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.
Follow me and get this newsletter every week! If you want more reading recommendations, consult the Tsundoku archive:
A review of Parasocial, a graphic novel that’s Stephen King’s Misery for the TikTok era
In Parasocial, a fan kidnaps her idol, and in the process, we consider the exploitative, transactional nature of fandom.
Writer Alex De Campi created some great exploitation comics in her Dark Horse series, GRINDHOUSE. And she previously collaborated with Erica Henderson on their Blaxploitation-homage, DRACULA MOTHERF**KER! I loved that book, too, with its moody pastel pallet.
A panel from Dracula Motherfu**er! by Alex De Campi and Erica Henderson — Credit: Image Comics
The pair developed a working rhythm because Parasocial is a standout work for both creators.
Now, I can tell you with words why this comic book has deep themes and thought-provoking content.But this is comics! Parasocial has impressive illustrations. The story is told visually, combining words and images in ways only comics can.
Consider this four-page car crash:
Two Pages from Parasocial — Credit: Image ComicsTwo More Pages from Parasocial — Credit: Image Comics
Incredible! The layout utilizes dynamic fonts and onomatopoeia, so sounds jump off the page, and you can hear that 18-wheeler’s horn. The headlights on the truck and car illuminate the scene in a halogen glow. As our driver loses consciousness, the panels snap away from the grid, and moments start overlapping, moments and slow, drowsy repetitions. This action is much more visceral than contemporary superhero junk.
Henderson’s style reinvents itself on every page. At one point, I checked to see if there were multiple artist credits. So many styles are represented, but when the characters embrace, and it’s rendered like a 90s Shojo manga, I knew this must be one of the year’s best comics.
Three Panels from Parasocial — Credit: Image Comics
Unlike its celebrity protagonist, Parasocial is not all just surface-level good looks. The work wonders a provocative question: why might a fan deserve revenge on her idol? The introduction uses a montage to show all the people at the fan convention and the scope of the event. For a moment, the focus is on one crying person offering a deeply revealing confession.
One Panel from Parasocial — Credit: Image Comics
Fandom is a pay-to-play. You belong to the community as long as you can afford to belong to the community. You can’t be a fan if you can’t afford the new thing. Fan conventions and costumes, merch, signings, and photographs cost money. This background character is getting into five figures of credit card debt so she can see her friends and pretend to be a cat.
You belong to the community as long as you can afford to belong to the community.
Something disconcerting is going on here. When our celebrity protagonist, Luke Indiana, is tied to a chair in his #1 fan’s kitchen, he asks why he should remember her. She points to her bulletin board.
Two Panels from Parasocial — Credit: Image Comics
I count five pictures of Luke and Lizzie together, so they met five times. He even hugged her. Each time, she probably paid $100 to get those photographs. That’s $500 for five minutes of his time.
And he still doesn’t even know she exists. That’s cold. Despite this, the fans persist.
They dream of getting with their celebrity crush. Parasocial bluntly points out that the only way that is actually going to happen is your crush is kidnapped and hogtied.
Is it any surprise Lizzy’s filled with rage? Celebrities treat their fans like servants yet rely on them for financial support. Like all good exploitation stories, Parasocial blurs exactly who’s exploiting who.
A Page from Parasocial — Credit: Image Comics
The work is short, yet every panel counts. I loved this book and immediately reread it.
MaybeI should kidnap the creators and tell them how much I loved their new graphic novel?!?!
It’s out now, so get it from your comic shop or an online retailer.
Thank you, NetGalley and Image Comics, for providing an advanced review copy in exchange for an honest review.
Parasocial by Alex De Campi (writer) and Erica Henderson (artist) Image Comics, 2023
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!
Scorsese’s film is another brutally honest look at how white supremacy won the American West. Not cowboys, but cowards. Powerful psychopaths who cheat, lie, and steal.
David Grann’s 2017 book of the same title is a comprehensive look at the Osage massacre. It also takes a more critical perspective on the FBI and the federal government.
This piece considers the differences between the book and the movie and the FBI’s role in hiding the accurate, staggering death count.
Spoilers ahead! Read this after you see the movie!
The Guardian System
The movie uses a silent film framing device to explain the Osage backstory. Forcibly moved off their land two times, the Osage were given a reservation in Oklahoma by the federal government. Nobody knew it was rich in oil deposits.
A map of the Osage reservation marked for its oil deposits — Credit: National Archive
Grann cites the testimony of an Osage chief, Bacon Rind,
“[the whites had] bunched us down here in the backwoods, the roughest part of the United States, thinking ‘we will drive these Indians down to where there is a big pile of rocks and put them there in that corner.’” Now that the pile of rocks had turned out to be worth millions of dollars, he said, “everybody wants to get in here and get some of this money.” (88).
