Maurice Dantec‘s new novel, Villa Vortex (in French only) is a stupendous book of over 800 pages, brilliant and obnoxious, exhilarating and exhausting, radical and reactionary–all of this in ways that are difficult to disentangle, or even to describe coherently. The book starts out (after an introduction in which the narrator informs us that he is already dead) as a kind of police procedural, a cop investigating various gruesome serial killings, against the backdrop of world events from 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall) to 2001 (the bombing of the World Trade Center). The cop has more philosophical ruminations than is usual for a police procedural–way too much Eurocentric whining about the decline of Western Civilization for my taste–but for a while it doesn’t seem all that unusual. But then, as the book proceeds, we get all sorts of unexpected genre shifts, strange discontinuities, and many amazing and wonderful individual passages (I especially loved the chapter where the narrator, strung out on methedrine, is hallucinating on Omaha Beach, where the Allies landed in 1944, thinking about, not only the carnage of that invasion, but of Hiroshima, Nagasaki as well, and beyond World War II of burning oil wells in Kuwait after the first Gulf War, and so on). After that, there are all sorts of metafictional twists; the narrator comes to think he is really a character in an unwritten novel by a French journalist-photographer who died in Sarajevo covering the Bosnian war; we get more and more paranoid formulations of the narrator’s general thesis about the “suicide” of Western Civilization (of which 9/11 is only the confirmation–Dantec sounds a lot like Baudrillard in places, despite his apparent dislike of Baudrillard). And then–the narrator is killed (as foreshadowed at the start of the book) with over 200 pages left to go; and that’s when things really get crazy, as the writing of the book itself is dramatized within the book as a messianic act capable of undoing and inverting history, by means of a comic book science-fiction narrative that combines the visceral experience of video games with theological speculation mixing Maurice Blanchot with the Kabbalah, with the 2nd-century Church Fathers Iranaeus and Origen, and with crackpot theorizing about the mystical powers of the DNA “meta-code.” Whew. On one page I will be blown away by the sheer excess of it all, and the weird, unexpected connections Dantec keeps on making; then, on the very next page, I will be irritated by inane rants about the evils of technological domination in the modern world, or about the need to stand firm with America in its fight against international terrorism. All in all, I’d say that Dantec is taking some very particular gripes he has that are parochially exclusive to France in the 1990s, and blowing them up to world-historical proportions. I’m also disappointed that Dantec seems to have dumped Deleuze (who was the main philosophical influence on Dantec’s previous book, the brilliant , and also apocalyptic, Babylon Babies, which I wrote about earlier), instead, the key philosophical figure here is a French writer I know little about, Raymond Abellio, but who seems to have made a bizarre synthesis between phenomenology, on the one hand, and a Gurdjieff- or Rudolf Steiner-like mysticism, on the other. (As far as I’m concerned, it’s hard to decide which I find more boring, phenomenology or Gurdjieff/Steiner/etc). In short, Dantec is “too French for his own good” (as Pauline Kael, I believe, once said of Marguerite Duras); in spite of which, Villa Vortex is filled with much that is audacious and wonderful. (Not to mention that, in the French context, there’s a lot to be said for a book that takes, as one of its key allegorical images of evil, the architectural monstrosity that is the Mitterand Library).
