http://www.21cmagazine.com 21C Magazine Mon, 16 Apr 2012 03:43:56 +0000 http://www.21cmagazine.com en http://www.21cmagazine.com/The-Lament-of-the-Disconsolate-Chimera http://www.21cmagazine.com/following/21cmagazine.com/The-Lament-of-the-Disconsolate-Chimera Mon, 16 Apr 2012 03:43:56 +0000 21C Magazine 3211471 I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams. Mark Dery, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2012. by Darren Tofts <img src="http://payload45.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/3211471/badthoughts_700.jpg" border="0" width="690" height="469" width_o="690" height_o="469" src_o="http://payload45.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/3211471/badthoughts_o.jpg" align="left" data-mid="16444741" /> Mark Dery's I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts. Image Source: MarkDery.com Essayist, author, cultural critic, blogger (though he despises the term), public intellectual, enfant terrible. Just some of the monikers that have been or could be applied to Mark Dery. Dery has made an art form of the short, punchy and polemical screed. It was through such writing that he single-handedly put epoch-defining terms such as cyberspace and culture jamming into permanent circulation in the 1990s.With the eviscerating Pyrotechnic Insanitarium. American Culture on the Brink (1999) he carved out a new identity for himself as the psychopathologist of the American unconscious. Following all too slowly on its heels I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts (2012) takes us beyond the brink into the maw of something distastefully uncanny, something so horribly real that it can’t possibly exist. CGI cinema certainly has a lot to answer for. What is most appealing about both texts is their composition, by and large, of previously published essays. But this is no cynical commerce. On the contrary, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts reveals just how ferociously productive Dery has been during the past decade, especially when the final selection is only a snap, or rather sniper shot of the scribbling that the guy churns out. The book brings together essays published in diverse and at times obscure or at least specialized contexts that speak to different demographics and readerships. Collecting them into a single volume concentrates the intensity of the trip we are about to take, rather like pumping up the juice on the electric chair, or getting medieval on the plunger of a lethal injection. In the Pyrotechnic Insanitarium the conjoined metaphor of the theme park and the lunatic asylum gives a thumb nail sketch of the millennial American midway as a freakshow disporting pregnant men, homicidal clowns, cloned sheep and mordant space cults. In Bad Thoughts we are once again privy to a front seat view of the execution chamber where the spectres of American bad faith are gurneyed in for swift despatch at Dery’s merciless hands. The motif of the “drive-by essay” neatly captures Dery’s sense of what it means to live as a thinking person in America. There’s a shit load going down, it happens real fucking fast and the only way to see it first hand is to get in the Hummer and sit next to the shooter. There’s no time for casuistry here and the “embedded” writer is not simply along for the ride. As he says in the Introduction, he wants to “induce in [his] readers the vertigo that comes from gazing too long into the cultural abyss—then give them a loving shove, right over the edge”. Dery is clearly the 21st century’s most compelling and readable polymath of the perverse. He trades in American dreams, ranging from old chestnuts like his country’s obsession with guns, the Super Bowl and primal-return-to-wild-nature phenomena such as living with bears and other hopelessly unredeemable critters, the dread of hate-speech shock jocks, the Fantasy Decapitation Channel, the penetrative qualities of dental retractors, and the Church of Euthanasia. Dery writes persuasively on what appear to be left of field non-sequiturs like the death of Pope John Paul II, Facebook, the dark side of Father Christmas and, for me the most extraordinary piece of writing in the book, an essay on the suicide note as a literary genre, “Goodbye, Cruel Words”: “The awful truth (unthinkable to a writer) is that eloquent suicide notes are rarer than rare because suicide is the moment when language fails—fails to hoist us out of the pit, fails even to express the unbearable weight that drags someone about to murder himself down, into endless, silent night”. But where this book really kicks is with some deliciously mordant themes that seem to have piqued the attention of our author, whom I have characterized here (unashamedly pilfered from Tom Eliot) as the disconsolate chimera, in recognition of his fascination with the absolute cheerless, abject worst America has to offer (a phrase that sounds like the branding for a national cooking show franchise competing for whose cuisine reigns supreme in the name of fast food hell). The idea of the writer as chimera also captures Dery’s shape-shifting ability to move, wraith-like, in and out of America’s dark recesses, consorting with what or who he finds there for a time, then taking his leave without retaining a trace of ordure, slime or malevolence on his nimble feet. Like the obsessed carny-barker that pulls the punters in