Overnight, the tribe was wealthy. Grann describes a scene where oil drillers, like Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood (2007), come to bid on the rights, fighting each other to pay millions of dollars to drill Osage oil.
Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview buying oil rights in There Will Be Blood — Credit: Paramount
Reservations are subject to national authority, so the federal government established the headright system. Oil companies paid dividends as a “headright” to Osage members who could prove blood heritage. To access the money, they required a guardian. So, while the money lawfully belonged to the Osage, the guardian system required Osage to get their checks cashed by a white man, someone directly inserted into their finances. Grann explains, “A full-blooded American Indian was invariably appointed a guardian, whereas a mixed-blood person rarely was.” (83)
This racist system created the financial stakes for murder — a bureaucratic seizing of indigenous property.
In the film, this legal system plays out clearest in the life of Henry Roan. A diagnosed “melancholic,” he needs Bill Hale to give him money to buy moonshine. Hale pretends to care for Roan’s safety, but really he’s waiting on a payout from Roan’s life insurance policy.
A scan of the document certifying William Hale as Henry Roan’s Guardian — Credit: National Archives
The oil industry and the federal government resented paying the Osage money for their oil rights. After fear-mongering news articles about Osage spending their money unwisely, Congress instituted even stricter guardianship laws. Osage with guardians could not withdraw more than a few thousand dollars a year, not even for exceptions like medical expenses (87), making a bad situation even worse.
Then, after the Hale conviction, what finally stopped the massacre was another federal law. Federal legislation created and “solved” the problem. In 1932, the Osage petitioned the federal government to change the qualifications for collecting a head right. Grann summarizes, “It barred anyone who was not at least half Osage from inheriting head rights from a member of the tribe.” (242).
While the FBI takes credit for solving the case, this legacy distracts from the federal government’s culpability for these crimes.
FBI’s Legacy
The FBI claims they intervened in Oklahoma after county, state, and private investigators and Congress didn’t stop the conspiracy. But Grann proves the FBI didn’t end the conspiracy either.
In the movie, the tribal chief chastises Congress for making the tribe pay money to fund the federal investigation. It’s quaint to imagine an FBI so new they needed funding, but this is the FBI’s “first” case.
The book presents an agency that doesn’t understand the ramifications of its actions. At first, Hoover sent ramshackle agents to interview suspicious, low-income white men and turn them into criminal informants. Multiple witnesses were killed because the investigation raised Bill Hale’s suspicions.
The FBI cultivated informants like Blackie Thompson and let him commit state-sanctioned crimes to build evidence. This FBI tactic is still popular today. When Thompson broke out of jail, he robbed a bank and killed a local police officer (240).
Hoover almost closed the case at the first sign of controversy. When a local lawyer, A.W. Comstock, was critical of the agency’s recklessness, Hoover started suspecting Comstock of the murders and encouraged investigators to pursue him as a lead (136).
Hoover ignored the apparent pattern of murder despite his agents putting it directly into their reports. This is convincing evidence that the FBI was helping to perpetuate a coverup. From an FBI agent’s report,
“An agent described, in a report, just one of the ways the killers did this: “In connection with the mysterious deaths of a large number of Indians, the perpetrators of the crime would get an Indian intoxicated, have a doctor examine him and pronounce him intoxicated, following which a morphine hypodermic would be injected into the Indian, and after the doctor’s departure the [killers] would inject an enormous amount of morphine under the armpit of the drunken Indian, which would result in his death. The doctor’s certificate would subsequently read ‘death from alcoholic poison.’” (307)
Jesse Plemons as Tom White in Killers of the Flower Moon — Credit: Apple
In the film, when Tom White arrives it relieves the tension. But was the FBI heroic?
They only stopped three murderers out of a vast conspiracy of murderers. They had proof and witnesses of other criminal activity, begging the question, why did they stop investigating?
As Grann proves, after the Hale conviction, Hoover promoted the case and made it into the FBI’s origin story. He realized “that the new modes of public relations could expand his bureaucratic power and instill a cult of personality…“ (240).
The FBI’s origin story deliberately did not include Tom White. Hoover never publically thanked White for his contribution, although the Osage tribe did (241). Hoover steered White to offer selective information he could share with the press, “the representatives of the press would have an interest in would be the human interest aspect, so I would like to have you emphasize this angle.” (240). Through his brilliant use of implication, he’s asking White to downplay the conspiracy of lawlessness for oil extraction!
