The Book Piles newsletter returns to review a memoir, a novel and a comic book about finding truth in crime
Thank you for coming to the pile. Let’s consider the psychological impact of closely scrutinized murder.
Books
I Know Who You Are | Barbara Rae-Venter | Ballantine Books | 2023
I Know Who You Are by Barbara Rae-Venter | Credit: Ballantine Books
Barbara Rae-Venter’s 2022 non-fiction memoir details a forensic genealogist’s quest to catch serial killers. With DNA sample left at the scene, investigators can match it with samples collected from millions of people. This book shocked me in ways few things do.
What shocked me is the conclusive proof that our DNA is not private. Enough people took at-home DNA tests (like 23 and Me), and because of genetic similarity between relatives, gene databases contain 90% of people’s DNA.
The author used this research technique to find the Golden State Killer, Joseph James DeAngelo. The former police officer admitted guilt, and a judge convicted him after being presented with every possible piece of evidence a prosecution could bring against a person: eyewitness testimony, material evidence, and a well-established and analyzed timeline. A true crime writer, Michelle McNamara laid out a clear timeline in I’ll Be Gone In The Dark. Unfortunately, the author died, and her files were given to other investigators.
I Know Who You Are continues the story of the apprehension and prosecution of DeAngelo. Rae-Venter specifies how DNA evidence was used to find him and how police got confirmation samples by swabbing DeAngelo’s car door handle and stealing a used Kleenex. To vastly oversimplify it, an investigator uploads a DNA sequence to Ancestry.com and compares it with other sequences on the site. Rae-Venter built thousands of family trees from possible DNA matches and then researched the individuals on the associated tree.
When they narrowed the suspect profile, the author explained that her co-investigator (a retired detective) couldn’t believe a police officer would do this. They assumed it was someone in the real estate industry who had keys to many locks. It’s just another ominous association between police and real estate.
Of course, it was a police officer. Employed by police departments in both Exeter and Auburn, CA, DeAngelo was a burglary unit officer. He likely learned how to break into houses by investigating many cases where people did just that. In a witness testimony, she recalled DeAngelo cursing his ex-wife and blaming another man for “making him do this.” How weird that, in this case, the actual criminal happened to be the police officer 🙂
The book isn’t just about the Golden State Killer investigation. Rae-Venter explains how she got interested in forensic genealogy, her family history and search for genealogical truth, other non-criminal investigations like reuniting long lost family members, and even tips for aspiring investigative genealogists.
And she confronts the ethical questions head-on, although I disagree with her conclusions. What makes a crime “true”? Can truth be stripped down to the base building blocks of human genetic material? Does one’s right to privacy get trumped by our collective right not to get murdered and catch murderers? These are the questions at the heart of DNA evidence.
The practical concerns are immediately relevant to sexual assault cases. Police departments with DNA evidence now have a much more reliable means of finding these men. The author imagines a future where this could upend how current assault investigations.
Investigative genealogy also has a place in the future of unarmed police response. The author and her co-investigator on the GSK case were both retirees. They solved a cold case for really cheap! Forensic DNA investigations only require biosamples, access to DNA databases and laboratories, and investigator hours. These were unsalaried volunteers. Now imagine a world where this technology scales up to a speed that can solve cases without decades of inactivity.
Of course, corrupt police and prosecuting attorneys can manufacture DNA evidence. Since the American justice system has a quota of people to send people to private prisons, I predict genetic genealogy will convict people than it exonerates. The police could say they found a DNA sample at the scene when they didn’t. How could a defendant falsify the evidence without access to samples or technicians? These are just some horrifying questions to ruminate on throughout the future.
Rabbit Hole | Kate Brody | Soho Crime | 2024
Rabbit Hole by Kate Brody | Credit: Soho Crime
Rabbit Hole, Kate Brody’s debut novel, is a dramatized version of a true crime obsession gone awry. Teddy is a high-achieving English teacher and a woman on the edge. Her sister went missing about a decade ago, her family never dealt with the trauma, and the novel begins after her dad finally committed suicide after an obsessive investigation. Teddy seeks answers.
There are family secrets, a psychic, unprescribed pills, a cam girl, an estranged brother, an illegally purchased firearm, bawdy twists, shocking betrayals, and high-heat sex scenes. The calls come from inside the house, so it’s a domestic thriller but one set firmly in cyberspace. Our protagonist processes her trauma through experiences on the internet.
Reddit acts as a setting, a collection of deranged characters, and the book’s inciting incident. When Teddy pokes her toe in her father’s investigation, Reddit doxxes her, sending her to the titular rabbit hole. Brody fictionalizes Reddit threads and recreates the schizophrenic thrill of a Reddit investigation—look at all these connections and implications! There’s always a Reddit comment to drive somebody just a little bit crazier.
What’s gained from Reddit investigations? Those who dislike ambiguous endings should brace themselves because there are no easy answers or clear conclusions. Does Rabbit Hole make readers reconsider who’s on the True Crime message boards? Sure, there’s a bunch of obsessive freaks (take me, for example), but these traumas also impact the family members. The message boards call themselves “communities,” a misleading name for anonymous people data-mining a dead person’s most vulnerable personal information. These message boards even entice participation from a victim’s loved ones.
There’s the idea that, eventually, the investigation will crack, and the victims will get justice. And
I Know Who You Are offers an example, but I think Rabbit Hole provides a more emotionally truthful outcome to becoming an online vigilante. It hurts one’s spirit.
Comics
Where The Body Was | Ed Brubaker (Writer) | Sean Phillips (Illustrator) | Image | 2024
Where The Body Was by Ed Brubaker (Writer) and Sean Phillips (Illustrator) | Credit: Image
Brubaker/Phillip’s latest book is their funniest: a graphic mockumentary about how a dead body impacts a neighborhood.
The book begins with a map of Pelican Road, 1984. A Cul de Sac of just a few houses. But in the legend, notice #9. Spoiler: that’s where the body was found.
A page from Where The Body Was, illustrated by Sean Phillips | Credit: Image
I grew up in a similar-looking cul-de-sac and had first-hand experience to attest that nothing ever happens here by design. A dead body? That’s something! Just being close to action gives these characters a strange new authority. They know where the body was. Listen to them! They must be important!
Maybe. Or what if the witness is a lying psychopath like Palmer Sneed, the “Man with a Badge.”
A panel from Where The Body Was, illustrated by Sean Phillips | Credit: Image
Palmer’s not a cop, but he acts like a cop. He resented his cop’s father and stole his badge from his casket to spit on him. Eventually, whenever he needed a confidence boost, he would flash the badge and get into or out of trouble. It helps him get laid. Of course, phony cops would get in the way of figuring out what happened to the body. But that’s just it. These guys come out when a body is found because dead bodies can be a conduit for their repressed vigilante tendencies.
Like Batman! There’s a diminutive parody of vigilantism and superheroes in The Roller Derby Girl, a.k.a. Lila Nguyen. In 1984, she dressed in a mask and cape, ran around the neighborhood, and pretended to be a superhero. Yes, that is weird, but not unheard of as something an American child might do since syndicated radio. So if a body is found,of course, the little kid playing superhero would need to fight crime and solve the case. Somebody has to do it!
Three panels from Where The Body Was, illustrated by Sean Phillips | Credit: Image
The real crime fighters are trying to solve the case by pinning it on Ranko, the Homeless Veteran.
A panel from Where The Body Was, illustrated by Sean Phillips | Credit: Image
Because, come on, he looks like a criminal! He’s squatting on public property, and important people in town wish he were gone. He’s the perfect patsy.
I’ll leave you hanging there because this book was a blast! Fantastic art, dialogue, structure, colors, and vibe. Read it! Buy it at a comic shop, or if you’re broke, get it on Hoopla! Thanks, Image and Netgalley, for the Advanced Readers Copy.
Pile of the Week
This week’s pile has to be this sculpture of incredible birds sitting on top of books by Malia Jenson that I found in the Public Art Archive.
A photo of Malia Jenson’s sculpture, “Pile” in Portland, Oregon | Source: Public Art Archive
This week, the pile pertains to art and state ideology in reviews of Frances Stoner Saunders’ history of the cultural Cold War, Who Paid the Piper and Zodiac, a new graphic memoir about the controversial Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.
Books
Propaganda was how the West won the Cold War. Frances Stonor Saunders explains the specifics in Who Paid The Piper, a detailed look into the cultural ideological warfare. She focuses on the men who made the propaganda campaign happen and the overlap between the intelligentsia and the intelligence agents.
