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The experience of reading Sex and Race is one of embrace and recoil as Rogers indiscriminately loads us down with the provable and the forever dodgy, the serious and the frivolous. Sometimes his footnotes, not always adequate or acceptable, tell when he was at work on a given aspect of his subject, in the way that an itemized credit card bill is a diary, a record of movement. The references go in clusters: in the 1920s, he was reading about Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and Persia; in the 1930s, he was reading the memoirs of English travelers in Africa. Sometimes, he clearly couldn’t go back to a particular library or text to check his facts again. And sometimes Sex and Race reads as though it had threatened to consume him, because the first-person voice breaks through in the book at times of what could be called narrative stress.

“Three words,” Gaz said. “Motion. Picture. History.” He got up, circled the table as he explained his movie: en route to Earth from a distant solar system, the crew of the Valedictorian crash-lands on a hostile planet inhabited by bat-winged pygmies, lobster-clawed cannibals, two-headed vampires. “That’s where your stuff comes in. I’m going to splice up your movies with mine.” He went on about the mixing-up of genres, chop-suey cinema, bringing together East and West. “We’d be the ambassadors of international film!”

“What’s your thinking on this?” Checkers asked me in Tagalog. “Is this man serious? Is he just an American fool?”

“Ask how much he’ll pay,” I said, “get twenty percent more, give him the movies, and show him to the door.”

I decided the caterpillar was too stupid to live. I put it into the carabid beetle’s container. The caterpillar was much larger, but it had no means of defense. The carabid sliced into it and lapped at its leaking blood. Because the caterpillar was so big, the carabid had to repeat his attack eight or ten times. The caterpillar crawled away frantically for the first few wounds, but it was so slow that its movements hardly inconvenienced the beetle drinking from its bleeding flank. After ten minutes or so the caterpillar lay still. Its jade flesh turned black as the beetle chewed and drained it.

The cat was making friends. The previous day when Emmet returned home, he had found four other cats loitering near his building. He worried what would happen if the cats jumped him when he left the house. The cats understood his language, but what passed among their heads was impenetrable to him. He had observed their movements all summer and listened to their sighs and spits and sounds, but he was no closer to infiltrating any part of it as a sign.

Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy form (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an improvised friction needs to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new.

Often, the three of them—burro, horse, rider—would simply stand in the middle of the plains. Aside from the occasional sigh or the halfhearted attempt at swatting away an insect, they all stood still, staring into the avoid. Brown flats, blue wall. From his animals, with their serenely sad, bulge-eyed gaze, Håkan seemed to have learned to gape into space. To this absent expression, he added a drooping jaw. They merely stood, completely absorbed by nothing. Time dissolved into the sky. There was little difference between landscape and spectators. Insensible things that existed in one another.