultimately build a precarious but steady middle-class family in the 1970s. What is unique about them is Harry’s love of horror culture, which the whole family (joined by daughters Sydney and Eunice) ultimately parley into a rich and theatrical family-run haunted house attraction called “The Wandering Dark”. This creative project bends the arc of their lives, but it is also inspired and spurred by strange and inexplicable events, particularly images of wolf-like monsters who appear to each of them at various times. What also folds into their lives is tragedy, in the form of mental illness, disappearance, and death. But paralleling this familial unraveling is Noah’s increasingly close relationship with one of the myserious creatures, who visits him, and eventually invites him into a cosmic supernatural world in the form of an unnnamed and alien city. The intertwining of this broken family with the strange and possibly animate “city” forms the narrative vortex of the book.
Part of how this vortex is depicted is through structural alterations of text and formatting. Intercutting Noah’s narrative are narratives written by and about other characters, imaginatively depicting their dreams, nightmares, or daily struggles. There is an eventual explanation for this narrative break, but until it arrives, these structural shifts feel somewhat contrived.
The book is well written, and the prose is rich but not flowerly or indulgent. Like a lot of family dramas, the emotional beats of the story are told through incredibly expressive dialogue which frequently felt more like emotional infodumps (emodumps?) than the realistic exchanges of family members. The characters in this book were all too happy to talk about their feelings in ways that often felt overwrought or perhaps expressed an idealized sense of self-understanding.
To me, the supernatural element of the novel eventually felt too heavy for its own weight. The forces and motivations of the alien city and the creatures that live within it and serve it felt unclear and uneven. It is suggested that the city feeds on imagination and creativity, and uses its mostrous servants to harvest human beings as provender. But the book also makes clear that who gets taken, or changed or devoured to serve this need is in some ways up to the monsters themselves, which made me feel confused about who was actually serving whom. Likewise, there is a suggestion that something about the “Wandering Dark” haunted house is either an echo or the source of the city, but I couldn’t always figure out the chicken and the egg in this process. Ironically, I think less clarity about the city and the cosmology would have heightened the strangeness of the whole affair, and shined a brighter light on the subtle family dynamics.
Ultimately I liked the book, as I tend to like books that horror and the weird in the subtle politics and emotions of everyday human life. It reminded me quite a bit of Graham Joyce’s the Tooth Fairy, another book about the overlap of the supernatural, the familial, and the experience of growing up. But this book felt as thought it was holding too many balls in the air and didn’t quite catch them all at the end.
Occult Features of Anarchism
Notes:
A short, fascinating book that lays out the connections between the mystical philosophy of the ancient world, the radical politics of the enlightenment, and contemporary conspiracy theories.
This book reminded me of something that Umberto Eco’s “The Island of the Day Before” brought into shocking focus: that the Enlightenment was not merely the sudden decision to apply reason to the world, but unfolded unevenly over the course of centuries from all kinds of strange, mysterious, and entirely non-reasoned sources. Lagalisse argues that one of the important origin texts of the enlightenment was in fact the translation of Hermetica, which brought together complex mathematics, alchemical chemistry, physics, and mystical-religious analysis. Lagalisse shows how this text influenced both science and politics of the Renaissance, and indeed, how the two were linked in their utilization of the control of women and the takeover of what had traditionally been women’s knowledge. Thus, the Enligthenment project was simultaneously mystical, reasonable, and patriarchal in the way that it unfolded across Europe. This was the part of the book that I found the most astounding and engaging.
The remainder of the book traces the relationship between radical politics (particularly anarchist politics) and mysticism, showing connections between Freemasonry, anti-authoritarian movements, and labor activism. Lagalisse concludes with some thoughts about the social role of the term “conspiracy theory”, arguing that it is too routinely deployed as a means of punching down and excluding poor and working-class people from activist engagement. She urges activists to try and use the suspicion and clear morality embodied in so-called conspiracist thinking towards engagement around shared goals and ideals. I find this compelling, but also quite an uphill challenge–it would probably be overwhelmingly difficult to engage with someone who saw anti-racist protests as part of a global jewish conspiracy in anti-racist work.
Nonetheless, the book was a fascinating read, providing a genealogy of connection between two seemingly disparate historical movements, and showing how their connections have organized and hindereed possibilities for change and transformation in the present.