The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, Dery subtly graduates the tour, priming and preparing us for the horrors ahead. He guides us gently by the elbow through the extreme sport banality of zombie walks and the dusty closeness of medical libraries in search of Ballardian “invisible literature.” And when he feels the moment and mood lighting is right, he takes us further down into the musty piquancy of armpit fetishism, clown porn and “sneeze freaks, who rejoice at the thought of a nice, juicy honk, with plenty of spritz.” And did I neglect to mention lactating transsexuals, cuddly necrobabes and scrotal inflation? By now he has prepared us for a descent into the rancorous pit of repugnant fucked-up nastiness, an annotated reading of Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture. But Dery is no detached, aloof Marlin Perkins-styled anthropological observer (though this book would make a great TV series in the manner of Wild Kingdom but set in the office of Re/Search magazine with Dery as anchor cueing various live links to the crypt of the Capuchins and the cafeteria of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and State Museum). His loathing of Parfrey and his self-styled role as “pitchman on the pathological midway” is worn with pride on the cuffs of the leather jacket he is wont to wear in press photographs: If he were simply a buck-hungry retailer of the unspeakable, he’d go down easier. But he insists on a more exalted status than the Charles Kuralt of our psychic badlands: that of a Luciferian Noam Chomsky, speaking the awful truths about The Conspiracy and the Dictatorship of Political Correctness that the lapdog mainstream media dare not utter. Unfortunately, it’s well-nigh impossible to reconcile Parfrey’s lofty claims with his mean-spirited “retard” bashing, his seeming endorsement of wet-brained conspiracy theories about Waco, and his creepy coziness with one too many neo-Nazis and Odin-worshipping Aryan supremacists. One of the real surprises in reading these essays is the occasional tendency towards the autobiographical vignette. In a wonderfully lacerating essay on Lady Gaga’s glam pretensions and conceptual vacuity, Dery let’s the proverbial cat out of the bag and reveals his long-term cerebral identification with David Bowie, and in particular, contra Gaga, his actual knowledge of the cultural references he included in his lyrics. He also shows us his chops in a wonderfully erudite reading of Queen’s “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke.” Contrariwise, once again, he bristles, “Listen to Gaga and you’ll hear the sound of IQ points molting” (the final essay in the book, “Cortex Envy,” is probably the most candidly honest and autobiographical and deals with the subject of our author’s intelligence. Long Silence. Sorry, I don’t read and tell). But be wary, this is no pop-culture-icon bashing. Dery declares his pop and prog rock credentials elsewhere in the book, particularly his discerning taste for Relayer as the apotheosis of the Yes back catalogue. He is simply impatient with the “throbbingly dumb” nature of Lady Gaga’s shtick. In a book about confrontation and extreme conditions he is quick to point that when “Gaga learns that thinking is the most dangerous act of all, she’ll really be one scary monster.” A subsequent essay specifically on his identification with Ziggy and Aladdin (“When did I stop wanting to be Bowie?”) further reveals his capacity for writing solid music criticism; a welcome relief and breath of fresh air, to be sure, from the malodorous depths of cess-pool America and its cults, conspiracy theories, megalomania and, vis. Adam Parfrey, necrophilia, child torture and pedophilia. I ask you does it get any better? This is what Dery calls the American Gothic, a “stomach-plunging drop from reassuring myth to ugly truth – the distance between our dream of ourselves and the face staring back at us from the cultural mirror.” Bad Thoughts is a truly chilling revelation of all the things you don’t necessarily see in the mainstream media (whatever that means these days). But this is what makes Dery such an ethically important writer. In the Introduction he writes with candour of the writer’s responsibility to think bad thoughts, to “wander footloose through the mind’s labyrinth, following the thread of any idea that reels you in, no matter how arcane or depraved, obscene or blasphemous, untouchably controversial, irreducibly complex, or preposterous on its face.” And that thread, just to be clear, ain’t the one used by Ariadne that helped Theseus navigate the Cretan labyrinth and evade the Minotaur. It is more like a line of nauseous flux, a Burroughsian undifferentiated tissue emanating from the bowels of any-town America, live and coast-to-coast. The other responsibility that Dery exemplifies with a passion is to writing itself. The great thing about the essay as a form of social and cultural critique is its uncompromising demand on authors to not bore the shit out of the reader. Dery may or may not have affinities with other essayists past and present. I like to situate his writing as a kind of analogue (Eliot would say objective correlative) of the so-called “poison pen” of the 19th century British caricaturist George Cruickshank, whose most famous series of engravings, Monstrosities, lambasted the bombast and grotesque excess he associated with governance, royalty and