When White asked for files to write a memoir on the case in 1958, Hoover declined. Nor was White allowed to consult on a Hollywood film about the Osage, The FBI Story (1959) with Jimmy Stewart (253).
Grann cites how Hoover would send the story to “sympathetic reporters.” Here’s a headline from a William Randall Hearst syndicate paper.
“NEVER TOLD BEFORE! — How the Government with the Most Gigantic Fingerprint System on Earth Fights Crime with Unheard-of Science Refinements; Revealing How Clever Sleuths Ended a Reign of Murder and Terror in the Lonely Hills of the Osage Indian Country, and Then Rounded Up the Nation’s Most Desperate Gang” (241)
That headline is similar to the POV of the Scorsese movie.
In the film, the Osage are primarily victims. The FBI convinces white guys to flip, saving the Osage from the deranged murderers.
In reality, J. Edgar Hoover used the Osage just like the Hale family. The FBI built its investigation on years of intel gathered by the Osage and their hired investigators. Hoover came in at the end and took all of the credit. Hoover’s FBI also neglected to investigate others clearly implicated in this conspiracy — the coroner, the doctor, the sheriff, etc. Not so coincidentally, those not investigated were often wealthy and tied to oil companies. By hijacking this narrative, Hoover used the Osage murders to build the agency’s profile and to begin amassing a pool of federal dark money that let him do whatever he wanted.
The Deeper Conspiracy
The book’s final chapters examine new truths Grann discovered in the case, “a deeper, darker, even more terrifying conspiracy.” (258).
Grann attempts to count how many people were killed, consulting federal and tribal archives of oral history, and finds manuscripts of unpublished interviews in Osage collections, newspaper obituaries, census records, and historian researchers. He estimates hundreds of Osage were murdered.
The Osage call these years the “Reign of Terror” (264). Grann describes walking through the Osage graveyard, notices a pronounced increase in headstones from the period. According to the cited Authentic Osage Indian Roll Book, 605 Osage died over sixteen years, from 1907 to 1923 — more than 1.5 times the national rate. (307).
While Bill Hale and his nephews were heinous criminals they were not unique. Collectively, the community murdered hundreds of Osage for their head rights. Hale and his nephews conspired together for the oil money, as did the town. On the book’s last page, Grann concludes, “Indeed, virtually every element of society was complicit in the murderous system.” (316).
I thought Scorsese’s film did a fantastic job of literalizing this. The Klan marches in the town parade, and the Grand Wizard is a city official. Every town official comes together to coach Ernest on lying under oath.
And Scorsese even includes a grander conspiracy. The book mentions Bill Hale: “…often wore a diamond-studded pin from the Masonic lodge…” (30). In the film, they personified this as Hale, a 32nd-degree mason, paddling his nephew.
Grann finds almost no information about the tribal advocate who was assassinated while traveling to Washington. Scorsese dramatizes this by showing the man receiving a note right before his assassination, which raises a fascinating question. How did those Okies in Fairfax hire a hitman in Washington, D.C.?
So …Did You Hate the Movie?
NO! I loved it! I’m not trying to cancel the movie, say it was racist, evil, or I didn’t like it. That would be a dull argument. Who cares if I liked it or not?
A movie costing 200 million dollars cannot be critical of the FBI. Interesting!
Racism is a necessary part of the Osage story. The way Bill Hale and Ernest Burkhart could compartmentalize their lives to both love Osage and plot their extermination is only possible because of white supremacy. They thought they deserved the money, a deeply internalized manifest destiny.
Yet, federal legislation, FBI negligence, and a deep conspiracy of rich oil drillers show that racism wasn’t only in Oklahoma but throughout all of America. The federal government is racist, as is the state government, especially in the context of drilling for oil. Like everything in the 20th century, oil fueled America’s genocidal quest.
Works Cited
The Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann, 2017, Vintage
The United States Government National Archive 1, 2
Reviewing Nishioka Kyodai’s Kafka: A Manga Adaptation
I’m a Kafkahead, or a monstrous vermin, as we Kafkaheads call each other.
Pushkin Press released a collection of eleven Kafka stories adapted to manga by the artist Nishioka Kyodai.
This book marks Nishioka Kyodai’s first English translation, and I hope more English translations come out someday. Kyodai is a pseudonym for a brother (writer) and sister (illustrator) who have been publishing surreal manga since 1989 about things like wonder laboratories, sadness, and hell.
And who is Kafka?
Who is K.?
Who am I?
These are all big questions befitting big text.