During the height of the Cold War, the US government committed vast resources to a
secret programme of cultural propaganda in western Europe. A central feature of this programme was to advance the claim that it did not exist. It was managed, in great secrecy, by America’s espionage arm, the Central Intelligence Agency. The centrepiece of this covert campaign was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, run by CIA agent Michael Josselson from 1950 till 1967. Its achievements – not least its duration – were considerable. At its peak, the Congress for Cultural Freedom had offices in thirty-five countries, employed dozens of personnel, published over twenty prestige magazines, held art exhibitions, owned a news and features service, organized high-profile international conferences, and rewarded musicians and artists with prizes and public performances. Its mission was to nudge the intelligentsia of western Europe away from its lingering fascination with Marxism and Communism towards a view more accommodating of ‘the American way’ – Frances Stoner Suanders, The Cultural Cold War (1)
Saunders explains how the CIA funded art around the world in an act of “psychological warfare,” or winning the hearts and minds of Europeans. The war destroyed Allied countries, and even in the countries that “won,” they lacked food, water, and jobs, with rates of 50% unemployment. American leaders in business, military, and government worried that Communism would be attractive to people living under these conditions.
To beat the Communists, America made several gigantic investments. American industry publicly and overtly committed to rebuilding Europe, but secretly and covertly, they also funded programs to propagandize an American point of view. Thus begins Pax Americana.
There are tragic ironies, like how Europeans saw exhibits of cutting-edge modernist paintings and how American communists at home faced severe repression. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI surveilled and sabotaged them, and Joseph McCarty blacklisted them from employment.
The book recounts what could be called the inciting incident of the Red Scare: The 1949 Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf Hotel. Another irony is that a conference for World Peace ignited ideological warfare.
CIA agents in attendance carried out hilariously erudite acts of sabotage, like Nicholas Nabokov (yes, Vladimir’s brother), who asked a question during a panel and tried to get a Soviet musician to denounce the party line and condemn a review in Pravda. Allegedly, Stalin would have murdered or imprisoned the musician for doing this, and that was Nabokov’s point. But it makes N. Nabokov look like a psychopath for trying to trick someone into saying executable opinions.
Life Magazine smeared the attendees of the conference, including the acerbic Dorthy Parker, whose FBI file “…listed variously as ‘an undercover Communist,’ ‘an open Communist,’ and ‘a Communist appeaser’” (53).
Dashiell Hammett also attended the conference; shortly afterward, he’d refuse to testify against his fellow communists, serve jail time, and quit writing in disgust. Arthur Miller was also in attendance; I read Miller’s play, The Crucible, in the 10th grade and taught as a parable for McCarthyism. This disaster conference seems like a direct inspiration for the first act.
The CIA and its many front organizations promoted the “Non-Communist Left” and targeted former Communists like Arthur Koestler and Jackson Pollock. To me, this sounded similar to the way federal police agencies cultivate criminal informants. Both men considered themselves communists who rejected Stalin in the 1930s, and the agency figured, “Who better to fight the communists than the communists?” (62). Agents admit that some artists receiving funding might not have even known about it. We’ll return to dark money’s mysterious role in art funding…
Saunders is concerned with the funding of “freedom and liberty” cultural warfare. She remarks that the Rockefeller family bankrolled the New York Museum of Modern Art from its inception. Nelson Rockefeller even called it “Mommy’s Museum” (258). MoMA was crucial in canonizing American Abstract Impressionism, America’s first “true” art style.
The agency men saw potential in abstract expressionism. There was power in the splotchy globs of paint. One conservative reactionary claimed expressionist paintings hide secret codes, “If you know how to read them, modern paintings will disclose the weak spots in US fortifications, and such crucial constructions as Boulder Dam.” (253). Abstract expressionism was a direct reputation to Soviet social realism. The museums insisted these paintings looked fresh, new, and free, and this uninhibited expression made the Soviet paintings, usually depicting people at work, look corny and boring.
The “Abstract expressionism as CIA Op” has made its way into mainstream publications. And a popular counterargument is, how would paintings win a war? Saunders demonstrates that it wasn’t only paintings. Instead, every artistic medium became an ideological battleground with shadowy funding. WhoPaid the Piper? Pretty much everybody. Music and Radio Free Europe, Hollywood movies, literary prizes like the Nobel Prize for Literature, and every cultural product helped manufacture consent for America’s empire.
Who Paid the Piper? is an excellent book. Make sure to get the British edition, Who Paid The Piper, and **not the censored American edition, Cultural Cold War.
But covertly, I brought up this book for a reason. Did all these art spies go away after the fall of the USSR? Did they go online? What happened after the end of history?
Let us consider Ai Weiwei the “Most Dangerous Man in China.”
Comics
Zodiac: A Graphic Memoir
By Ai Weiwei (Subject) | Elettra Stamboulis (Writer) | Gianluca Costantini (Illustrator)
Penguin Random House, 2024
Zodiac | Credit: Penguin Random House
According to Western media sources, Ai Weiwei is one of Earth’s most accomplished living artists. Every article stresses that Weiwei is very popular and known for speaking truth to power by standing up to the repressive regime of the People’s Republic of China.
Weiwei claims Chinese authorities imprisoned him for 81 days for speaking truth to power. Chinese authorities claim they arrested Weiwei for not paying his taxes. Something strange is happening with the artist’s money. Credit Suisse closed his Swiss account, and he also claimed closed accounts in Germany and Hong Kong because he criticized these governments. Interesting…
Ai Weiwei describes himself as “an activist for freedom.” That’s a noble pursuit, and I’m thankful for my freedom of speech, which lets me say that I think Ai Weiwei’s art is thinly veiled propaganda, not to mention lazy, dumb, and obnoxious.
I don’t recommend Ai Weiwei’s new graphic memoir, Zodiac, but it did lead me to look up the artist’s strange career.
Weiwei grew up in a Chinese labor camp with his family. His father, Ai Qing, was a political exile and a poet with many pen names. While Ai Qing was a member of the Communist Party through the revolution, during the 1959 “Anti-Rightist Campaign,” he was expelled. Mao purged the party of everyone who advocated capitalism because he thought these people were a threat to the state. Ai Qing was sentenced to scrubbing toilets. Curiously, this labor camp allowed the prisoners to have jobs and live with their families, which sounds much better and more humane than an American prison.
When Mao died, China embraced capitalism, and Ai Qing was welcomed back into the party and made the president of the Chinese Writers Association. According to Zodiac, Ai Qing’s poems are printed in children’s textbooks today. Of course, the graphic memoir doesn’t mention why his father was expelled from the party. He was writing against communism.
If all history is family history, the son of a political exile capitalist poet would have no choice but to become an iconoclast, a multi-media performance artist with strange financial backing.
For a guy whose dad cleaned toilets, Weiwei could attend four expensive New York universities. The artist discusses his time in New York, hanging out with art scene icons like Alan Ginsberg and getting influenced by Andy Warhol.
In 1986, one of the first Ai Weiwei pieces to receive acclaim was “Condom Raincoat.” I find it vague and bizarre. Somehow, gluing a condom on a rain jacket was meant to bring awareness to the AIDS crisis.
“This raincoat has a hole near the waist which is covered with a condom. The work is intended to describe the AIDS crisis as Ai saw it in New York City” | Credit: Wikipedia
Weiwei lived in America for a decade, from 1983 to 1993. After this, he returned to China and cared for his elderly father. Surely coincidentally, this is right after the collapse of the USSR, when the global balance of power was shifting, and America was assessing new threats to trade dominance.
In 1995, Weiwei “made” arguably his most controversial work and, quite possibly, the dumbest and laziest piece of his career. Consider, “Han Jar Overpainted with Coca-Cola Logo” (1995).
Weiwei stenciled a Coca-Cola logo on Han pottery over 2000 years old. It’s dated between 206 B.C. and 9 A.D. See, it’s a profound statement about how consumerism overruns history by ruining a cultural artifact. He took this idea further and smashed another priceless vase.
AI WEIWEI, DROPPING A HAN DYNASTY URN, 1995 | Credit: Guggenheim
Why would someone do this? Isn’t this just historical vandalism? Why did Western museums exhibit this work? Why is it any different from the way ISIS destroys art? Here are Weiwei’s unsatisfying explanations in Zodiac.