British society. The measure of this responsibility fulfilled is of course the desire to sustain reading and put off the inevitable sense of an ending that threatens with every sentence. And of course the pleasure in language itself. I can remember many years ago the wonderful miniatures of verbal theatre that readily offered themselves up to be taken hostage in Dery’s writing for 21C and World Art magazines. Of Mike Davis’ City of Quartz, for instance, he observed that “every word… reads as if it were etched in an acid bath.” He describes the lectures of Terence McKenna as “tours de force of verbal virtuosity and packrat polymathy” and Manuel De Landa’s War in the Age of Intelligent Machines as “the internal monologue of a smart bomb seconds from impact.” And if this sounds fannish, it is, and I’m not the only writer on the book who enjoys what Dery does with the English language. Bruce Sterling’s Foreword to I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts is an astute and deliciously written set piece in its own right. Sure, it more than capably establishes the formaldehyde-infused mise en scène of the hit and run assaults we are in for (“He’s very good at going into areas of culture you wouldn’t care to visit yourself and performing autopsies”), as well as the debt we owe him for drawing our attention to what we normally don’t and certainly never want to see (“This world now looks a lot more like a Mark Dery world than it looked when he started writing”). The zest of Sterling’s text is a testament to Dery’s capacity to bring out the best in other writers, to enable them to not only write memorably, but to infuse every participle of their own writing with the bouquet, piquancy and commitment, no matter how distasteful, of the writing to come: “Having found the cult, he judiciously sips the Kool-Aid.” Like cyanide, that’s it in a nutshell. http://www.21cmagazine.com/Stelarc-The-Murmur-of-Skin http://www.21cmagazine.com/following/21cmagazine.com/Stelarc-The-Murmur-of-Skin Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:36:01 +0000 21C Magazine 2766619 On the eve of a 2012 Suspension Performance by the indefatigable performance artist Stelarc, 21•C re-ponders the obsolescence of the body. By Darren Tofts 2012 <img src="http://payload23.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2766619/stellarc1_700.jpg" border="0" width="690" height="345" width_o="690" height_o="345" src_o="http://payload23.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2766619/stellarc1_o.jpg" align="left" data-mid="14036989" /> <img src="http://payload23.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2766619/stellarc2_700.jpg" border="0" width="690" height="345" width_o="690" height_o="345" src_o="http://payload23.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2766619/stellarc2_o.jpg" align="left" data-mid="14036991" /> <img src="http://payload23.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2766619/stellarc3_700.jpg" border="0" width="690" height="340" width_o="690" height_o="340" src_o="http://payload23.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2766619/stellarc3_o.jpg" align="left" data-mid="14036992" /> “On the morning after the storm the body of the drowned giant was washed ashore on the beach five miles to the north-west of the city … I took up my position directly opposite the giant’s head, from where I could see the new arrivals and the children clambering over the legs and arms.” – J.G. Ballard, The Drowned Giant (1964). “The suspensions are experiments in bodily sensation, expressed in different spaces and in diverse situations. They are not actions for interpretation, nor require any explanation. They are not meant to generate any meaning. Rather they are sites of indifference and states of erasure. The body is empty, absent to its own agency and obsolete.” – Stelarc (2012) The human condition, the novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet once wrote, is to “be there.” Thinking in particular of the isolated characters of Samuel Beckett’s plays, the notion of presence on the stage exceeded the fictional drama of play, of acting. Like Shakespeare’s “bare forked animal,” the human body is vulnerable, alone, subject to a relentless flow of time and entropy beyond its control. Imagine, then, being hoisted four stories above a New York street, the body’s physical mobility compromised by an unforgiving system of hooks, wires and pulleys. Naked and silent, it too is there, “anaesthetised and pacified,” words carefully chosen by the artist to suggest suspension as an alternative state of being and of becoming. There in the 1985 Copenhagen City Suspension was 60 metres above the ground. Stelarc remembers how frightening the experience was, but at the same time the sensation of the body vibrating, simply occupying space. The dispassionate reference to “the body” here bristles with the artist’s dogged resistance to the use of any variation of the first person pronoun when referring to himself in performance. While objectified the suspended body is also liberated, free of the earth-bound tyranny of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, beyond the material necessity of movement through the work of its own locomotion. Achieving a temporary escape velocity it is already on the way to becoming something else, a virtual body capable of flow across networks without the need for wires and hooks. This emergence of the telematic body is implicit in the suspensions. Consider the artist’s closing remarks to the notes for the 1980 Pull Out/Pull Up: Event for Self-Suspension in Tokyo: “The skin is pulled out/the body is pulled up. Touch-down occurred after Approx. 