Kafka is arguably the most influential European author of the 20th century. He’s a serious author, often considered depressing, but the real heads know his work is funny. Kafka is paranoid, sad, strange, weird, and unforgettable.
Kyodai’s illustration style is a perfect match: unnerving faces, thin lines, and abstractions on top of unconventional panel layouts with densely inked background patterns. Many of their pages remind me of paintings, quilts, and mandellas.
The illustrators hold Kafka in high regard. The collection includes an essay where the author explains resisting the idea of adapting “The Metamorphosis” because Kafka objected to visualizing Samsa’s transformation.
We often think of the monstrous vermin as a cockroach because of visual adaptations. It’s not necessarily a cockroach. Instead, Kyodai uses isometric room drawings to portray Gregor as a looming absence in the Samsa family.
A panel from “The Metamorphosis” in Kafka by Nishioka Kyodai — Credit: Pushkin Press
“A Vulture” is the source of the collection’s cover image. The description of the man becoming a puddle (see above) of darkness when observed by the vulture is strangely relatable. The vulture’s facial expression is rendered so perfectly.
A panel from “The Vulture” in Kafka by Nishioka Kyodai — Credit: Pushkin Press
“The Country Doctor” appears, and so must the young boy’s wound. The doctor’s happenstance is bizarre when illustrated as stick figures in a bed.
A panel from “The Country Doctor” in Kafka by Nishioka Kyodai — Credit: Pushkin Press
What a wound!
I thought the collection’s boldest choice came in “The Concerns of a Patriarch,” also translated as “The Cares of a Family Man.” Check out Wikipedia. That Adorandak can mean anything! The illustrators choose to visualize the Adorandak as a Star of David.
A panel from “Concerns of a Patriarch” in Kafka by Nishioka Kyodai — Credit: Pushkin Press
“The Hunger Artist” in 2023 hits differently. As we all deal with our own planned obsolescence: getting replaced by AIs, overseas contractors, or austerity. Life can feel like wasting away in a cage of our own making.
A panel from “The Hunger Artist” in Kafka by Nishioka Kyodai — Credit: Pushkin Press
“In The Penial Colony” reads prescient in 2023, a story about a horrible colonial island where the military officials subject themselves to an arcane torture device.
A panel from “Concerns of a Patriarch” in Kafka by Nishioka Kyodai — Credit: Pushkin Press
I immensely enjoyed this collection, and if you like surreal Japanese comics like Junji Ito or contemporary art comics like Michael DeForge, this is up your alley. Heck, if you’ve never experienced the joys of Kafka, this is a fine place to start.
Kafka: A Manga Adapatation By Nishioka Kyōdai Pushkin Press, 2023
Kafka by Nishioka Kyodai — Credit: Pushkin Press
Thank you Pushkin Press and NetGalley for providing a copy in exchange for a review.
Tsundoku Book Piles 003, originally posted on Medium, 10/22/2023
I read some books about 1970s paranoia. Stick around until the end to see my new pile this week.
What did you read this week? I’m legit curious! I’m not just saying this for engagement baiting! Tell me! Comment below.
Books:
Two books about hippies and intense paranoia.
Agents of Chaos Sean Howe 2023, Hachette
Wild read! Easily a personal favorite of mine for 2023. Tom King Forçade was a lot of things, most famously the publisher of High Times, but also a drug smuggler, hippie, radical subversive, cannabis advocate, First Amendment crusader, and possible federal agent or criminal informant. Fans of CHAOS: Charles Manson, The CIA and the Secret History of the 60s by Tom O’Neil, and Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream by Dave McGowan (RIP!) must check this out. I’ll write a longer post about the specifics soon.
I grew up loving “subversive” stuff: rock music, pot, High Times, William S. Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg, hippie things. The above books reveal everything “subversive” might be a calculated attempt to reify power by the US military. It’s destabilizing. Beliefs I hold deeply (free speech, for example) were used for pro-market propaganda in an abstract fight with the Soviet Union. And that fight extends to the battle for oil rights, the blood that keeps empires running.
Agents of Chaos by Sean Howe — Credit: Hachette
Inherent Vice Thomas Pynchon 2007, Penguin
With that context, I had to pick up Inherent Vice again.
I never really understood Pynchon’s pessimism until now. Are the paranoid narrators paranoid if they correctly intuit every bad thing about to happen? The eternal question.
But do any of our paranoiacs (Zoyd, Doc, Slothrop) make out better than where they start? Nope.
P.I. Doc Sportello is funny but also a bummer, man. Stuck in the past, a mental cloud of smoke, confused and hapless, singular in his purpose of forgotten love.