Maurice Dantec‘s new novel, Villa Vortex (in French only) is a stupendous book of over 800 pages, brilliant and obnoxious, exhilarating and exhausting, radical and reactionary–all of this in ways that are difficult to disentangle, or even to describe coherently. The book starts out (after an introduction in which the narrator informs us that he is already dead) as a kind of police procedural, a cop investigating various gruesome serial killings, against the backdrop of world events from 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall) to 2001 (the bombing of the World Trade Center). The cop has more philosophical ruminations than is usual for a police procedural–way too much Eurocentric whining about the decline of Western Civilization for my taste–but for a while it doesn’t seem all that unusual. But then, as the book proceeds, we get all sorts of unexpected genre shifts, strange discontinuities, and many amazing and wonderful individual passages (I especially loved the chapter where the narrator, strung out on methedrine, is hallucinating on Omaha Beach, where the Allies landed in 1944, thinking about, not only the carnage of that invasion, but of Hiroshima, Nagasaki as well, and beyond World War II of burning oil wells in Kuwait after the first Gulf War, and so on). After that, there are all sorts of metafictional twists; the narrator comes to think he is really a character in an unwritten novel by a French journalist-photographer who died in Sarajevo covering the Bosnian war; we get more and more paranoid formulations of the narrator’s general thesis about the “suicide” of Western Civilization (of which 9/11 is only the confirmation–Dantec sounds a lot like Baudrillard in places, despite his apparent dislike of Baudrillard). And then–the narrator is killed (as foreshadowed at the start of the book) with over 200 pages left to go; and that’s when things really get crazy, as the writing of the book itself is dramatized within the book as a messianic act capable of undoing and inverting history, by means of a comic book science-fiction narrative that combines the visceral experience of video games with theological speculation mixing Maurice Blanchot with the Kabbalah, with the 2nd-century Church Fathers Iranaeus and Origen, and with crackpot theorizing about the mystical powers of the DNA “meta-code.” Whew. On one page I will be blown away by the sheer excess of it all, and the weird, unexpected connections Dantec keeps on making; then, on the very next page, I will be irritated by inane rants about the evils of technological domination in the modern world, or about the need to stand firm with America in its fight against international terrorism. All in all, I’d say that Dantec is taking some very particular gripes he has that are parochially exclusive to France in the 1990s, and blowing them up to world-historical proportions. I’m also disappointed that Dantec seems to have dumped Deleuze (who was the main philosophical influence on Dantec’s previous book, the brilliant , and also apocalyptic, Babylon Babies, which I wrote about earlier), instead, the key philosophical figure here is a French writer I know little about, Raymond Abellio, but who seems to have made a bizarre synthesis between phenomenology, on the one hand, and a Gurdjieff- or Rudolf Steiner-like mysticism, on the other. (As far as I’m concerned, it’s hard to decide which I find more boring, phenomenology or Gurdjieff/Steiner/etc). In short, Dantec is “too French for his own good” (as Pauline Kael, I believe, once said of Marguerite Duras); in spite of which, Villa Vortex is filled with much that is audacious and wonderful. (Not to mention that, in the French context, there’s a lot to be said for a book that takes, as one of its key allegorical images of evil, the architectural monstrosity that is the Mitterand Library).
I kind of think the Harry Potter books are merely OK reading, not particularly great. And I do think they are ultimately right wing and crypto-Christian, as has been recently argued. The great contemporary children’s author is not J.K. Rowling, but the anti-religious humanist, Philip Pullman. But, that said, I have no sympathy for the current high-minded backlash of anti-Potterism…
I kind of think the Harry Potter books are merely OK reading, not particularly great. And I do think they are ultimately right wing and crypto-Christian, as has been recently argued. The great contemporary children’s author is not J.K. Rowling, but the anti-religious humanist, Philip Pullman. But, that said, I have no sympathy for the current high-minded backlash of anti-Potterism…
Continue reading “Anti-Harry Potter-ism”
I was alerted by Boing Boing to Warren Ellis’s new issue of Planetary, which is also a Batman (!) comic: Planetary/Batman: NIght on Earth (illustrated by John Cassaday). This is the most hilarious pisstake on the Caped Crusader since Grant Morrison presented him as a schizophrenic unable to resist the logic of a deliriously postmodern Joker in Arkham Asylum. In Ellis’ vision, a passage through a series of alternate Earths, with alternate Gotham Cities, gives us glimpses of a variety of Batman incarnations (Batmen? Batmans?), from raging psychopathic vigilante to empathetic New Ager (well, almost). It’s ridiculous to the point of nearly being sublime. Another direct hit for the incredibly prolific Mr. Ellis. (Did I mention that I am an obsessive reader of his blog, Die Puny Humans, as well?)