20 minutes”. Stelarc performed 25 suspensions between 1978 and 1988. The very notion of suspension carries with it varying inflections to do with a state of abeyance, of something on hold in the physical and metaphysical sense. He frequently used the word “event” to describe such performances, suggesting an interim, enframed time and space that punctuates the diurnal flow of the everyday (suspensions typically lasted from sixty seconds to twenty minutes). The suspensions capture the moment when the body is no longer capable of agency. Conditional upon the infernal mechanics of the suspension apparatus (hooks, tension of wires, leverage of hoists) and the vagaries of atmospheric conditions, it performs involuntarily. Liberated or indeed denied the capacity to exercise will, the suspended body is no longer an active, reflexive subject in the Cartesian sense, but rather an involuntary zombie body subject to the will of other forces. The suspensions commenced Stelarc’s long-standing exploration of the obsolescence of the body, its material limitations as well as its contestable futures. The last suspension he performed in 1988, featuring the prosthetic Third Hand, was a fitting metaphor of the convergence of the somatic body and cybernetic technology into an informatic hybrid. But even here, and although obsolete, the body is not yet extinct but rather in suspense, waiting for whatever augmentations are required to extend it into the next phase of its evolution. The spectacle of the body in states of stress captures the fine, ambiguous line between cruelty and aesthetics, an idea that was central to the work of Antonin Artaud, an artist with whom Stelarc shares many affinities. Both the suspensions and the theatre of cruelty presume the abandonment of traditional conceptions of performance space and a more visceral communication between spectator and spectacle. And, in particular, the spectacle of the human body in transformation. As Artaud famously and somewhat presciently wrote in the First Manifesto on the theatre of cruelty, “it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.” This state of abeyance reveals how unreliable and inadequate the body is as a piece of equipment for living. Polemically, the suspensions insinuate genetics as bad code, planned obsolescence that must be enhanced and fortified to make the body more efficient under extreme conditions. Scientists Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline were forced to invent the term cyborg in 1960 to describe the speculative notion of a technologically extended conception of the human body capable of self-regulation in outer space. In Stelarc’s work the Renaissance perfection of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man is also found terribly wanting in the age of the nano-scale, organ printing, cryogenics and partial life. But this is no morbid hatred of the body, but rather an anticipatory consciousness imagining its techno-biotic evolution. Stelarc’s interest in the human skin as an artistic medium begins with the suspensions and continues with his current Ear on Arm project. SUSPENSIONS converges these sites as material landscapes of exploration, in which the physicality of both is exposed and amplified. The ear on arm is suggestive of the skin’s capacity for fluency and superfluity, malleability and excess. As well it captures its ability to stretch and adapt to force, pressure and unusual, even abnormal growth. A recent performance at the Lorne Sculpture 2011 biennial displayed the body as it is and what it might become. The artist lies supine on a four-metre replica of the ear on arm sculpture. Disembodied, displaced on a beach, it resembles some weird detritus washed up overnight; a strange visitation anticipated in the 1981 Seaside Suspension: Event for Wind and Waves in Jogashima, Japan. It is a figure literally and metaphorically writ large, a play of scale between a human body and a huge fragment of a body, whereby the artist’s arm is equivalent in size to a finger on its Leviathan avatar. Stelarc has lyrically described an acute aural sensation associated with the Copenhagen suspension as “the whooshing of the wind, the whirring of the crane motors and the creaking of the skin” (body tensions that were amplified as a further extension of the body’s central nervous system during the 1982 Moving/Modifying: Suspension for Obsolete Body event in Los Angeles). Think of the artist, then, suspended by wires and hooks, spinning above the distended ear on arm sculpture, listening to the murmur of its skin. Thanks to Scott Livesey Galleries, Melbourne http://www.21cmagazine.com/Dr-Benway-Notes-on-Some-Thing http://www.21cmagazine.com/following/21cmagazine.com/Dr-Benway-Notes-on-Some-Thing Wed, 08 Feb 2012 05:59:23 +0000 21C Magazine 2766493 Dr. Benway From Burroughs to Cronenberg: Notes on the work Some Thing By Ian Haig, 2012 <img src="http://payload23.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2766493/benway_700.jpg" border="0" width="690" height="345" width_o="690" height_o="345" src_o="http://payload23.