I finished reading Mike Davis’s newest collection “Old Gods, New Enigma’s: Marx’s lost theory”. Davis is a wonderfully readable radical historian of labor, urbanism, and ecology (or in the case of “City of Quartz” his astonishing history of Los Angeles, all three) and he brings to bear his vast knowledge on his first published commentary on Marx. It’s worth the price of admission alone for his incredibly funny introduction in which he lays out all the times he’s tried to read Marx and failed. There are four essays, all of which are insightful in different ways, but what’s stuck with me the most is his quote from the last essay on global warming and urbanism:
I learned that I need to stop shopping at Dollar General, which has outpaced Wal-mart as the most insidious destroyer of rural communities, with more stores than McDonald’s restaurants.
I poured over some beautiful maps of Brooklyn that show the locations of indigenous Lenni Lenape trails. Not surprisingly, many of these trails became the basis for major thoroughfares and roads. As I’ve educated myself about the Indigenous history of North America, it’s always surprising to me (though it really shouldn’t be) just how many putatively “American” (read European or English) places are actually Indigenous places that were papered over by colonization and material efforts to actively forget it.
I read this absolutely bonkers intellectual and social biography of Charles Murray, one of the co-authors of the Bell Curve and ongoing proponent of the thoroughly debunked belief in correlations between intelligence and race. Murray began his work as part of the US’s counterinsurgency efforts in Thailand in the 1960s, and much of his subsequent work built on this formative experience. He later grafted his anti-government beliefs onto ideologically minded (and funded) racist IQ science, and has spent the next 30 years as a putative teller of uncomfortable truths that are really just self-fulfilling justifications of existing inequality. Anthropologists did little work to publicly counter Murray in the 1980s and 1990s, though some are taking him on now.
I read with great relish Erik Loomis’s call for a Corporate Accountability act that takes aim at the limited array of progressive and leftist activism around trade issues. Loomis’s argument is basically that the neo-liberal consensus between the center-left and center-right in the 1980s and 90s has left us bereft of alternatives for what a just, fair, and healthy global trade would look like. Also, his upcoming book “A history of American in Ten Strikes” looks like the kind of saucy labor history I tend to love.
I welcomed a Cayuga faith keeper and his partner to the Museum where I work. Ostensibly I was there to give them a tour and help them figure out a more precise location for Oquaga, a large Iroquois settlement and refugee community in what is now Southern New York. But in practice, he was the one who gave me a tour, and I just opened doors! The group of us had long and interesting conversations about Iroquois history, wampum, and Indigenous representation in White culture. I’m hoping to have him back sometime in the future to talk to students and faculty!
I’ve been slowly working my way through The Weird: A compendium of strange and dark stories, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (himself famous as the author of Annihilation, the basis of the recent bizarre movie. ) The book is a historical anthology of weird fiction, including the usual suspects like Lovecraft, Blackwood, Leiber, and M.R. James. However, the Vandermeer’s included stories from much more literary figures like Kafka, Saki, Borges, Chabon, and Joyce Carol Oates. There are also some pieces by non-western authors from Asia and Africa which make for delightful discoveries. The only problem (if you can call it that) is that it’s huge–over 1100 double-columned pages, and is a large format tome (7" x 9"), so it’s a little unwieldy to read casually. Robert Aickman’s “The Hospice” was a particularly creepy revelation, but realistically, there hasn’t been a bad tale in the bunch.
I’ve been making my way through a lengthy back-log of episodes of The Best Show w/ Tom Scharpling. It’s a long-running (since 2000!) radio show turned podcast that combines live call-ins, music, bizarro comedy and misanthropy. I was delighted and surprise to be listening to an episode from early July only to hear the voice of my old friend Ryan H. Walsh discussing his new book Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968. (Ryan and I met in a frankly surreal creative writing class at Boston University). The book (which I’ve only had time to skim so far) uses Van Morrison’s time in Boston while he was writing his legendary masterpiece Astral Weeks as a starting point for undertaking a psychogeography of 60s-era Boston and is full of bonkers tales of cults, counter-cultural media, and organized crime. Kudos to Ryan for writing such an interesting book, and for making it onto the Best Show!
I read a new essay by Laurie Penny in The Baffler about the new iteration of Queer Eye on Netflix. Man, can Penny write! She’s managed to get me, a White, cis-het male, interested watching Queer Eye, despite my historical disinterest in fashion and my (not-entirely unjustified) suspicion of the fetishism of consumer-based personal self-improvement. Though critical of the show’s commercialism, performative homosexuality as a palliative to masculinity, and over-emphasis on the need of people with vastly different access to social and economic power finding common ground, Penny’s enthusiasm for the show as a hopeful vision of the future comes shining through. As she says, Queer Eye is “not about queerness at all. It’s actually about the disaster of heterosexuality—and what, if anything, can be salvaged from its ruins." UPDATE: My wife and I finally started watching the series, and we’re really captivated by its charm and genuine humanity.
I finished reading Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch. It’s a wonderous and strange novel about a teenage Nigerian (Igbo) girl who discovers that she is part of a community of magic users called Leopard People, and follows her as she enters their world. I loved Okorafor’s Binti books, and this one continues her brilliant drawing on West African folklore and culture to build an imaginative and engaging fantasy novel.
I watched A Dark Song, a wonderfully subtle horror movie about (occult power, revenge, and faith. )[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvQ2ClKbRcU&w=560&h=315] The basic plot is that a woman whose child was murdered pays an odd and eccentric man to help her perform a complicated occult ritual that will take many stressful and strenuous months. They retreat to an isolated welsh manor house and the movie follows them through the process of this ritual and the consequences of the two of them locking themselves in with each other and the forces they may or may not unleash. I loved this movie for its ambiguity, rich characters, and frankly gorgeous setting and design. I was hipped to it by Sady Doyle, who wrote a beautiful review focuses on the movie’s exploration of patriarchcal violence and female desire.
I read this long-form history of Wendy Pini, creator of the legendary Elfquest comics on Boingboing. I’m not an Elfquest fan, but this history focused attention on Pini as an independent creator, and I love hearing people talk about how and why they make art. Aside from the history of Elfquest and how Pini’s personal and professional life fed the astonishing art and story she was making, it also reveals Pini’s early interactions with the mainstream comics world in the 1970s and 80s, and her enthusiasm for cosplay (check out the video of her dressed as Red Sonja, menacing M.A.S.H. actor Jamie Farr on the Mike Douglas show!)
I read with great relish 
I’ve been slowly working my way through 
I’ve been making my way through a lengthy back-log of episodes of 
the need of people with vastly different access to social and economic power finding common ground, Penny’s enthusiasm for the show as a hopeful vision of the future comes shining through. As she says, Queer Eye is 
I cut off all my hair! I’d been losing my hair since I was in my mid-20s, and have thought about shaving my head a lot since then. This week, on the recommendation of 