This book makes me feel bad for baby boomers. People often mock the generation because they often had material opportunities and yet remain resentful about nonsense culture wars. But that might be because they were psy-op’d into the intense confusion of 1967–1971. When some Americans tried organizing for a better society, the police state crushed them and the chance for a better world.
Of course, there are strange synchronicities to contemporary violence: housing projects in the desert, the quest for power, and free real estate.
This might be my favorite novel. Here’s a line that always cracks me up.
Inherent Vice — Credit: Penguin
Killers of the Flower Moon: David Grann 2017, Vintage
Everybody’s talking about Martin Scorcese’s three-and-a-half-hour epic western crime drama! I saw it this week and enjoyed it. I sat motionless for 206 minutes! I never do that! I also read the book earlier this year and reread it this weekend to write a piece about what the movie left out. Follow me if you want to see it sometime this week!
Robert DeNiro as Bill Hale in Killers of the Flower Moon — Credit: Apple
The New Pile
I cannot help myself. Prime Day had a sale on some books I’ve meant to read or reread, and even a virtuous library user like me gets tempted when the devil offers good books for under $10.
My latest pile — Credit: photo, the author
Thank you for considering my piles. As always, I pine to know what’s on YOUR pile! Comment below! Let’s see those piles, people!
Don’t be shy! What did you read and enjoy this week?
Letterboxd is an app that lets users rate, review, and rank movies they’ve watched — an Instagram for film. Log in when you watch it, look up who’s in it, and heart your favs. Some obsessively rate the movie on a 0.5–5 star scale. Other people use it as a movie blog, like Goodreads for film. Twitter people use it to write funny one-line reviews.
This post considers reasons a Letterboxd user (me) loves the app and how a PE firm might monetize it.
1. Unconventional Diary
Letterboxd suggests you consider your life as the things you watch. If you get in the habit, this simplifies remembering when you saw a movie. It’s the pleasure of a diary and a database. Reflection might make you a more engaged viewer and offer practice for turning feelings into words. Or it proves to your significant other that you already watched that movie.
Tiny owns a robust dataset of entertainment consumption over time, the sequence of selections, and the impact of a user’s review. They can trace the network effect of recommendations and target curated audiences.
The diary view on Letterboxd — Credit: Letterboxd
2. Consolidated Watch List
Letterboxd offers a centralized watchlist. I have ten streaming app logins and ten separate watch lists, which I find overwhelming. I bet I’m not alone. Letterbox lets you add any movie to one list. A premium feature is accessing the “Is It Streaming?” database, which tells you what platform the movie is on without Google. You can also filter your watchlist by service.
PE likes this for a lot of reasons. First, they have a clear value proposition: watchlist app. They know what viewers watch and what they think about it.
Viewer preference data determines what shows to make. Netflix is harvesting data when they ask, “Did you like this? Rate it thumbs up or down!” Letterboxd collects that across streaming platforms in a standardized format. Rights-holders and licensees could leverage that data to see what content to buy next.
The Watchlist view — Credit: Letterboxd
3. Recommendations and Reactions
Seeing what your friends are watch is a major part of what makes Letterboxd fun. Users see a horizontally scrolled feed of what their friends ratings and reviews.
Private Equity bought a network map of media preferences showing the impact of a recommendation.
The What Your Friends Are Watching View — Credit: Letterboxd
4. Funny Reviews
Many Letterboxd reviews are funny. Like this one about Barbie.
Perfect Barbie Review Credit: Letterboxd, user bimbim
Or this person who harassed Zach Braff.
A Good Person review — Credit: Letterboxd, user leemkuli
Everybody likes jokes. Jokes help users forget they’re self-reporting their media preferences to a private equity firm.
5. Deep Movie Knowledge
Letterboxd is about movies.m so trending topics don’t drive content. Fans discuss old movies. My favorite Letterboxd user is pd187. They write about movies and military propaganda and leverage the database to show the connection between movies with strange funding.
Private Equity won’t like pd187. However, they would like a all the files, data, and detritus about American intellectual property of the 20th century. Is there an enterprise version of Letterboxd for studios and universities? Probably.
6. Curated Lists
The 2010s: the Golden Age of Internet Lists. The list lives on strong in Letterboxd. It’s easy to make lists with art and context already written.
Visually Insane is my favorite Letterboxd list. These collections are a vibe.
Consider Tiny’s company page. They hold a network for hiring visual creatives, UX design firms, template marketplaces, a Canva competitor, many Shopify integrations, and a design news publication. They monetize the intersection of data and creativity.