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2766493/benway_o.jpg" align="left" data-mid="14036551" /> William S. Burroughs as Dr. Benway. Image Source: Brecht-o-Rama. <img src="http://payload23.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2766493/something1_700.jpg" border="0" width="690" height="331" width_o="690" height_o="331" src_o="http://payload23.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2766493/something1_o.jpg" align="left" data-mid="14037104" /> <img src="http://payload23.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2766493/something2_700.jpg" border="0" width="690" height="331" width_o="690" height_o="331" src_o="http://payload23.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2766493/something2_o.jpg" align="left" data-mid="14037105" /> <img src="http://payload23.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2766493/something3_700.jpg" border="0" width="690" height="331" width_o="690" height_o="331" src_o="http://payload23.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2766493/something3_o.jpg" align="left" data-mid="14037107" /> <img src="http://payload23.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2766493/something4_700.jpg" border="0" width="690" height="331" width_o="690" height_o="331" src_o="http://payload23.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2766493/something4_o.jpg" align="left" data-mid="14037109" /> <img src="http://payload23.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2766493/something5_700.jpg" border="0" width="690" height="331" width_o="690" height_o="331" src_o="http://payload23.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2766493/something5_o.jpg" align="left" data-mid="14037110" /> Some Thing by Ian Haig Images. Image Source: IanHaig.net Some Thing represents the unclassifiable body, a body that slips out of the comfortable category of what we think of as human. In an attempt to describe accurately what this pulsating mass of melted flesh and guts actually is, the title Some Thing seems like an appropriate starting point. It is a body that was possibly once human and is now on its way to being something else, transformed into another thing. Then again this thing could be sub-human or post-human. We can’t quite be sure. The work itself is a bodily fusion of David Cronenberg’s New Flesh along with assorted other viscera from numerous horror movies and William S. Burroughs’ transmuted bodies that populate Naked Lunch. When referring to the junkie’s mutating body in Naked Lunch, Burroughs sees it as losing its "human citizenship and was in consequence, a creature without a species". Some Thing is perhaps a creature without a species, an aberration of flesh, guts and gristle. It is what Burroughs refers to as un-D.T. – Undifferentiated Tissue – a condition whereby the body and its flesh liquefies and transforms into a new form, literally seeing parts of the body consume itself with its own flesh. With this in mind, the notion of the body in a state of transmutation is central to the work. This is a body that maybe represents the subjective state of disease or illness, and how such conditions alter our very imaginings of what the body is. Our latent fears, unconscious horror and disgust of the body manifest as a thing not of this world. The work too is concerned with ideas of attraction/repulsion of the body and how the two are closer aligned then we think. Mark Dery refers to an emotion of sorts called the pathological sublime which he has defined as “an aesthetic emotion that is equal parts horror and wonder, inspired by works of art (or nature) that hold beauty and repulsion in perfect, quivering tension." The work also references David Cronenberg’s oft quoted quip that we should have beauty pageants for the interior of our bodies. Cronenberg maintains that we are disturbed by our own moist interiors because we lack an aesthetic classification for them, we reject, rather than rationalize. For Cronenberg the body is a polymorphously perverse zone, an inside out entity with multiple functions and genders, latent and repressed psychologies, and new forms of sexuality. For Cronenebrg the body embodies notions of the abject and the beautifully repulsive co existing on their own terms. Indeed the horror film has long been the cultural site of dread for the internal body, destroying and breaking apart the body while revealing its dark and wet insides in its own genre of ‘body horror’. It therefore makes sense that the project’s initial starting point was a scene in David Cronenberg’s The Fly, which features an experiment on a Baboon as it travels through a matter transporter/telepod. As the Baboon passes through the telepod its entire body is turned inside out, into a disturbing, writhing collection of organs, viscera and bones. What if such an experiment took place on a human, what would the result be, what would it look like? Many of us will never have the opportunity to view our own interiors, our skeletons and our bloody viscera of organs. Our internal selves remain largely invisible too us, abstract and removed from reality even though they are indeed part of us, our interior’s remain a mystery. Some Thing not only takes its visceral aesthetic from the horror movie, but one also expects to see such a gory prosthetic and pulsating bodily form within the world of a movie and not the real world. ie: John Carpenter’s The Thing or Stuart Gordon’s Re-animator. The