November 2019 Journal (Patreon)

Hate to charge you for these again, but my tutoring job is about to fizzle out for the winter and I need all the income I can get. "Babooshka" should be along by tomorrow at the latest, but probably tonight. Soon I'll start on some commission pieces and a trilogy of essays on Planet of the Apes.

No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam (Reza Aslan) - A taut and nuanced primer on Islam and its history. Aslan relates the way the material conditions of the 7th-8th century Arabian Peninsula shaped the religion, cutting through the toxic Islamophobic chaff of mainstream discourse to reveal a flawed but often fascinating and beautiful religion. Extremely glad to have read this.

Females: A Concern (Andrea Long Chu) - Much sharper than bad faith Twitter threads would have you believe. It's not Chu's best writing - she leans too hard into the shock-and-awe aspects of her writing, sometimes at the expense of her writing. Nonetheless, this is a fun and smart book about navigating gender in a world that fights you at every turn. Also very gay.

Catwoman: Selina's Big Score (Darwyn Cooke) - The last part of my Catwoman binge. A fun book; Cooke knows how to line up the heist movie and Selina Kyle in a way that works as both. Hardly transformative, but an easy read.

Book of Longing (Leonard Cohen) - A book of horny existential rants by a monk who'd like nothing better than to get off this mountain so he can get laid. This lends itself to some of Cohen's worse instincts - Cohen is never more of a turn-off than when he goes into "old lech" mode. Nonetheless, there's lots of terrific writing in this, as you'd expect from its writer. Cohen's verse is gorgeous, suggestive, and very, very funny. It also has the True Detective Season 2 theme song in it, which is neat.

Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (Grant Morrison & Dave McKean) - When Alan Moore talks about the wave of juvenile grimdark superhero comics that were published in the wake of Watchmen and The Killing Joke, this is what he was talking about. A mean-spirited, putrid, and surprisingly homophobic book that only encourages its creators' worst instincts. Even a spectral, ghostly Batman (my platonic ideal for the character) doesn't save this book from being an overglorified mess. Possibly as bad as The Killing Joke, if not as influentially toxic.

Queer (William S. Burroughs) - Burroughs writing about gay loneliness, except not as good as that sounds. This is only his second book, so his style hasn't matured quite yet. Skip this one and read Naked Lunch instead.

The Mirror of Love (Alan Moore & Jose Villarrubia) - I'm finally getting into poetry! And of course Alan Moore helped. This is a masterpiece of verse, a massively ambitious gay history that nails the broad historical strokes as well as the isolating despair of queerness. Matches From Hell, Promethea, and Watchmen for sheer ambitious beauty.

Poems from Black Africa (ed. Langston Hughes) - Superb little anthology. Every fascist who claims that the African continent has never produced anything of value should be shot and have this book shoved down their throat. Delicious.