I was alerted by Boing Boing to Warren Ellis’s new issue of Planetary, which is also a Batman (!) comic: Planetary/Batman: NIght on Earth (illustrated by John Cassaday). This is the most hilarious pisstake on the Caped Crusader since Grant Morrison presented him as a schizophrenic unable to resist the logic of a deliriously postmodern Joker in Arkham Asylum. In Ellis’ vision, a passage through a series of alternate Earths, with alternate Gotham Cities, gives us glimpses of a variety of Batman incarnations (Batmen? Batmans?), from raging psychopathic vigilante to empathetic New Ager (well, almost). It’s ridiculous to the point of nearly being sublime. Another direct hit for the incredibly prolific Mr. Ellis. (Did I mention that I am an obsessive reader of his blog, Die Puny Humans, as well?)
Alain Joxe’s Empire of Disorder is a deeply problematic book. The author often comes off as a pompous ass, he is overly Franco- and Eurocentric (and I mean that in the worst possible way), and his theorizations are often annoyingly opaque. But this is still a worthwhile book, because of one thing: Joxe is very clear on the vile nature of the current, US-sponsored world system, with its toxic combination of “free-market” economics and predatory military adventurism. He shows how the US insists on having its way everywhere in the world, whether through economic coercion or overwhelming military force, but without even offering the protection that past empires (Rome, Austria-Hungary, etc) at least provided to their subjugated peoples. The result is a new world disorder: the vicious ethnic conflicts (Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechenya) and Mafia- or druglord-sponsored civil wars (Columbia) that have sprung up in the poorer (and not only the poorer) parts of the world since the fall of the Soviet Union are direct results of American imperial ambitions. By imposing the “free market” under conditions that devastate whole peoples, and by using our military might so capriciously, we have undermined any possiblity for democracy, civil society, and the peaceful resolution of conflicts over large parts of the globe. Joxe is not wrong in describing the American Empire (the gentler version under Clinton, no less than the meaner version under Bush) as fascistic and genocidal in terms of its effects (and perhaps even in terms of its overt intentions).
Alain Joxe’s Empire of Disorder is a deeply problematic book. The author often comes off as a pompous ass, he is overly Franco- and Eurocentric (and I mean that in the worst possible way), and his theorizations are often annoyingly opaque. But this is still a worthwhile book, because of one thing: Joxe is very clear on the vile nature of the current, US-sponsored world system, with its toxic combination of “free-market” economics and predatory military adventurism. He shows how the US insists on having its way everywhere in the world, whether through economic coercion or overwhelming military force, but without even offering the protection that past empires (Rome, Austria-Hungary, etc) at least provided to their subjugated peoples. The result is a new world disorder: the vicious ethnic conflicts (Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechenya) and Mafia- or druglord-sponsored civil wars (Columbia) that have sprung up in the poorer (and not only the poorer) parts of the world since the fall of the Soviet Union are direct results of American imperial ambitions. By imposing the “free market” under conditions that devastate whole peoples, and by using our military might so capriciously, we have undermined any possiblity for democracy, civil society, and the peaceful resolution of conflicts over large parts of the globe. Joxe is not wrong in describing the American Empire (the gentler version under Clinton, no less than the meaner version under Bush) as fascistic and genocidal in terms of its effects (and perhaps even in terms of its overt intentions).
Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan, has been widely acclaimed–rightly–as one of the best science fiction debuts of the last several years. Morgan transports the hardboiled detective style of Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler, or (more recently) Elmore Leonard, into a future world that he describes in convincing detail. Good prose style, good plotting, exciting read. But what interested me most about the novel was its take on the mind/body dilemma, the idea of downloading your consciousness into another body…
Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan, has been widely acclaimed–rightly–as one of the best science fiction debuts of the last several years. Morgan transports the hardboiled detective style of Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler, or (more recently) Elmore Leonard, into a future world that he describes in convincing detail. Good prose style, good plotting, exciting read. But what interested me most about the novel was its take on the mind/body dilemma, the idea of downloading your consciousness into another body…
Continue reading “Altered Carbon”
My wife, Jacalyn Harden, has just had her first book published. Double Cross: Japanese Americans in Black and White Chicago. The book is truly interdisciplinary: ethnography, social history, and race theory. It tells the story of a group of Japanese American political activists, now quite elderly, who were active in political struggles crossing racial, ethnic, and gender lines. It places this story in the context of the relocation of Japanese Americans to Chicago after World War II, at the same time that the Great Migration of blacks from the South to northern and midwestern industrial centers like Chicago was taking place. And it uses these experiences and this history in order to question our understanding of race in America, by showing how Japanese Americans stood in relation to both black people and white people, and how this means that race in America is more than just a question of “black and white.”