illusionary world of film fuses here with the real in the uncanny material of a strange cinematic object. The teleopd of cinema delivering the work into the real world, cinema made flesh. Some Thing too explores the idea of the death of our bodies, that is, death as the ultimate bodily transformation. Death renders the body as a cadaver, a thing other than a live body, and in turn the body decomposed or turned to ash too becomes another thing, another material. However the more direct reference here is perhaps the development and introduction of new kinds of improved death technologies, such as those nicknamed The Digester, currently used in the cattle industry. The Digester involves a process known as tissue digestion or waste reduction, of mixing potassium hydroxide with the carcass to produce a slurry of liquefied matter. With plans for The Digester to be introduced as a more efficient way of disposing of dead humans, and with less environmental impact, the process sees that the body is liquefied like a human slurpee and flushed into the sewerage. No muss, no fuss. No longer in the ground decomposing and returning to the earth, or incinerated and its fumes symbolically rising into the ether and ashes scattered, the body is a waste product to be disposed of. The liquefied body sees the erasure of all features, all gender, all identity, returning it to a material state of primordial ooze. Some Thing too is about the body transformed into unclassifiable meat, the body as a form of raw and exposed gristle, fat and muscle, stripped of its exterior shell or as the Heaven’s Gate cult referred to the body as ‘your container.’ The body lays pathetically exposed, vulnerable and possibly in some kind of pain, or then again maybe this body is only half alive or possibly being born, trapped in a state between life and death. While Solariums, liposuction, plastic surgery, body building, vaginal reconstruction and other body modifications all point to an amplified notion of what the body can be, such procedures not only show us just how malleable flesh is but also how strangely limited the body is, in that such procedures are necessary to enhance and extend it. While technology may be advancing to dizzying heights, in terms of Darwinian evolution we are trapped within our meat bodies, left behind in the rush of the technological vortex, and they don’t look like evolving anytime soon. The body isn’t obsolete, the body is meat. Some Thing references this teratological body, the body turned inside out, its internal viscera exposed or appearing in places that it shouldn’t, the body engulfed by its own flesh, mutated like a DNA experiment that has gone horribly, horribly wrong. Welcome to the Future. Some Thing references all of these things and more. Credits Concept, development, direction and original model: Ian Haig,
 Production and fabrication: Fiona Edwards,
 Animatronics and electronics: Martin James, Sound: PH2 (Philip Brophy and Philip Samartzis)
 Thanks to Drew Harding, John Barcham and Creature Technology Ltd, 
Funded with the assistance of the Australia Council, Inter-Arts Office, 2011. http://www.21cmagazine.com/Ben-Marcus-The-Flame-Alphabet http://www.21cmagazine.com/following/21cmagazine.com/Ben-Marcus-The-Flame-Alphabet Mon, 16 Jan 2012 11:15:12 +0000 21C Magazine 2613739 Fantasies of Trauma and the Experiment of Coherency. In Ben Marcus’ searing, apocalyptic novel The Flame Alphabet
 it is the toxicity of language itself that brings about the end. Review by Eric Lindley January 2012 <img src="http://payload15.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2613739/Ben_Marcus_700.jpg" border="0" width="690" height="406" width_o="690" height_o="406" src_o="http://payload15.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2613739/Ben_Marcus_o.jpg" align="left" data-mid="13227016" /> Ben Marcus. Image Source: Skylight Books Ben Marcus wrote this book, which is to say he either typed it into a computer or used a stylus, pen or pencil to scratch pigment into a page or roll of paper – the tools available to us humans at our particular anchor in time.* He did this in roughly a year, after developing the concept: a man – through his own somewhat distorted lens on reality – relates his recent experiences in a world wherein language, spoken and written, is discovered to harm its producers and recipients. I will try not to ruin it for you, but the inhabitants of this world eventually determine that the formation of meaning itself – the moment of insight, in which the gestalt of the lexeme coalesces in the mind of the listener/reader – is the problem; i.e. when you understand a word, you become sick: and more words, more understanding makes you sicker. The toxicity of comprehension itself, which renders harmful nearly any communication between people, is an elegant literalization of some of the more figurative consequences of meaning-making. I refer to the perennial anxieties of the establishment and reproduction of meaning that have filled philosophers and critics with excitement and dread as distantly as human history has surviving records – at least for those of us who like to interpret ancient artifacts in this way. This reification guts words and phrases of their communicative power and integrates them into systems of exchange that rely on a currency of socio-political control. The consequence is that language, with all its