A page from Zodiac, by Elettra Stamboulis (Writer) | Gianluca Costantini (Illustrator) | Ai Weiwei (Subject) | Credit: Penguin Random House
Around this time, Weiwei began work on “Study of Perspective,” a series of photographs from 1995-2003 where the artist gives stuff the middle finger. He flips off cities, buildings, and cultural artifacts from around the world.
This man is praised as one of the world’s most controversial and thought-provoking artists. Really? Are the blurry travel pictures flipping off a painting meant to evoke laughter and derision? It’s like if Kid Rock started shooting on film. Both these photos and the defaced pottery culminated in “FUCK OFF!” an exhibition of the Chinese avant-garde that seemingly featured a lot of gore photography.
Around 2005, Weiwei started doing stuff that got him in trouble. He blogged for Sina. If you read about China, you’ve probably heard of Weibo, a social media app like Blogspot or Twitter, and Weibo acquired Sina. So…anybody could make an account on this website. I cannot verify if Weiwei’s blog differed from the average account profile or if he was invited especially to start blogging on it. Eventually, he was banned from the platform and switched to Twitter, claiming to tweet up to eight hours daily (huh).
2007 brings Weiwei’s Fairy Tale, a 2007 performance piece that, from **what I can tell, was buying Berlin vacations for 1100 Chinese factory workers. Framed as “freedom of expression,” obviously, coordinated vacations for impoverished workers was a provocation against the Chinese government. How would Germany react if China invited migrants living in Germany to tour Beijing? Or America, if migrants in Texas came back from Shanghai?
Sina banned Weiwei for reporting on a 2008 8.0 megaton earthquake that struck Sichuan. The artist as a reporter, too, eh? That’s unusual. The earthquake killed over 68,000 people and left another 4 million people homeless. Weiwei believed the Chinese government was to blame for responding and preparing for this natural disaster. In 2009, Weiwei published leaked classified documents on his blog, claiming the local government cut corners to build a school where over 5000 children died.
Weiwei claims China censored these posts, and I believe China censors media that threaten government leaders. But so does America. So does every government in history. Perhaps there was corruption that led to faulty building planning, but also, as COVID-19 showed us, disasters are great opportunities for insurgent narratives to sew government distrust.
Skeptics of modern art say, “My two-year-old could make that.” Usually, that gives a two-year-old way too much credit, but in this case, I believe a two-year-old could spread a big pile of sunflower seeds on the floor. Perhaps the child wouldn’t know to say the seeds represent Chinese people.
Around this time, in 2011, Weiwei was jailed for 81 days in China, allegedly for thought crimes. He said things that were too controversial for the Chinese government. The Chinese government claims he didn’t pay his taxes.
After his release, he took sanctuary in Germany and spent years devoted to “understanding the migrant crisis” and traveling to hot zones in 41 countries for a documentary. His exhibit “Law of the Journey” focused on migrants. Of all the artist’s pieces, this is my favorite. His writing on migrants is elegant and based on first-hand experience. He even blames “the West” for the global migrant crisis, and even though “America” is more accurate, this is closer to truth than the condom jacket.
A picture of the “Law of the Journey” by Ai Weiwei | Credit: Collater.ai
Fast forward to today. Weiwei has embraced AI art with a cornball-titled exhibit, “AI vs. Ai.” In the Guardian, Weiwei claimed that any art AI can copy is meaningless and that learning to paint realistically is “worthless.”
I enjoy political art, but not tepid propaganda. So much of Weiwei’s work equates transgression with freedom (like flipping off a building or breaking artifacts). The notion is that craft and dedication aren’t worth pursuing, and art should just be some ephemeral experience that makes the viewer say, “Huh?” This ridiculous insistence that the only art worth making pisses off governments (except never America).
This week, Weiwei’s graphic memoir was released. The author tells the conventional story of his life. This graphic memoir is undoubtedly the least exciting thing about Weiwei. Like much of the artists’ work, it seems like assistants made this book. How is this a memoir if Weiwei didn’t write it? It’s a biography with too much oversight from the subject! I dislike Gianluca Costantini’s illustrations: dull, flat, line drawings without shading or depth that evoke coloring book pages. The Chinese Zodiac structures the story as a vague gesture to Chinese culture but not much deeper than the back of the lunch buffet placemat.
Weiwei explains his life in stories to his son and considers his life, art, and ideology of “freedom.” It leaves much to speculation because the artist moves through each subject quickly and offers platitudes instead of reflection. Now, for the real heads, there’s a $275 deluxe edition with a signed print…of an illustration that Ai Weiwei did not illustrate. I can’t decipher that signature, but Weiwei did not draw that picture.
Zodiac Deluxe Edition | Credit: Penguin Random House
I should commend the artist for opening up my perspective to how art and propaganda function in the 21st century, but perhaps different from how the artist intended.
Pile of the Week
And finally, here’s this week’s pile. I am the skeleton angel living on a cloud, filling my head with strange and paranoid truths.
Pile of the Week, 1/23/24 – Credit: the author
Expect this newsletter on Tuesday now! Yes, I know it’s Thursday. And you can even subscribe by email with Beehiiv.
Considering occulted fraternities in America by reviewing true crime, Among the Bros, and the comic Fraternity
Let’s initiate ourselves into a clandestine brotherhood of reading piles. This week’s reviews consider how fraternities harness rituals and drugs to influence reality.
Books
Among the Bros | By Max Marshall | Harper | 2023
Among the Bros By Max Marshall | Credit: Harper
So that’s what a frat’s like! In his 2023 true crime expose, Max Marshall details a 2016 drug bust at the College of Charleston to reveal how fraternities function within drug-dealing economies.
The story centers around two brothers of the Kappa Alpha fraternity, Mikey Schmidt and Robert Liljeberg. Both boys rushed Kappa Alpha but went on divergent paths. Rob looked like the all-American boy: A student and a fraternity president. Secretly, he loved to party and move weight. Our lovable fuckup protagonist, Mikey, looks like a suspect. A college dropout and a chauffeur at a famous club, he developed supply connections within the Atlanta trap scene. The two boys shared a passion for dealing drugs in felony weights.
Frats seem like the perfect place for drug dealing. They’re closed markets with high demand. Customers aren’t price savvy and took public oaths to keep secrets from each other. The Fratboy kingpins primarily sold three drugs: weed, cocaine, and benzodiazepines (Xanax, benzos). They ordered powered benzodiazepine on the dark web and pressed it into pills at rented AirBnBs, then traded pills for weed or coke with other dealers. They distributed these products through frat houses across the south with a pyramid structure of dealers.
In the background is the collectively accepted insanity of fraternities. Every year, people die gruesome deaths in a hazing ritual. The organizations exist to enforce segregation. Marshall points out that the founders of Kappa Alpha saw themselves as the youth wing of the Ku Klux Klan. He also remarks how almost every president and business executive is a fraternity alumnus. What seems like a problem of childish excess is a symptom of a much deeper problem. Fraternities are the incubators for America’s highest institutions.
The story only gets crazier, with high drama, deep betrayals, lengthy prison sentences, and a surprising amount of dead people. Even Waka Flocka Flame makes an appearance. Among The Bros was an entertaining read that implies horrifying conclusions.
Comics
Fraternity | Jon Ellis (Writer) + Hugo Petrus (Illustrator) | Humanoids | 2022
Fraternity by Jon Ellis (Writer) + Hugo Petrus (Illustrator) | Credit: Humanoids
Frats are secret societies. Fraternity, a 2022 comic from Humanoids, takes this to its heightened conclusion: are frats covens of wizards summoning Satan?
The comic follows two lifelong friends, Wyatt (Black) and Jake (White); they go to college together, and immediately, a fraternity starts using Satanic ritual magic to ensnare Jake. How does the magic work, exactly? Consider the ritual of the frat party.
A page from Fraternity by Jon Ellis (writer) and Hugo Petrus (illustrator) | Credit: Humanoids
Old mansions exist across American college campuses. In those mansions, young men invite over strangers, do secret hand signs, and exchange libations. Sure, this is “just like any party” except for the paddles, the exclusive sub-rooms, and the tendency to consume so much poison one blacks out and forgets everything.
Odd. Now, consider the initiation rites. The men enter a room and do secret rituals, promising always to work to progress the fraternity’s goals. These rituals are passed on from generation to generation. The practices often involve participants doing cruel, humiliating sexual acts.