My wife, Jacalyn Harden, has just had her first book published. Double Cross: Japanese Americans in Black and White Chicago. The book is truly interdisciplinary: ethnography, social history, and race theory. It tells the story of a group of Japanese American political activists, now quite elderly, who were active in political struggles crossing racial, ethnic, and gender lines. It places this story in the context of the relocation of Japanese Americans to Chicago after World War II, at the same time that the Great Migration of blacks from the South to northern and midwestern industrial centers like Chicago was taking place. And it uses these experiences and this history in order to question our understanding of race in America, by showing how Japanese Americans stood in relation to both black people and white people, and how this means that race in America is more than just a question of “black and white.”
Greg Tate’s Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience is as brilliant a piece of music writing as I have read in a long while. Tate seeks both to evoke Hendrix’s sound, and to theorize Hendrix as a musician and cultural icon. He succeeds in both aims, with a coruscating prose style that crackles with sharp insights as much as with extravagant metaphors. Tate’s main goal in the book, or his “racial agenda,” as he self-consciously calls it, is to place Hendrix as a Black musician. That means dealing with the paradox that Hendrix appealed, and still continues to appeal, almost exclusively to a white audience. (Many other black musicians, before and since, have had such “crossover” appeal, but usually they have also had more following among blacks than Hendrix seems to have). Tate shows how fully grounded, both culturally and musically, Hendrix was in the African American experience; and he links the seemingly magical way Hendrix was able to “pass” among otherwise racist white audiences to the alchemy he performed on musical traditon. He illustrates both art and life from a variety of perspectives, ranging from a straightforward and insightful accounting of musical developments, to a deliriously poetic take on Hendrix’s semi-divine position in music history and in the history of black (and just plain American) culture. The volume also includes first-person accounts by other black folks who knew Hendrix, and even a horoscope. The overall effect of Tate’s book is to freshen what might have seemed utterly banal (since probably no popular musician of the last half century has been written about as extensively, and as hagiographically, as Hendrix has), as well as to put the question of Hendrix’s blackness into a totally new light.
Greg Tate’s Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience is as brilliant a piece of music writing as I have read in a long while. Tate seeks both to evoke Hendrix’s sound, and to theorize Hendrix as a musician and cultural icon. He succeeds in both aims, with a coruscating prose style that crackles with sharp insights as much as with extravagant metaphors. Tate’s main goal in the book, or his “racial agenda,” as he self-consciously calls it, is to place Hendrix as a Black musician. That means dealing with the paradox that Hendrix appealed, and still continues to appeal, almost exclusively to a white audience. (Many other black musicians, before and since, have had such “crossover” appeal, but usually they have also had more following among blacks than Hendrix seems to have). Tate shows how fully grounded, both culturally and musically, Hendrix was in the African American experience; and he links the seemingly magical way Hendrix was able to “pass” among otherwise racist white audiences to the alchemy he performed on musical traditon. He illustrates both art and life from a variety of perspectives, ranging from a straightforward and insightful accounting of musical developments, to a deliriously poetic take on Hendrix’s semi-divine position in music history and in the history of black (and just plain American) culture. The volume also includes first-person accounts by other black folks who knew Hendrix, and even a horoscope. The overall effect of Tate’s book is to freshen what might have seemed utterly banal (since probably no popular musician of the last half century has been written about as extensively, and as hagiographically, as Hendrix has), as well as to put the question of Hendrix’s blackness into a totally new light.