potential to build understanding and cooperation, becomes a weapon, used and abused by those at all levels of more directly observable stations of power, as well as those who are not empowered in any other way. More than a typical weapon, though, it becomes an unfocused, misunderstood, and generally uncontrollable weapon that encroaches upon the most casual or benignly utile speech, and locks it into a web of injury and subjugation. Something that starts small, in pinpricks across human society, and intensifies as it spreads: a disease. A more positive analogy can be drawn to the process of Marcus, the writer, who in creating the work found himself experimenting with a form that will doubtlessly be perceived as far less “experimental” than much of his preceding writing: that is, broadly comprehensible contemporary fiction. Marcus found himself completing full-circle concepts and narrative events that in earlier work would have been more shielded or omitted entirely, so that the reader would have had to do the work to complete these events and concepts with materials available in bits and pieces or, in the absence of even that, with materials of their own imagining.** In stark contrast to the encyclopedic long-form work Age of Wire and String, and the novel, Notable American Women which – deliberately, in my mind – undercut its own dramatic arc with gorgeous and frightening linguistic and narrative construction, in The Flame Alphabet Marcus creates a consistent narrator who relates a linear plot filled with fully-drawn characters in a coherently rendered setting. The world may operate by slightly different rules, and the characters may exhibit traits that resemble horrifying augmentations of the narrator’s anxieties – and indeed, typical familial anxieties – but it’s clear that Marcus is composing something close to a proper, contemporary novel. He even admits that some readers might find it suspenseful at times – an aside in which I read an endearing mix of bashful pride. He does all this in the service of a book that is at times gripping – I found my face contorted in disgust, suspense, and horror as I read it in the NYC subway, once missing a stop I was so immersed, and eventually, after days of reading the book whenever I had a free moment, having to finish it on the street, tucked under the shade of scaffolding, when I just couldn’t wait any longer. I should note, though, that moments of overt strategy do poke through: self-conscious foreshadowing of the kind that makes Ishiguro novels sometimes feel like essays – in the most wonderful possible way – appears and invokes the notion that indeed Marcus is manufacturing the story, manufacturing suspense. The story is no less suspenseful or effective as a result, but rather, like the best descriptive language in the book, this foreshadowing manages to make the reader aware of the tools of artifice at the same time that the power of that artifice is heightened, drawing the critical eye into sharper focus, just as the joy – or more often terror – of the characters described becomes more vivid, and more embodied. An alarmed and adamantly self-proclaimed “experimental” writer – if indeed those do exist – might accuse Marcus of enacting the problematic of the novel; he has shaped and clarified his most recent writing into works that might be absorbed into the currency of contemporary literature, and toes a dangerous line in doing so. His writing might be emptied of communicative power and simply tossed around as a symbol, a reference to “experimental” writing, or even simply presented as something to aspire to without regard to the theoretical and historical forces at play in creating such a work. Even if this happens, however – as it often does with any great work in the position to be read by a large number of people – the novel itself guards against such a trend: it exposes some of its own construction, causing a push and pull between immersion and criticality; it enacts the dangerous metaphor of reification as a driving force in its plot, which if it is read through something approaching my particular lens, encourages a considered criticality that is not immune to but at least strives away from simple, symbolic exchange; it uses a kind of rich, oblique metaphor that – though I have no proof or even any anecdotal evidence of this – feels to me like it encourages a powerful mix of empathy and intuitive semantic analysis in the mind of the reader. As a result, the seeds of a heightened criticality of writing are contained in the novel, and have the potential to spread. Even if the work does get swallowed in the stream***, if it is asked to participate in the epidemic of reification, it may catalyze something of a cure, an antidote. * I apologize – the book lends itself to a particularly panoramic, evolutionary perspective. **This, I feel, is a central question in art, as insight is managed in time, and either given immediately, stored up and delivered to the reader/viewer all at once, released gradually over time, or left in varying amounts for the reader to bridge. “Experimental” art seems to be work that withholds insight to whomever is experiencing the piece, whether it be in the work itself or the context in which it’s presented. “Experimental” is most often a label given to work by someone shut out of interpretation by the lack of tools available to them, or those constructing work