7. Filterable Opinions
What did the haters say? And the fans? Filtering is data granularity in action. One can look up any user, sort their reviews by rating, and see their highs and lows, what they liked and hated. Do these associations influence buying behavior?
8. Clean Data
A user can download all their data into a nifty spreadsheet. It’s great. But if I have easy access to my data, who else has easy access?
My movie database in Notion — Credit: Author’s Screenshot
9. What’s Coming Out This Weekend?
How does Tiny get ROI on their $50M?
To me, “coming soon” is the monetization opportunity. Users want to know what’s in theaters or on streaming. Letterboxd can charge studios for targeted ads to users. They can even attribute if the ad worked because users log films. Could Letterboxd get paid per ticket sold? Getting five to six-figure payments from Hollywood marketing budgets seems like one way to 10x their investment.
10. The Community
The best part about any social media app is the other people using it. No users, no fun is obvious when looking at the empty Blue Sky.
Private Equity sees the user community as a market. Many users already pay to support the app, so one way to increase revenue is to raise prices. People will pay for it. That’s an easy way to make Q4’s numbers!
Add Me on Letterbox: Nicky_Martin
Will private Equity ruin my favorite social network? I hope they don’t because everybody loves talking about the movies.
Many confuse leftist writer Naomi Klein with right-wing writer Naomi Wolf. There’s a rhyme on Twitter.
Credit: X, @markpopham
It’s also the framing story for Klein’s new book. Naomi Klein sees Namoi Wolf as her doppelgänger, a German word for an uncanny evil twin. When Wolf became one of America’s biggest sources of COVID-19 disinformation, Klein went on a personal research journey across health, history, fascism, colonialism, the climate, and the future. She finds eerie conclusions.
Wolf vs. Klein.
Naomi Klein is painfully aware she always gets mistaken for Naomi Wolf. They have similar names, looks, religions, and careers, and both write “big idea” non-fiction books, sometimes with overlapping topics!
Yet, Klein doesn’t hate Wolf; she’s obsessed with her, surveying every media appearance the woman made for years, and she knows a lot about double.
Wolf’s first book, The Beauty Myth (1990), a feminist argument on the expectation for women to look and dress a certain way (and buy cosmetic products), is an example of society subjugating women. I agree with Wolf’s point; in 2023, this seems widely accepted.
Wolf’s career had ups and downs. She consulted as a feminist advisor on the 2000 Al Gore presidential campaign and published a book-length libertarian listicle about fascism rising in America, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. Ironically, fascism in North America and warnings are a topic of Doppelgänger.
In 2019, something interesting happened. Wolf wrote a left-wing book about governments banning gay love based on her doctoral thesis. It got pulped and never came out. She went on the BBC to promote the book, and the interviewer called out her research as incorrect. Wolf misread historical court records and didn’t consul basic newspaper archives. Klein marks this as Wolf’s Jokerfying moment (my word).
Jokerfied Naomi Wolf — Credit: Made in Canva by the author
Mainstream media rejected her, so Wolf became reactionary. Platformed as “an exile of the left,” her rhetoric got increasingly deranged: microchip vaccines, 5G polluting air, real feminists like the abortion ban. All nonsense. Twitter suspended her, and X invited her back for now!
Many publicly humiliated Wolf on Twitter. She continues to be humiliated on the app to this day. Humiliation keeps app users returning as an audience. Their schadenfreude, a German word for pleasure from someone from another person’s misfortune, is a troupe in a shared dialect. A shared symbol saying, Look at this crazy person!
Ironically, vilifying right-wing writers offers them a monetization opportunity. Wolf can take haters and make herself famous, creating a network to broadcast disinformation.
Vaccines, Autism, Fitness and COVID Disinformation
COVID was terrible, an acceleration of every bad thing happening in the world, and there’s reason to be deeply skeptical of everything you hear to stay inoculated against bunk information. Klein concedes this.
She recalls knocking on doors for her husband’s parliamentary election with the NDP. She had doorstep conversations with hippy-dippy peace and love flag owners who were very hostile against mandatory vaccinations and lockdowns. These voters distrusted public institutions.
What politicized them? The material events of COVID and competing sources of propaganda. COVID-19 did disrupt people’s lives, often to their detriment. Unemployment, isolation, and, most of all, getting sick with the potential for death or lifelong consequences were radicalizing events. The theoretical ideas of “access” and “bodies in spaces” became literal regarding airborne infection, lockdowns, and work.