In Cory Doctorow‘s SF novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (also downloadable for free), death, scarcity, and mandatory work have been eliminated. The network is direct-wired into your brain, and mortality is averted by backing up your brain, and downloading it as needed into a new clone body. People spontaneously cooperate–well, most of the time–and wealth isn’t measured by money, but by your reputation among your peers. Doctorow imagines a society in which many of the last decade’s utopian fantasies about new technology are actually given flesh. Among other consequences, this means a society in which Disney World is seen as the absolute pinnacle of aesthetic achievement, the highest accomplishment of the human species. Doctorow doesn’t limn this situation with cheap irony, but takes it pretty much on its own terms. There’s something slightly creepy about the dampened affect, the sincerity and desire to please, the embrace of warmth without a hint of tragedy, the way unhappiness is pathologized and therefore not taken seriously; but the novel works because Doctorow doesn’t belabor this creepiness, and indeed seduces us into accepting it, as a reasonable price to pay for conquering mortality. So you might say that what I found disturbing about this novel was precisely its refusal to be disturbing; but I cannot really say that without falling into an infinite regress, a self-reflexive loop. For in fact, as I read the book I didn’t find it disturbing; and if I find this lack of disturbingness disturbing, it is only because what I find disturbing is that I didn’t find this lack of disturbingness disturbing; and so on, ad infinitum. I think this means that Cory Doctorow is far more postmodern than I am, or than Baudrillard is, or than Dave Eggars and the whole McSweeney’s gang could ever hope to be.
In Cory Doctorow‘s SF novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (also downloadable for free), death, scarcity, and mandatory work have been eliminated. The network is direct-wired into your brain, and mortality is averted by backing up your brain, and downloading it as needed into a new clone body. People spontaneously cooperate–well, most of the time–and wealth isn’t measured by money, but by your reputation among your peers. Doctorow imagines a society in which many of the last decade’s utopian fantasies about new technology are actually given flesh. Among other consequences, this means a society in which Disney World is seen as the absolute pinnacle of aesthetic achievement, the highest accomplishment of the human species. Doctorow doesn’t limn this situation with cheap irony, but takes it pretty much on its own terms. There’s something slightly creepy about the dampened affect, the sincerity and desire to please, the embrace of warmth without a hint of tragedy, the way unhappiness is pathologized and therefore not taken seriously; but the novel works because Doctorow doesn’t belabor this creepiness, and indeed seduces us into accepting it, as a reasonable price to pay for conquering mortality. So you might say that what I found disturbing about this novel was precisely its refusal to be disturbing; but I cannot really say that without falling into an infinite regress, a self-reflexive loop. For in fact, as I read the book I didn’t find it disturbing; and if I find this lack of disturbingness disturbing, it is only because what I find disturbing is that I didn’t find this lack of disturbingness disturbing; and so on, ad infinitum. I think this means that Cory Doctorow is far more postmodern than I am, or than Baudrillard is, or than Dave Eggars and the whole McSweeney’s gang could ever hope to be.
Breaking Open the Head, by Daniel Pinchbeck, is the most cited, and probably the best, book on psychedelic experiences since the works of the late Terence McKenna. I read it with great eagerness, and found it delightful in parts, irritating in others, and finally vastly disappointing…
Breaking Open the Head, by Daniel Pinchbeck, is the most cited, and probably the best, book on psychedelic experiences since the works of the late Terence McKenna. I read it with great eagerness, and found it delightful in parts, irritating in others, and finally vastly disappointing…
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Jeff Noon‘s latest novel, Falling Out of Cars, is one of the best things he’s ever done. It’s a moody, poetic book, set in an almost-contemporary England, where a strange malady has affected nearly everyone’s perception. People are no longer able to separate the signal from the noise. There is a blockage somewhere between transmission and reception. Images and sounds are affected with blur and static; texts and clocks become difficult to read; mirrors are positively dangerous…
Jeff Noon‘s latest novel, Falling Out of Cars, is one of the best things he’s ever done. It’s a moody, poetic book, set in an almost-contemporary England, where a strange malady has affected nearly everyone’s perception. People are no longer able to separate the signal from the noise. There is a blockage somewhere between transmission and reception. Images and sounds are affected with blur and static; texts and clocks become difficult to read; mirrors are positively dangerous…
Continue reading “Falling Out of Cars”