Marlon James

[padraig (u.s.)]

Sidney Mintz's history of sugar, Sweetness and Power, has been on my to-read list years, should get around to that too at some point

 

[forclosure]

and yeah I'll have to check out his first two at some point

I'd assume w/o looking into it that the social bandit badman thing harks back to escaped slaves and maroon communities and so on, in folk memory

sounds like The Book of Night Women gets into that era - sounds like a really interesting book

I'm somewhat familiar with Haitian sugar plantation slavery, which was unimaginably brutal, can't JA was much better if any

You can FEEL the tension and heat in book of night women I grew up hearing about JA slavery through family but also old rastas who can tell you about the history of an area during colonialism

I like it more than Seven Killings in part because it really does capture how different it was in the Caribbean compared to America and the ever constant paranoia regarding slave rebellions and riots

 

[forclosure]

I never saw Public Enemies but I knew a girl in Sixth form who was really into it for some reason

 

[forclosure]

initial generation often has some kind of resistance purpose, even if it's just blindly lashing out against injustice and can't be articulated

if that generation survives and prospers, it becomes a business, its own power structure

new generation comes along and 1) isn't desperate, or as desperate as the founders 2) is more interested in business opportunities

banditry is at cross-purposes with organized crime

organized crime wants to coopt power structures. bandits bring down bad heat, and get gunned down in the street.

it was the major theme of that John Dillinger movie Michael Mann and Johnny Depp did awhile back

Dillinger and his ilk as anachronism in the era of crime as large-scale, organized business

To bring it to rap this is what separates a Jay Z from a Biggie where despite being born in BK roughly around the same time as Well as being a worshipper of money have Jay was always accused of being very callous even when he made his bullshit pivot from hustler to revolutionary

 

[luka]

i might read 7 killings one day. danny l liked it. thats the best i can do, sorry.

just picked this up for £4 in greenwich market. i cant tell from the opening paragraph if it is trying and failing to be literary or trying and failing to be hard boiled. it's bad but not so bad i want to chuck the book in the bin.

 

[luka]

hopefully its more pulp that booker prize

 

[forclosure]

hopefully its more pulp that booker prize

You'll get your bloodshed soon after that intro

 

[forclosure]

hopefully its more pulp that booker prize

Forgot to say the initial influence for Seven Killings is Ellroy cause James said so himself

Started out wanting to make a crime novel and it just developed on from there

 

[luka]

you can see that. i was reading some more today. hasn't really caught me yet but might do once i get more of a feel for the characters

 

[version]

A Brief history of seven killings

Started this the other day. It's clunky, but compelling. I like the way Marley's this peripheral presence whilst paradoxically being somewhat central. All these people talking to and about him, events connected to him, but he's always 'The Singer' and seems like a ghost. Maybe it's partly to avoid legal issues re: using his likeness, but it adds something to the story, like the mechanical shark breaking down in Jaws leading to a more sparing, effective use of it.

 

[version]

The stories about the police in this are horrendous. It is a novel and the specific incidents might be fiction, but we all know what they're like and that this stuff really goes on. There's something referred to as the 'Electric Boogie' where they strip someone naked and torture them with a couple of sections of frayed electrical cable that I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn was a genuine practice.

It's been doubly sinister reading it at the moment as I recently read a report of body parts being found in a rubbish dump in Kenya not far from a police station and after people had been reported missing since being arrested during the recent protests:

Kenyan police find more female body parts at Nairobi garbage dump

Police have been scouring site in Mukuru since mutilated corpses of at least six women were found on Friday

www.theguardian.com

The Independent Police Oversight Authority (Ipoa) on Friday had said that it was investigating whether there was any police involvement in the gruesome saga.

“The bodies, wrapped in bags and secured by nylon ropes, had visible marks of torture and mutilation,” it said, noting that the dumpsite was less than 100 metres from a police station.

Kenya’s feared police force is often accused of extrajudicial killings and other rights abuses, but convictions are rare.

A coalition of civil society and rights groups said the Mukuru discoveries came amid a “troubling surge” in cases of mysterious disappearances and abductions, particularly after the anti-tax protests.

 

[version]

It's good the way he steadily unfurls this map of Kingston as the story progresses and you become more familiar with the voices. The tics and currents within each voice start to tell stories of their own, e.g. none of the gangsters' girlfriends have names, they're just referred to as "woman," and there's a guy writing for Rolling Stone who keeps trying to tell the reader about "the real Jamaica," then undercutting it agonising over being a white guy from America doing that.

 

[version]

The rogue CIA man, William Adler, is clearly supposed to be, or is at least based on, Philip Agee. One of the other agents has a dig at him over the phone and blames him for the death of Richard Welch...

By 1968, Welch had been publicly identified as a CIA agent in the magazine, CounterSpy and in a book attributed to two Soviet bloc intelligence agents, Who's Who in the CIA. Former CIA agent Philip Agee published two books revealing the names of more than 1,000 alleged CIA officers in Europe and Africa, resulting in the revocation of Agee's passport. Haig v. Agee. "[...]The practice of naming CIA agents allegedly led directly to the 1975 assassination of CIA station chief Richard Welch in Greece."

 

[version]

you can see that. i was reading some more today. hasn't really caught me yet but might do once i get more of a feel for the characters

Did you ever finish it?

 

[luka]

I Gave it to the free 'library' at the train station a few days ago

 

[version]

I picked it up again recently and almost done with now. I like it. Still feel it's a bit clunky, but it's kept me reading. The different voices/characters are the strongest element. Reminds me of The Wire.

 

[shakahislop]

the one marlon james i've got i never read coz it's hardback and too heavy for my hands, i keep dropping it on my head