A review by 600bars
The Department of Truth, Vol. 2: The City Upon a Hill by James Tynion IV
4.0
This one was very exposition heavy, when Hawk explains the entire history of esotericism and Alestair Crowley and Thelema and the Theosophical society and whatnot. I thought it was a little overwhelming and would be hard to follow if you don’t already have an interest in this stuff, but how else is he going to get all this info dumped? This installment mentioned every shelf of the Metaphysics section at work lol
The section on the bigfoot hunter was very sad and reminded me of the posts I see on the subreddit for people who have lost family members to Qanon. It’s really heartbreaking the way conspiracies cause people to become isolated as they go deeper down the rabbit hole. It’s even more sad when the conspiracy is in fact true and no one believes them and thinks they’re crazy, as is the case with the bigfoot hunter in the book. I thought of the scene in Ben Lerner’s 10:04 where he has a student come to office hours who is clearly having schizo-sounding paranoia and seems to be breaking with reality, but he doesn’t know what to say to him because the things he says about surveillance and poisonous food are *technically* all true. This is what I always find really sad about people who fall into paranoia and Q and that sort of thing, because they’re just trying to make sense of a world that is genuinely confusing and fucked up, and they know something is wrong, which is true, but then they take a turn. I return to the Eve Sedgwick quote about conspiracy theories, which is that if we find out something is true for sure, we don’t really learn anything we didn’t already know.
The section on the bigfoot hunter was very sad and reminded me of the posts I see on the subreddit for people who have lost family members to Qanon. It’s really heartbreaking the way conspiracies cause people to become isolated as they go deeper down the rabbit hole. It’s even more sad when the conspiracy is in fact true and no one believes them and thinks they’re crazy, as is the case with the bigfoot hunter in the book. I thought of the scene in Ben Lerner’s 10:04 where he has a student come to office hours who is clearly having schizo-sounding paranoia and seems to be breaking with reality, but he doesn’t know what to say to him because the things he says about surveillance and poisonous food are *technically* all true. This is what I always find really sad about people who fall into paranoia and Q and that sort of thing, because they’re just trying to make sense of a world that is genuinely confusing and fucked up, and they know something is wrong, which is true, but then they take a turn. I return to the Eve Sedgwick quote about conspiracy theories, which is that if we find out something is true for sure, we don’t really learn anything we didn’t already know.