It just keeps going, doesn’t it?
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I don’t know, man. Shit’s fucked. It’s 93 degrees Fahrenheit and 40% atmospheric humidity here in KCMO — closer than I ever want to be to wet-bulb territory, and the worst is yet to come! Here’s some locals trying to do something about that, and here’s some books. Links go to Bookshop, as per.
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The past thirty years has been quite a ride: in the 1990s, one of the biggest phenomena on television was the X-Files, which wrestled with the hidden weirdness of the 20th century (mostly in the form of aliens.) At the core of the UFO mythos was a nominally apolitical distrust of authority – the government was hiding something from us. They were hiding the truth. Of course, much of this distrust was coupled with (the publicly disavowed) white supremacist ideology. This gave us what could be called the Interbellum Consensus, sitting as it does between the Cold War and the War on Terror: the UFOlogical Weird and the Militiaman Hauntological.
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First of all, I realize June is not yet over. But I have read fifteen of the thirty books on my Goodreads goal, so it seemed like a good time to do another book round-up. It’s been a bit of an odd go, for reasons that will hopefully become clear, but we’ll see. Also worth noting is that most of the links do go to Goodreads pages; they are not subsidizing me, but it seemed more useful than anything else. (Image is The Magician King by Lev Grossman, which is mentioned but not pictured in the piece.)
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I think that this resonates with many of us because we were given such reason to hope for the future when we were younger and it didn’t pan out. We were born in the “End of History,” when western liberal democracy had triumphed over the Soviet Union, and the future was supposed to just be an asymptotically perfecting version of the present with no huge revisions.
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