how the fuck do I pay taxes

My favorite part of Mumbo Jumbo so far has been its mythology, detailed in Chapters 52 and 52. I love how it borrows on several different mythologies, weaving them together into a completely new thing. Mumbo Jumbo’s mythos made me reflect on ancient cultural borrowing and proximity in a new way. Before reading this book, I’d known that Roman mythology was basically a rip-off of Greek, but I hadn’t heard much else about mythologies being similar across cultures. Of course, I’m aware that most of what happened in Mumbo Jumbo’s mythology doesn’t appear in Egyptian, Greek, South American, or Judeo-Christian “official” myths, but it still drew attention to travel and inspiration between nations.  Take the book’s narrative about Dionysus being a follower of Osiris. While this relationship really happening is about as likely as the Titanic sinking in the 1920s, it’s still an example of someone from Greece interacting with someone from Egypt. Or take Osiris going to South Americ...

We’ve just barely gotten into Mumbo Jumbo in class, and one thing I’m enjoying is the sheer… postmodernism of it all. “Facts” and “history” are so confusingly melded into the book that I feel like I’m seeing traditional US history with this hazy, double-vision conspiracy behind it. I guess that’s the point. But there’s a separate and more interesting type of “double vision” that Reed also employs to great success. He highlights cases of historical double meanings, where a word or concept which is important and meaningful in an African culture is made evil and/or irrelevant in white American culture. Since, in Reed’s world, loas and magical people exist, the white establishment that disregards these ideas is wrong. For example, take two words whose meaning Reed explicates in the beginning of the novel: Voodoo and Mumbo Jumbo . Voodoo, in American popular culture use, is a broad, vaguely evil type of superstition that involves zombies and/or dolls that can be used to torture peopl...