A page from Fraternity by Jon Ellis (writer) and Hugo Petrus (illustrator) | Credit: Humanoids
The magic must sort of work, right? Why else would a secret brotherhood commit to doing the same silly rituals every autumn? The Sorority Sister Whore of Babylon, laid over this 24-panel grid, suggests the deeply sexualized nature of the Greek system. Sex becomes a means of control and mental programming. Consecrate rituals to Greek deities with sex magic.
A page from Fraternity by Jon Ellis (writer) and Hugo Petrus (illustrator) | Credit: Humanoids
Is there any way for your average goddamn independent to resist these demonic forces? Well, it’s a Humanoids comic, so we must harness some demons, too. Wyatt ends up making friends with Antaura, a God of Headaches. He’s not as powerful as the weird, Cthuluian Frat gods, but hey, headaches suck.
A page from Fraternity by Jon Ellis (writer) and Hugo Petrus (illustrator) | Credit: Humanoids
Fraternity is a fun, violent, short read on Hoopla and Kindle Prime. I hope to see more from debut writer Jon Ellis, and I have enjoyed watching illustrator Hugo Petrus make comics with Marvel and DC.
Pile of the Week
A pile of rocks with a cow’s skull on it. I found this picture in the New York Public Library Image Archive
Here is a pile of rocks with a cow’s skull on it. I found this picture in the New York Public Library Image Archive by searching “Book Pile.” This week, the coveted Pile of the Week Award goes to NYPL’s digital archives! Look for your strange images here.
Merry Christmas! Happy Solstice! Io Saturnaia! While I no longer participate in Catholic mass for Christ, I enjoy Christmas as an idea, a ritual, with all its pomp and bombast.
But I can’t help but notice the darkness within Christmas’ heart. Perhaps you feel a lurking Holiday dread, reader. Fear of large crowds, overstimulation, and rejection from the tribe.
This post is for you. Lean into the dread and let us discuss the horrors of Christmas.
Books
The Christmas Beastery Credit: Illustrator John Kenn Mortensen | Publisher: Fantagraphics
The Christmas Beastery Illustrator John Kenn Mortensen | Writer Benni Bodker Fantagraphics, 2023
This week, I considered the Christmas Beastery, which brilliantly illustrates Christmas horror. A beastery is a collection of monsters, and Christmas has a surprising amount of them. Naughty children, beware: Christmas is a time for PUNISHMENT!
Mortensen’s pen and ink illustrations use shadows to hint at an inescapable void: darkness under the bed where monsters live. Each line is used to etch ancient demons that cannot die, surviving the centuries to terrify children.
Santa Claus has a barely concealed eerieness, watching us sleep, judging the children, and forcing his elven slaves to make toys. That horror is literalized in Krampus, the most popular Christmas monster with his big-budget Hollywood adaptation (sellout). I love how Mortensen represents the many regionalizations of Krampus.
Krampus, Credit: Illustrator John Kenn Mortensen | Publisher: Fantagraphics
But there are more monsters I’ve never heard of, like the Icelandic Grýla, a gigantic troll sorcerous who carries 15 sacks on her tail to carry children’s bodies to her cave. A Christmas feast!
Grýla, Credit: Illustrator John Kenn Mortensen | Publisher: Fantagraphics
Or the French Père Fouettaro: he’s Father Whipper! He hides in the shadows and beats children with a cane. I find this illustration deeply unsettling.
Père Fouettaro, Credit: Illustrator John Kenn Mortensen | Publisher: Fantagraphics
The beastery even includes little monsters, like the Kallikantzaroi, little werewolves that come out on Christmas, squeeze through the chimney, and steal all the food.
Kallikantzaroi, Credit: Illustrator John Kenn Mortensen | Publisher: Fantagraphics
Even The Wild Hunt, from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, has a Christmas connotation, where undead riders on black horses with red hot eyes storm the town, eat the food, and torture the children. Sounds like a Davos Conference!
The Wild Hunt, Credit: Illustrator John Kenn Mortensen | Publisher: Fantagraphics
This book is amazing. If you like Krampus, folklore, pen and ink illustration, or if you are a TRPG dungeon master writing a Christmas campaign, this book is for you. I read it from the library on Hoopla, but I will buy a copy.
All I Want For Christmas is Utahraptor By Lola Faust 2023, Independently Published
All I Want For Christmas Is Utahraptor, Credit: Lola Faust
Shifting gears into Mormon Raptor Romance. I saw this pitch-perfect Harlequin cover parody and had to read it. I stayed reading about the strange world where humans and dinosaurs live in harmony and sometimes mate together, an anti-Jurassic Park. As you’d expect, the steamy descriptions are very amusing or likely very erotic to some readers.
Consider this Christmas Kiss,
A passage from All I Want For Christmas Is Utahraptor, Lola Faust
Of course, most of humanity rejects Raptor Romance. They cannot admit the truth: love is love. But Holly Hottie and Rocky Raptor prove the bigots wrong.
Lola Faust has published a dozen more dino-romances in case you try this one and find out it’s you need more. A perfect XXXmas read with an 8.5/10 heat level fireplace.
Film
A scene from Eyes Wide Shut, Credit: Warner Brothers, Flim.ai
Eyes Wide Shut | Dir. Stanley Kubrick | Warner Brothers
My favorite holiday movie is Eyes Wide Shut, wrongly read as a Christmas movie. The rituals therein predate Christ. Eyes Wide Shut is a Saturnalia movie, just as Christmas is the Christianisation of Saturnalia, Rome’s feast to Saturn, the God of Agriculture.
Every twelfth month in Rome, “slaves [had] license to revile their lords.” In the film, consider Bill is the slave, and when he sees the orgy, he’s reviling his lords. In 217 BC, the Phoenicians conquered the Romans at the Battle of Lake Trasimene, and the Romans adopted Greek rituals into the holiday, particularly cult sacrifices to Baal. That’s what the cloak people are doing in their Long Island mansion. We sublimate brutal Pagan holidays in Christ, just as our Puritanical overlords kept what the patricians do secret from us plebs. An Eyes Wide Shut party is a modern invocation of the leader’s urge to meet under candlelight, wear cloaks, and do sex-magik-murder.
Some allege Kubrick got killed for making this movie. Maybe so. Yet a quarter-century after release, billionaire sex cults are common. Multiple presidents and Congressmen were probably at that orgy party in the movie. The Epstein case opened all our eyes wide shut: we know the truth, but there’s nothing we can do about it.
I enjoyed Hot Star’s recent analysis of Eyes Wide Shut, where he speculates which lines were overdubbed by the studio and why (spoiler: Prince Andrew).
Pile of the Week: The Boxes in My Parents’ Basement
In my parents’ basement are boxes of books I like well enough to keep but not display in my piled-pilled apartment. Piles of Vertigo comics, alt-lit, David Foster Wallace, book-noted literary classics that are indisputably good, but why would I display a $0.99 copy of Candide covered in highlighter? Why do I keep them? To see how my brain develops over time is what I tell myself each week as I write and consider my reading piles.
It’s buying season. A perfect thing to buy a lover is a book. They don’t need to read it to enjoy it; they can put it in a pile and look at it, and by sheer proximity, they will absorb its wisdom.
Novels
Alice Knott by Blake Butler — Credit: Riverhead Books, Penguin
Alice Knott By Blake Butler 2020, Riverhead Books
Alice Knottis about burning priceless works of art. Remember those videos where extremists destroy art?Alice Knott wonders what would happen if masses of people started destroying priceless art. She films it, slashes paintings, bakes them in pizza ovens, and blows them up with fireworks. At the beginning of the book, Alice Knott is dissociative, angry about the vandalism, claiming to be a victim. But we learn that in a dissociative fugue, she remembers who torched all the paintings. She did! And doing this untethers her from herself and reality.
The vandalism inspires copycats to go into museums and stab paintings or smash statues. Liberatory burning commences among the masses. Paintings are an asset for rich families to transfer wealth generationally. Museums codify values, aesthetics, and ideals by displaying the empire’s plundered wealth. When the priceless works burn and shatter, systems shock, states lose control, and people start having new ideas untethered from the past and creating something new. Intentional destruction is a form of creation.
Blake Butler, the author, has previously considered this idea of how burning art imbues new meaning with his novel Scorch Atlas. This book encouraged readers to burn after reading and even had a launch where readers could buy pre-destroyed, burned copies, just a bag of ash. The book, too, is about finding a crumbling book in an apocalyptic world. (source: this great video about Ergodic Literature).