Yet COVID was a prime opportunity for disinformation. People took advantage of the confusion to make things up for profit. Klein cites The Disinformation DozenEditSignEditSign, twelve online influencers that researchers traced back to COVID-19 false information. A strange pattern emerges.
Six out of twelve COVID disinformation accounts are accredited medical professionals: Doppelgänger doctors and alternative health experts who told people to ignore the CDC.
There’s a former pharmaceutical executive, pediatrician, gynecologist, chiropractor, osteopath, and holistic psychiatrist, among other “alternative medicine entrepreneurs.” Even Naomi Wolf bills herself as a doctor because she has a Doctorate of Philosophy in English literature and a discredited thesis.
These hucksters claim medical professionals are untrustworthy, yet ironically, they themselves are untrustworthy medical professionals. Again, a doubling.
Why did so many credentialed medical professionals spread COVID-19 denial?
Klein cites profit as the obvious answer: they make money by saying don’t take free vaccines. Buy expensive powders, pills, herbal supplements, and essential oils instead. Their credentials might play into people’s programming to trust doctors. Also, those credentials might make it easier for them to feel overconfident in their own reasoning skills since they went to medical school, and that false confidence causes them to misinterpret complex studies into nonsense.
The body is both universal and personal, another doubling. Wellness is not neutral. Who’s “well” and how we should treat the unwell is a political question of power.
Bodies Hiding Fascism
Klein extends the argument, citing theory and history to show a link between the individual’s hyper-focus on the body and fascism.
Runners carrying the Olympic Flame — Credit: Wiki Commons, German Federal Archive
Klein cites recent research into Hans Asperger, the 2018 book Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna. Asperger’s was a doctor of cognitive development, the former namesake of Asperger’s Syndrome. In the 1920s, he advocated for people with cognitive differences.
Then in the 1930s, when the Nazis came to power, something changed for Hans Asperger. The double appears again.
New proof shows Asperger collaborated closely with Nazi extermination programs and signed execution warrants for children as young as two. Consider that the Nazi party banned vaccines for Jewish people because they wanted Jewish neighborhoods to get sick.
The lie that vaccines cause autism takes on eerie double meanings in these contexts.
Calls to Action
We are on the cusp of fascist control! That’s a rhetorically attractive idea for writers because then they have something to write against. They can write a book with a title like this:
When Everybody Just Stops Doing The Thing In the Book’s Title, We Will Evoke Change Together!
Klein wonders if a book’s call to action is hubris. A book can identify a trend but not stop it.
Klein acknowledges she previously wrote books making such bold proclamations. So did colleagues who quit writing and started non-profits because writing did not spur real-world action. All of Klein’s previous calls to action were ignored.
No Logo (1999) warned against the multi-billion dollar branding industries, yet in 2023, everyone and everything is a brand. Branding one’s self is how you get a job.
Shock Doctrine (2007) extolled community mobilization to stop privatization and profiteering. Yet, COVID Has Made Global Inequality Much Worse, “Global billionaire wealth grew by $4.4 trillion between 2020 and 2021…more than 100 million people fell below the poverty line.”
In This Changes Everything (2014), Klein argued the world’s leaders needed to act immediately to stop catastrophic mass deaths from the climate crisis. America pulled out of international treaties and refused to decarbonize.
Knowing that the world is in crisis and our leaders refuse to address the problem creates its own sort of double world. The eery vibe of doom-scrolling, seeing the projection of our shared fate but powerless to stop it.
Doppelgänger avoids straightforward answers, perhaps in reaction to the previous books. This call to action is more optical. See the mirror world around you. See the double in yourself. Acknowledge it exists.
Like in the Jordan Peele film Us, take the vision quest and “Find Yourself”
Us (2019) — Credit: Universal Pictures
Ask who owns the cages. Who’s locked inside? Who profits off conquest? Who sells the guns, the missiles, the bananas, and the consulting firm’s billable hours?
The book’s call to action is also personal: try not to judge others quickly or too harshly. In a world where digital platforms exist to make us angry and whip us into a frenzy, being kind is a radical act.
Call out dehumanizing generalizations like “all Palestinians,” “every Russian,” “those migrants,” and “the city’s rioting looters.” These generalizations lead to fatal ends.
Klein offers good ideas: be kind, be caring. Cynically, these calls to compassion are sure to be ignored by leaders in business and government. While these ideas are actionable, they require devotion, discipline, and community, three things the world currently lacks.
To conclude, a last call to action from a classic double movie is mentioned in the book.
Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world — to do away with national barriers — to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!
— Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator (1940)
Reviewed: Doppelgänger: A Trip Into the Mirror World By Naomi Klein Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023
Tsundoku is a Japanese word for acquiring reading materials and letting them pile up without reading them. Welcome to my (second) weekly pile recap blog.
Stick Around To The Conclusion To See My Raw, Unadulterated Piles
Books/Audiobooks
A Philip Marlowe mystery, some strange horror, and a work of Marxism.
The Second Murderer By Denise Mina 2023, Mulholland Books
Raymond Chandler’s been dead for 69 years, and The Second Murderer is the sixth “authorized” Marlowe novel. Chandler wrote seven. How does Denise Mina’s new rendition stack up?
I liked The Second Murderer! A twisty story told by a voice-y Marlowe in a steamy, political 1940s LA. Mina does a fantastic imitation of the Marlowe voice. Her Phil’s still dry, quippy, mean, honest, and fiercely loyal to unspoken ideals.
Marlowe is summoned to a mansion on Santa Monica Boulevard by a rich, wealthy oil-drilling family. They want him to find their missing daughter and offer good money plus expenses. Marlowe’s too smart. He sees their motive. They want to hire a two-bit, one-man private eye outfit because they don’t want to find the girl. They think he’s a bum. That’s the perfect motivation for Marlowe to prove them wrong!
That is, until a familiar fling from Farewell, My Lovely, gets in Marlowe’s way. It’s more fun if I don’t tell you who it is. She started her private eye firm with Daddy’s police contacts in Bay City, and the rich jerks hired her, too. Marlowe and her compete to find the girl and also maybe fall in love? She was my favorite part of the book, and if there’s a sequel, I hope she returns. Marlowe also visits some LA neighborhoods he never frequented much, Skid Row, South Central, and a little lesbian bar Raymond Chandler would have never known existed.
It’s interesting to see how Marlowe adapts over time. This book seems written with women readers in mind, with a romance subplot, a majority of women cast, and historical discussions of lesbianism. Marlowe’s stories were initially published in men’s fiction magazines (Black Mask). It’s impressive how the character’s voice is so enduring it can appeal across time and audiences.
Mina’s interpretation also makes much more sense than Chandler’s original novels. Chandler would combine three stories into one book, so they don’t really make sense. The twist in The Lady in the Lake is so silly you’d think it was a joke. The best one, A Long Goodbye, was not a story-combination novel; ithas a “literary” plot (i.e., no plot). It’s mostly drunk people talking. It’s fantastic, one of my favorite novels of the 20th century.
In his letters, Chandler said he obsessed over the Marlowe voice and character, not the plot. He was exactly right to do that. That’s why people are still reading and writing Marlowe almost a century after publication (well, 75 years). If you like Marlowe or mysteries, check out Denise Mina’s The Second Murderer.
The Second Murderer by Denise Mina (2023) — Credit: Mulholland Books
Negative Space By B.R. Yeager 2020, Apocalypse Party
I find B.R. Yeager’s writing intoxicating, like a weird new drug your friend told you about that you can weirdly buy at the gas station, even though this drug is hardcore and messes you up. Reading him feels like being possessed by a language ghost. His two novels get at the strange suburban feeling of liminal loneliness, and the less you know, the better, but I have a longer piece about both that I’ll post this week.
Negative Space by B.R. Yeager — Credit: Apocalypse Party
Marx’s Literary Style by Ludovico Silva 2023, Verso
I loved this 1973 essay about Marx by Venezuelan poet Ludovico Silva. His close reading of Marx brings the 150-year-old books to life. Silva suggests we consider the way Marx wrote, not just the topics and ideas he wrote about. If you are a Marx reader, this is a must-read, and I give it my most dialectical recommendation.
Marx’s Literary Style by Ludovico Silva — Credit: Verso
Conclusion: Raw, Unadulterated Piles
This is a blog about piles. But where are the piles?
Where are the piles? I Haven’t Seen Any Piles.
OK, let me show you some piles.
A Tale of Two Piles — Credit: Author’s Photo
The books on the left are the ones I’m writing about for Medium.com. The pile on the right is for a fiction project about boxing, all to be read.
And yet, there are more piles no one can see. Digital piles of audiobooks on Libby and Hoopla, NetGalley ebooks, posts, and internet articles: a beautiful, mountainous pile of the mind. I’ll keep thinking about piles, but I want to see your piles in the meantime!
Thanks for reading! Follow for more writing about books.
Do You Keep Your Books In Specific Piles? Show Me The Piles! I Want To See Your Piles!
NickyAdmin: This is the second reading piles newsletter from Medium, 10/08/2023