In AliceKnott, we get glimpses of the future world without art. The narrator describes a commercial for a dementia drug, where a spider basks in pharmaceutical goo absorbed through its skin. The world lacks storytelling technologies and vocabularies to make sense of their existence. It seems like the only art left is Alice’s videos. But the narrator doesn’t report societal collapse, mass agony, or even loss of electricity.
The author claims inspiration from The Crying of Lot 49, a favorite novel of mine. I see the similarity. Imagine Odepia won the auction at the end of the last chapter, and inside the lot was a collection of priceless paintings; this is her late-life crisis. Yet despite his fixation on flames and burning earth, Butler has more optimism for the future than Mr. Pynchon. The book is not anti-fire; it’s not a warning against fire; I read it as welcoming the oncoming fires. There’s optimism about starting anew.
From what I can tell, the only way to read Alice Knott is in hardcover, which I feel adds to its mystique and impermanence. It has no e-book, paperback, or purchasable audiobook — although I got the audio version from the library. A strange, thought-provoking novel for fans of fires, art, and transcending one’s self.
The Night Stalker (The Kolchak Novel) by Jeff Rice 1974, Moonstone
A journalist teams up with the Los Vegas police to fight a vampire, and the book inspires a TV show that spawns a genre (X-Files, Buffy, Monster of the Week). I watched the show years ago and always meant to check out the Kolchak novel. Unpublished until the show came out and was long out of print until Moonstone Publishing brought it back (and kept it easily readable with an ebook and audio version). The novel is surprisingly good. As an urban fantasy novel, it’s an early example that hits all the troupes. It offers a detailed portrait of Vegas, an interesting vampire, and mythological and historical researcher, culminating in an action-packed investigation with a tragic twist.
The way Jeff Rice, the author, metafictionally inserts himself into the manuscript, claiming Kolchak is a real guy who actually sent him this authentic diary about vampires, is a fun nod to Dracula, a novel that’s a fake diary claiming to be real. Kolchak is also a deeply 1970s character, a paranoid detective drawing paranormal conclusions, a grownup Scooby Doo. Consider the context of a fictional character investigating a “Night Stalker” when Richard Ramerez, the real media dubbed Night Stalker, was actually killing people, and the “Serial Killer” narrative was on the news and in the theaters with slasher movies at the theaters and less than a decade after the Manson murders. In this fictional story, the private investigator teams up with cops and wonders if these serial killers are all monsters and demons. Kolchak teams up with the local police department to reveal the vampire, but they burn him. He gets fired and has to leave Vegas with a hitman on his tail. The police totally burn him. I wonder when Kolchak will inevitably get rebooted and probably investigate Bigfoot school shooters and Mothman terrorist cells.
Regarding comic books, I have one golden rule: the pictures better look really good. Nature’s Labyrinth succeeds. Its story is troupe-y; a bunch of people have to kill each other on a murder island, like the Hunger Games, Battle Royal, The Most Dangerous Game, or …And Then There Were None.
A two page spread from Nature’s Labyrinth — Credit: Bayleigh Underwood illustrator, Mad Cave Studios
The setup offers strange, action-packed stuff to happen. Lady twin martial artists attack our hero, and then a few pages later, they blow up for some reason. Our hero immediately concludes, “Who cares?”
A page from from Nature’s Labyrinth — Credit: Bayleigh Underwood, illustrator, Mad Cave Studios
A page from from Nature’s Labyrinth — Credit: Bayleigh Underwood illustrator, Mad Cave Studios
The art sells the over-the-top zaniness and graphic gore. Consider how this page plays with a nine-panel grid to show a hero falling into a bottomless pit, submersing the bottom three panels in darkness.
Amazing art on top of pure pulp. Comics live! This is the first book I’ve checked out by Mad Cave Studios, but it won’t be the last. The trade paperback comes out on December 19th. Thank you, Mad Cave Studios and NetGalley, for the ARC copy.
Pile of the Week
Year end pile compiling and a sneak peek at my Favorite Books of the Year post coming out this week.
A pile of some favorite reads from 2023 — Credit: the author
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The days grow colder, and the piles grow larger. This week, the piles bring mass protests, big dinosaurs, God mascots, and the debut of a new pile: movies!
Books
Protest Flag in Hong Kong from which the book takes its title — Image Credit: Ill Will Press
If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution By Vincent Bevins Public Affairs, 2023
Between 2010 and 2020, history saw “the biggest protests” on the scale of attendees. These demonstrations brought more people into the streets than ever before, and the mass demonstrations were streamed online. Yet afterward, something strange happened: repressive, right-wing governments came to power. Bolsonaro in Brazil, Trump in America, and Johnson in Britain are just three. How could both these things happen in sequence? Citizens rejected their governments and elected even worse, more repressive governments.
Bevins’ new book seeks the answer. He considers mass protests in the decade and interviews the people who planned and participated in them. While the US and Britain are mentioned, most of the analysis is on countries in the “Global South.” Bevins was a reporter in Brazil, so the story is centered around Brazil, considering the red tide, the election of Lula, and the subsequent rejection and election of Bolsonaro.
The book’s analysis considers the “Arab Spring” protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and Libya and the vastly different protest outcomes in these countries. The 2018 Hong Kong protests and its cooptation by the Trump State Department to sew anti-Chinese sentiment. Ukraine’s history leads to a critical view of the current conflict; after the fall of the U.S.S.R., right-wing military groups co-opted protest energy and won governmental power. For Ukrainian nationalists, armed conflict against Russia has always been the goal. The limits of representational democracy are also considered with Boric and Chile. Bevins’ first book, The Jakarta Method (2020), considers coups throughout the 20th century; If We Burn considers evidence of US State Department intervention in Libya, Syria, and Bahrain.
Considering these examples, Bevins draws conclusions for more effective political actions (ch.20). Power does not exist in a vacuum; when one system is displaced, another system finds its place. Organization is the key to winning power. The rightwing groups in Ukraine were already organized, meaning they had systems for electing leaders, a defined message, and they identified local leaders. This allowed them to win state elections. The book proscribes justice activists to organize into democratic structures. One might call this Leninism (but Marx said to do this too). He even suggests in a vague, general sense that the 2010s were protests against our phones, protests against the violence we saw captured on digital video. Who showed us those videos?
This is essential reading for international politics, political activism, and history. It’s out of the book’s scope, but I felt the analysis has made society fully reckoned with the role of billionaires in this decade, specifically in these mass protests. The narrative alludes to oligarchs who take advantage of the crisis and get richer, lurking in the background like vampires. Last month, I wrote about The Bill Gates Problem (2023) and how Gates uses international “aid” foundations to influence foreign and domestic policy for African countries. Surely, he could benefit from capitalizing on discontent. The Chaos Machine (2022) considers the technical role that social media, particularly Facebook, played in some of these mass protests. My point: billionaire capitalism might imply billionaires hold more influence than entire state governments. I’m sure we’ll continue to see the wealthy feud and consolidate wealth throughout the 2020s.
If We Burn is on my shortlist for favorite books of 2023.
More Better Deals By Joe R. Lansdale Mullholand Books, 2020
A smoldering tale of love, murder, and racial passing set in 1960s Texas. Ed Edwards is a used car salesman. He’s White passing, in a racist town, and breaks local law when he sells cars to Black people. His life is bleak until he goes to repossess a Cadillac owned by Nancy, the sultry drive-in theater owner. Well, really, her husband owns it, and he’s a deadbeat, so they hatch a scheme to kill him and cash in the life insurance policy! There’s gore, a ransom, jealousy, passion, and an unhappy ending. A treat for fans Joe R. and James M.
Comics
Panel from Of Thunder & Lightning by Kimberly Wang — Credit: Silver Sprocket Press
Of Thunder & Lightning By Kimberly Wang Silver Sprocket, 2023
A debut comic about battling God mascots with incredible artwork. A fight between the Kabbahlah’s Sefirot tree versus the Norse Yggdrasil.
Page from Of Thunder & Lightning by Kimberly Wang — Credit: Silver Sprocket Press
Wang’s fight choreography reminds me of Astro Boy, FLCL, Akira, and Dragon Ball Z, with dynamic paneling and page layouts and the use of white space that makes the scale seem bigger.
Page from Of Thunder & Lightning by Kimberly Wang — Credit: Silver Sprocket Press
The characters remind me of Disney’s Pinocchio (1940), cute, emotive and elastic. And the colors! Two-toned fans rejoice because the red deepens the landscape and heightens the characters’ emotions.
Page from Of Thunder & Lightning by Kimberly Wang — Credit: Silver Sprocket Press
Admittedly, the plot is confusing, so I appreciated it when the characters turn chibi and explain what’s happening. Perfect for rereading. Here’s a link to buy it!
Page from Of Thunder & Lightning by Kimberly Wang — Credit: Silver Sprocket Press
Movies
Godzilla chases a boat in Godzilla Minus One (2023) — Credit Toho Studios
Godzilla Minus Zero (2023) is a remake of Godzilla (1954) that directly confronts Japan’s fate after World War II. A kamikaze pilot fights Godzilla. This is the perfect premise for a Godzilla remake, and it’s fully realized. The empathic portrait of our cowardly hero and the firebombed rubble of Tokyo build into the perfect motivation to kill Godzilla. And my favorite character, Godzilla, looks incredible. She’s present for the entire movie with highly detailed rendered models that harken back to the 50s and 60s designs. Glorious!
So, what does Godzilla really mean in this context? In the 1954 film, she seems to be an ancient consequence of using nuclear weapons. Her “atomic breath” is the literalization of dropping an atomic bomb, and Godzilla destroys Japan in the same way the Allies did. Yet in Godzilla Minus One, the monster is awake before the dropping of the atomic bomb. Perhaps the tests seen in Oppenheimer (2023) woke her up? A soldier claims Odo natives knew of Godzilla for centuries. Its presence kills deep-water fish. Of course, Japan does present itself as a victim of WWII when the historical truth is the country was an aggressor that tried to colonize China. Is Godzilla a reaction to colonialism? Does he come out of the ocean and eat colonizers? I hope so. One of the best Godzilla movies ever and a personal favorite of 2023.
Pile of the Week
This week’s pile goes to the books I got at Bart’s Books in Ojai, CA. Definitely my favorite outside bookstore. Some Wall Street mafia connections, 80s cyberpunk shorts, the next volume of a manga I’m reading, and a strange book about a criminal’s corpse that I intend to write about.
Io Saturnalia to you and yours!
My latest book pile from Bart’s Books in Ojai, CA — Credit: the author
On Wednesday, November 22nd, 2023, it will be sixty years since they shot Jack K! Kennedy is one of my reading obsessions, and I surround myself with many piles of books on the topic.
My haters claim this is proof of my insanity.
Yet more than half a century later, many people have no idea what happened on 11/22/1963 or why an American president was assassinated. This post doesn’t discuss who killed him. Instead, it asks why was he killed?
The JFK assassination is talked of in hushed tones, like God or the universe. The truth is that historians understand the general shape of the event. It’s not that complicated.
Six decades later, all will be revealedin this (long) blog post
The Classics
Here are three non-fiction books that explain why John F. Kennedy was assassinated and the consequences for American foreign policy. All three are well-sourced and conclude that JFK’s assassination wasn’t an accident.
JFK and the Unspeakable by James W. Douglass Touchstone, 2010
The author lays out his argument on the first page in the simplest possible terms:
On [America’s] behalf, at the height of the Cold War, John F. Kennedy risked committing the greatest crime in history, starting a nuclear war.
Before we knew it, he turned toward peace with the enemy who almost committed that crime with him [the USSR].
For turning to peace with [Russia], Kennedy was murdered by a power we cannot easily describe. Its unspeakable reality can be traced, suggested, recognized, and pondered… (ix).
Or even simpler. Why was Kennedy killed? He didn’t want to escalate tension with Russia, but industry and military leaders wanted him to do so. JFK got in their way.
Here’s a timeline sketching some specifics:
April 1961 — The “Bay of Pigs,” a botched invasion of Cuba, almost started a nuclear war against Russia. This event is satirized in Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb.
1961–1963 — Kennedy realized this could have killed millions of people. CIA director Allen Duelles planned the invasion, so JFK fired Duelles. JFK advocated a measured approach to intervening in “3rd world countries,” meaning countries that weren’t decidedly capitalist or communist.
1961-1963 — At the same time, a group of rich and powerful people, including Allen Dulles and the CIA, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, oil drillers, capitalist industrialists, mafia cartels, and corrupt union leadership like the Teamsters’ Jimmy Hoffa, all independently had reasons to dislike Kennedy. How they conspired together (evidence shows they did) is debatable. The military and oil industry realized Kennedy would not govern in their interests to protect American trade hegemony. He would not “fight Communism” and sabotage the USSR or countries with socialist governments. He got in the way.
11/22/1963 — This group conspired to assassinate John Kennedy. Then, they assassinated his brother, Robert Kennedy. After numerous failed attempts, they finally capped JFK on 11/22/1963 and RFK on 6/5/1968.
See, it’s not that complicated. Much of the bunk analysis on the Kennedy assassination seeks to litigate who killed him and how they specifically did it, with or without Oswald. What’s more consequential and more straightforward to prove is the numerous reasons why Kennedy was killed.
The book’s title refers to the concept of “The Unspeakable.” The violence states commit to maintaining economic control.
Douglass further explains the Unspeakable in the context of the Cold War,
In our Cold War history, the Unspeakable was the void in our government’s covert-action doctrine of “plausible deniability,” sanctioned by the June 18, 1948, National Security Council directive NSC 10/2. Under the green light to assassinate national leaders, overthrow governments, and lie to cover up any trace of accountability — all for the sake of promoting U.S. interests and maintaining our nuclear-backed dominance over the Soviet Union and other nations.
JFK’s assassination could be understood as anti-democratic aggression coming home. JFK didn’t listen to key leaders in the military-industrial complex, so they decided he needed to die.
JFK’s assassination could be understood as America’s anti-democratic aggression coming home.
The book sources over 2000 footnotes to make this argument, ranging from public archives, FOIA’d FBI archives, interviews, the Warren Commission, and more.
Touchstone, a division of Simon and Schuster, published it. The author is a respected Catholic peace activist.
My point is that any writer arguing the idea Lee Harvey Oswald “acted alone” is arguing irrationally, ignoring well-documented evidence to the contrary, and selling a false narrative for a specific reason. We’ll see this in action when surveying contemporary releases.
This book is affordable and available on Hoopla and Amazon Audible Plus, and you can borrow a copy from the free library on Archive.org.
Dallas ’63 By Peter Dale Scott Open Road Media (Reprint), 2015
Since the 2016 Trump Election, the idea of “The Deep State” has been relegated to right-wing discourse. But the concept was invented by a far-left, pacifist poet and historian, Peter Dale Scott, to explain the Kennedy assassination. In his book Dallas ’63, he argues why the assassination can be understood as a structural deep event, a framework for other significant events in 20th-century history. He writes,
By “structural deep events” I mean events that are never fully understood, arise out of ongoing covert processes, have political consequences that enlarge covert government, and are subsequently covered up by demonstrable omissions and falsifications in historic records. Here the assassination in Dallas can be compared to later structural deep events, notably Watergate and 9/11.
Let’s break down this definition: what is a Structural Deep Event?
“Events that are never fully understood” — An event that is impossible to understand fully is essential to a “deep event.”
“Arise out of ongoing covert processes” — The agencies and businesses that did this still exist, and it is still in their interest to obscure the actual reasons behind this event.
“have political consequences that enlarge covert government,” — There are many consequences. An overarching consequence of post-1945 deep events is that the American military-industrial complex allocated more resources and got a bigger yearly budget.
“ …and are subsequently covered up by demonstrable omissions and falsifications in historic records” — 60 years after the event, the assassination is “covered up” by hyper-focus on Lee Harvey Oswald and the day of the murder. It omits CIA and FBI involvement and the reasons why rich businessmen wanted Kennedy dead.
“Here the assassination in Dallas can be compared to later structural deep events, notably Watergate and 9/11.” — Some of the same people involved with the JFK assassination were involved with the Watergate break-in and the response to the 9/11 attacks. This is why understanding the JFK assassination is vital if a reader wants to understand history after 1945.
Structural deep events affect how states govern and how resources get distributed. It takes nuance to understand the reasons for JFK’s assassination, and that nuance reveals how global society has operated under American hegemony since 1945.
The historical blindness to JFK would obscure countless other historical events, like the downfall of the USSR and the destabilization of Africa and South America.
This book is excellent. It’s $3 on Kindle from the Forbidden Bookshelf series, and you can borrow a copy for free from the free library on Archive.org.
Albarelli takes the argument a step further and claims the JFK assassination was a coup. Rightwing elements in America overthrew a popular, democratically elected leader who favored liberalism, government oversight, international restraint, and democracy. Here’s the introduction explaining the book’s thesis:
“Esteemed historians have argued that November 22 was a “systemic adjustment” more than a coup. Albarelli makes the case that the assassination was indeed a coup d’état by demonstrating that among the planners and perpetrators were mutinous elements within US intelligence, military ranks, and industry who held immense power and influence sufficient to overturn the democratic election of John F. Kennedy and get away with it. He presents persuasive evidence — much of it ignored or misunderstood previously — to prove that the assassination cabal, including holdovers from Hitler’s Third Reich and Texasbased powers, passed deadly judgment on Kennedy’s platform, which at its core was a commitment to full democracy on a global scale.” (xiii, Roadmap)
Astute readers will see similarities between 11/22/1963 and a right-wing American coup attempt on 01/06/2021.
Or was January 6th a structural deep event? Can it be both?
This gets to the larger truths of these events. The forces that assassinated Kennedy didn’t go away; in fact, they only became more powerful. Structural deep events increased in frequency in the 21st century.
Albarelli goes for the throat and convincingly argues that assassinating JFK was a right-wing coup. America’s military killed the president and set the country on a course toward global fascism.
This book is new, so consider buying it or the audiobook and demand your librarian get a copy.
In Libra, DeLillo says the CIA did it. This is reductive, and the author probably wouldn’t put it that way, but if you read it, the novel blames the CIA. Is this novel disinformation? Yeah, probably. It treats fact like fiction and vice versa, adding more confusion and obfuscation to an already misunderstood yet deadly serious historical event.
But once we get over objecting to its very existence, there’s much to admire about the novel. Scholars write how it employs “historicity” to make sense of a complex event through fiction. It’s using the power of narrative to bring closure to the restless brain. It weaves in historical characters like Oswald and offers an empathetic portrait detailing all his strange proclivities and brush-ups with intelligence agencies.
But what’s left out?
Interestingly, while the CIA seems culpable, the novel doesn’t direct blame on Allan Dulles, the former Director of Central Intelligence. The man planned the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy fired him, he held a grudge about it, and Dulles arguably had the means, motive, and opportunity to kill the president. Few men have that, but more men held that grudge against JFK than all the other presidents except Lincoln, Garfield, or McKinnley (the other assassinated presidents).
The book mentions Dulles once, “The DCI, Allen Dulles, was spending the weekend in Puerto Rico, delivering a speech to a civic group on the subject ‘The Communist Businessman Abroad.’” That does sound like something he’d do.
The DCI is an acronym for the Director of Central Intelligence. The DCI is mentioned three times. Most significantly, the narrator considers the Director’s relationship to foreknowledge of extra-legal operations.
Knowledge was a danger, ignorance a cherished asset. In many cases, the DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence, was not to know important things. The less he knew, the more decisively he could function. It would impair his ability to tell the truth at an inquiry or a hearing, or in an Oval Office chat with the President…
Do we think the novel’s narrator is credible? I find it hard to believe a director of a top-down agency wouldn’t know about an assassination attempt on the president of his own country.
Notice specifically the three CIA agents are made up, or pseudonyms, probably composite characters. Is fictionalization a clever way to avoid a libel lawsuit? When one Googles the names, it’s honestly hard to distinguish that these are fake characters, made-up guys. Are these three characters written into the historical record, or does Google just suck?
Also, notice the 1988 publishing date. DeLillo knew a lot before the JFK Act and Oliver Stone’s film. Interesting… One could waste a lot of time trying to unravel what he made up.
American Tabloid By James Ellroy 1995, Alfred A. Knopf
The mass market edition of James Ellroy’s American Tabloid — Credit: Knopf, and Ebay
This is one of my all-time favorite novels. Is it disinformation? Yeah, probably, but it gets closer to the heart of the truth than DeLillo, even if it blows smoke on some false fires.
The novel says the FBI did it. Kinda. The author also employs three composite characters to show the players how the assassination came to be, interspersed with real characters like J. Edgar Hoover leading the FBI. Those characters include a hardened criminal and hired hand of Howard Hughes, a quiet but calculating FBI agent, and an FBI agent on Kennedy’s security detail (remember that now).
All three of these characters are obsessed with compartmentalization. Hiding what you know and how you know it from everybody, including yourself. This seems like how powerful people can justify their actions.
Did you know somebody tried to kill JFK in Chicago weeks before he got killed in Dallas?
It sure wasn’t Lee Harvey Oswald. This lends significant validity to the idea that it wasn’t just “one guy” who wanted the American president to die. A whole network of guys planned JFK’s assassination, and Dallas was the attempt that worked.
11/22/1963 By Stephen King 2011, Scribner
The mass market cover of Stephen King’s 11/22/63 — Credit: Scribner
Even Stephen King gets in on the fun with 11/22/1963. The prolific author has written over 65 novels, and this one is easily one of his worst. The Time Traveler’s Wife’s Husband sorta solves JFK’s murder, gets distracted, and falls in love. This novel is pure schmaltz. I suppose it’s significant because it proves “JFK fiction” is a subgenre, a trend, that sells books and offers more smoke to cover up the real fires.
“60th Anniversary” Books
With the above context, I survey some of the new books released for the anniversary.
The only new book I finished. The Enchanters is about the Enchantress, Marilyn Monroe, History’s Greatest Bait Girl. The second Freddy Otash novel, an existing historical person, a scumbag paparazzi private-eye blackmailer who spied on the stars and JFK, apparently, throughout the 1960s. This book investigates the relationship between Monroe and Kennedy and probably goes into whatever was in Otash’s archives that he always threatened to publish up until his death. Otash was a known liar, but he also loved photographic evidence. The conclusion is funny, climatic, and probably not true. It’s Ellroy’s best novel in a while, uniting all his strange passions, but I’m not sure it brings the reader any closer to the truth on the JFK assassination like American Tabloid. Still fun!
In my search for new releases, this one is the best bet. Poulgrain focuses on Dulles’ intervention in Indonesia and includes a timeline that dates back to the 1850s oil industry. Looks good.
The jury’s out on this new book about Jack Ruby. From the blurbs, I think the book will say Ruby was crazy, but it does grapple with his mafia and police ties. I’ll check this one out eventually.
The Final Witness is getting the most buzz. It’s by the bodyguard next to Kennedy on his detail. I suspect it will contain the least relevant information of any book on this list and has the highest likelihood of being disinformation. In the intro, Landis confesses he read nothing on the topic until 2013, picking up The Kennedy Detail, another account by secret service agents that doesn’t seriously consider the geopolitical context of the event. This is rehearsed and probably approved by the agency. The author claims he wrote the book to discredit the Zapruder film. Ah… I didn’t read the rest.
American Confidential: Uncovering the Bizarre Story of Lee Harvey Oswald By Deanne Stillman 2023, Melville House
The author studies Lee Harvey Oswald through his mother and sides with the Warren Commission. I don’t find this contribution useful at all. The argument pathologies historical figures to draw contemporary conclusions instead of considering populations, institutions, resources, or power.
Overemphasizing Oswald and his mother suggests that society should know a killer’s motive from his psychiatry, that the inner thoughts of a crazy person are paramount knowledge for us readers. Nope. Crazy’s crazy. And hey, Oswald’s mother didn’t commit a crime. Sure, she’s dead, and yeah, she probably was a bad parent, but why subject her life to intense scrutiny?
The author does this to argue that Lee Harvey Oswald was a toxic white male mass shooter. Conveniently ignoring, he only shot one guy who happened to be the dang president! The introduction directly compares LHO to a mass shooter. Stillman shoehorns the past to serve a contemporary argument. Even if we assume LHO “acted alone” and killed Kennedy, political assassinations have political contexts! Personal contexts are irrelevant. Oh, was Oswald’s mom sad that her crazy son went crazy? I’m sure she was! Investigating his mom is the same trauma porn impulse of Dr. Phil. This argument flattens the world into the same canned story: one lone wolf killer must be identical to another. Pay no attention to that hungry pack of wolves watching and manipulating the crazy wolf. I won’t be reading more of this.
Book Pile of the Week: Strangest Kennedy Crossovers
Let us end on something silly! I’ve found three very strange JFK Fan Fiction on Archive.org. I haven’t read any of them, and I am unlikely to do so, but they all look hilarious, and you can find them on Archive.org.
Sherlock Shoots JFK, From AIComicFactory.com
Sherlock Holmes, the Master Detective himself, finds out who did it! Or, did he do it? I have no idea. You’ll have to read to find out.
If anybody’s gonna find out who killed JFK, it’s LAPD Lieutenant Columbo! The LAPD is definitely not implicated in any Kennedy assassination plots; don’t even ask!
Welcome back to Piles. How are my homies in the northern hemisphere adjusting to the 5pm sunset? Cold days and long nights are better when you have piles of books to read.
Immerse yourself in piles.
Books
Considering two new releases this week, both are out on Tuesday, November 14th.One is critical of business, and the other is critical of the state.
The Bill Gates Problem by Tim Schwab — Credit: Metropolitan Books, Macmillian
The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire, By Tim Schwab Metropolitan Books (owned by Macmillian), 2023
An eye-opening read about the Gates Foundation. The world’s biggest charity functions nothing like a charity but a private equity investor or wealth management fund. Tim Schwab builds on his reporting for The Nation to make a compelling argument against the public relationships narrative spun by the Gates Foundation. In the 1990s, Gates branded himself as a technology whiz kid. Then, in the 2000s, he was pushed out of Microsoft and sued for monopolizing the tech industry. Schwab argues that Gates brought that same monopoly impulse to pharmaceuticals, charity, and international relations. He cites the peculiar statistic that since Gates started “giving his money away,” he’s only gotten richer. And yes, the book details Gates’ close, personal friendship with Jeffery Epstein! I felt this book incisively proves billionaires should not exist. This book has incredible research and reporting and directly challenges one of the world’s most influential people. I highly recommend it if you’re interested in politics and power.
Gator Country by Rebecca Renner — Credit: Macmillian
In 2017, a multiyear Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission investigation into egg poaching exposed alligator farm turf wars over the coveted eggs that feed the hide fashion industry. State undercover operatives opened an alligator farm in DeSoto County to hunt down poachers and wildlife law violators roiling an aquaculture industry dependent on annually re-stocking its pens from eggs.
So the FWC put on a sting operation not so different from the DEA, FBI, or any other state government police agency!
Renner’s book details the operation and the context of poaching in Florida. She’s from the region, understands the landscape, and sympathizes with the people who have no jobs and need to forge to survive. She interviews sting victims and presents their perspectives and perspectives of the agents who conducted the sting.
You’ll like this book if you like rural true crime that isn’t simple or moralistic. It reminds me of last year’s Tree Thieves by Lyndsie Bourgon, which examined how impoverished Californians poach Redwoods and the state’s response. Perhaps I’ll write something longer about this…
Pile of the Week
And finally, the coveted Pile of the Week Award goes to…
Spotify has given some users 15 hours of free audiobook content every week. I’m writing a list of recommendations for you now. You get a free Audible credit if you have the right Spotify plan. Check! It’s clutch!
Thank you, Metropolitan Books, Macmillian, Image Comics, and NetGalley, for this week’s Advanced Reader Copies.
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To start November, we are considering some new releases: a cozy fantasy sequel, an expose into the parole system, and a pile of the week toward the future.
Books
Both these books come out Tuesday, November 7th, 2023. Thanks, MacMillian and NetGalley, for providing a free copy in exchange for a review.
Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change By Ben Austen MacMillan, 2023
A harrowing read. Austen’s book considers the parole system alongside the growth of the American prison industrial complex from the 1970s until the 2010s. As more states built prisons, they stopped offering those convicted of parole and granted far fewer releases. The author profiles Johnny Veal, a prisoner sentenced to 100–199 years for allegedly killing a Chicago police officer with a rifle, a notorious police death in 1970. The book exposes discrepancies in Veal’s case, making it seem quite likely he was framed and had nothing to do with the murder. Also profiled is Michael, a man who gets parole and reintegrates into society. The author concludes with a passionate plea for the re-enstatement of parole hearings to allow for a space where prisoners can advocate for themselves.
Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change — Credit: MacMillan
Bookshops & Bonedust By Travis Baldree MacMillan 2023
I love Viv the Cozy Orc Barbarian! She’s a lovable lesbian who’s prickly on the outside but loyal and loving when you get to know her. I loved her debut in 2021’s Legends & Lattes and couldn’t wait for Baldree’s prequel. It delivers! Set long before Viv started her coffee shop. She’s a daring adventurer fighting a necromancer. After an injury, she rests in a town with a cozy bookstore owned by a ratkin and her little griffin doggy (from the cover). Viv can’t just sit around and do nothing! To keep occupied, she fixes up the bookshop, solves necromancer mysteries, and falls in love! Romance prequels are fun to see loves that could have been. I also love the titular bone dust character introduced halfway through. I’ll write more about this one, but no spoilers just yet! If you think you’d like a cozy fantasy, try this!
Bookshops & Bonedust — Credit: MacMillan
Comics
Dead Seas By Cavan Scott (writer) and Nick Brokenshire (artist) IDW Comics, 2023
Pages, a panel and the cover of Dead Seas — Credit: IDW
Prisoners on a floating ghost ship! Dead Seas reminded me of a grimy 1980s exploitation movie. It’s as if Ghostbusters and Con Air teamed up to invade Speed 2.
Page from Dead Seas — Credit: IDW
The prisoners wander the ship and try to collect ectoplasm for pharmaceutical companies, and I love how the ghosts and monsters look in this book (see below). Nick Brookshire’s illustrators are incredible, taking full advantage of the ship and spectral moods, and there’s more on his website.
Page from Dead Seas — Credit: IDW
The story really kicks in halfway through with monsters and big boat action, taking full advantage of the ocean setting. Fun stuff!
Panel from Dead Seas — Credit: IDW
I really enjoyed this. Thank you, IDW and Netgalley, for the review copy.
Pile of the Week
Lord help me, I’m back on Ebay. I meant to sell a box of books but bought more: some hardcovers, two little paperbacks, and a Superman comic. Now, I can procrastinate on selling the other ones by reading these!
What did you read this week? What’s on your piles?
Tsundoku is a Japanese word for acquiring reading materials and letting them pile up without reading them. Welcome to my weekly reading blog, Halloween Edition.
OooOOoooOOOoooOoooOOo!!!! [said like ghost]
Happy Halloween! Best holiday ever! Long live the dead!
This week, we consider my favorite horror novel from 2023, some great Halloween-y medium pieces, a perverted stoner cartoon witch, and my coveted Favorite Pile of the Week Award… goes to rocks?!
Need a Halloween read? How to Sell a Haunted House is perfect. I couldn’t put it down! When parents die, splitting an estate sounds like a living nightmare! In Grady Hendrix’s newest novel, estranged siblings figure out how to sell their dead parent’s house, but things are complicated because demonic puppets haunt the house! Aunt Honey says, “There’s always drama once money’s involved.” And that’s true, relatable, and scary without the puppets. The sibling relationship was perfectly rendered, how their childhood and parent traumas impacted their adult lives. I appreciated the smaller cast than Final Girl Support Group or Vampire Bookclub because Hendrix dug deep and considered family, death, free real estate, and all the excellent horror novel stuff. It’s also got a clear moral: beware of Pupkin!
Zachariah Bassett’s visualization of Pupkin: Credit — Zachariash Bassett
Comics
Megg, Owl, Werewolf Jones and Jaxon Jones, by Simon Hanselmann — Credit: Fantagraphics
Megg and Mogg are a Halloween treat! A witch, a werewolf, a cursed black cat, a boogeywoman, but they’re all normal and have relatable mental problems. You can read tons of strips on his Instagram. Plus, all the collections are on Hoopla.
But be forewarned!
These funny comics evoke a horrific sense of dread, of the hopelessness of 21st-century life, how trying to be a person who feels monstrous. Funny, vulgar, sad, relatable: it’s those good comics!
Pile of the Week
This weekend, my partner and I stranded ourselves on an island. Here, you can see a pile of rocks used to block the wind for a fire pit. Now that’s a helpful pile! It received the Pile of the Week award.
A pile of rocks for making a fire — Credit: Author’s Photograph
Did you read or write anything about Halloween this week? How about a pile? Do you want me to show me a pile? Go ahead, show me in the comments!