they understand will shut some readers out. *** I should say that I am an avid reader and supporter of contemporary writing. By no means does my characterization of the often-empty symbolic exchange inherent in mass-consumption of literature (or any media or product) diminish my appreciation for the beauty and criticality of such work. Literature in particular operates on a number of levels, many of which have the power to change entire cultures for the better, regardless of – and sometimes even due to – their status as cultural signifiers. Coda: I heard Ben Marcus say before a reading that he wanted to explore a story where a character was stripped of all the things it loved, and that impulse led him to write this novel, where a man loses his wife and daughter. I forget exactly if he talked about losing language, as well, but that too seems to be a part of this fantasy of loss and pain. With his other work, I’ve been interested in his imagination of family members harming one another, and of the sense of loss – profound, existential loss – that pervades the reading, in the depiction of a physical world in disintegration. Marcus doesn’t so much expose the psychological undercurrents of the family – though he does do this, and does it well – as he does explore the worst possible motivations for the damage that family members do to one another. So, what? Why? What do we take away from writing that is in part a fantasy of pain and willful injury? We have to grapple not only with the question of how we deal with this exposure of our latent, usually unconsummated tendency to harm one another, but also with the emphatically consummated readerly desire to explore descriptions of events that are more horrifying than they are in reality. There are many approaches to explaining this, but I like to think – if magically – of Marcus as an essential figure in our evolution, working to ensure the survival of our species by providing rehearsals of loss, of failure, of battling the dark possibilities of family and language, in order to either help us avert what is to come, or at the very least, prepare us for the future.* *** Eric Lindley (AKA Careful) is one of America’s living makers-of-things. You can find his work in Fence, Joyland, and many other places, with a cursory google search. This review first appeared at HTML Giant <img src="http://payload15.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2613739/Ben_Marcus_700.jpg" border="0" width="690" height="406" width_o="690" height_o="406" src_o="http://payload15.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2613739/Ben_Marcus_o.jpg" align="left" data-mid="13227016" /> http://www.21cmagazine.com/Colson-Whitehead-Zero-Hour-at-Zone-One http://www.21cmagazine.com/following/21cmagazine.com/Colson-Whitehead-Zero-Hour-at-Zone-One Mon, 16 Jan 2012 10:58:20 +0000 21C Magazine 2613657 Colson Whitehead’s take on the Zombie mythos is both a literary tour de force and a tale of mesmerizing mayhem. Review by Ashley Crawford January 2012 <img src="http://payload15.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2613657/colson_700.jpg" border="0" width="690" height="279" width_o="690" height_o="279" src_o="http://payload15.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2613657/colson_o.jpg" align="left" data-mid="13226727" /> <img src="http://payload15.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2613657/zonebook_700.jpg" border="0" width="690" height="279" width_o="690" height_o="279" src_o="http://payload15.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2613657/zonebook_o.jpg" align="left" data-mid="13226764" /> Colson Whitehead. Image Source: The Atlantic The zombies, as is there wont, simply refuse to die. What should have been a passing fad for festering flesh seems hell-bent on its throttling and grisly grip on contemporary culture’s arterial vein, and blackened blood and gangrenous gore continue to spout unabated. Movies and television aside, the dead seem to infest books – instead of the Death of the Book we are experiencing the Books of the Dead. And the mutations are following; just consider Seth Grahame-Smith’s bizarre amalgamation of prurient Jane Austen and zombie semiotics – Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I’m a comparative newbie to all things zombie in the new century. The designer of the 21c site, Mick, put me onto Robert Kirkman’s gripping graphic novel series The Walking Dead, a visceral, epic, heart thumping ride through a bleak wilderness that had moments of real human empathy. My daughter, something of a zombie aficionado, introduced me to Max Brooks’ World War Z, a fascinating, multi-faceted series of eye-witness reports post the end days. Then, pre a laborious eight hour flight to China, someone suggested Justin Cronin’s The Passage, a page turner ideal for, well, an eight hour flight, but by no means a literary masterpiece. Which brings us to Colson Whitehead and Zone One. Whitehead is by no means a genre writer. He is what is known as an award-winning “literary” writer with five previous books under his belt: Sag Harbor; The Intuitionist (which did carry a strong scent of speculative fiction), which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award; John Henry Days, which won both the Young Lions Fiction Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Apex Hides the Hurt, winner of the PEN Oakland Award. He has also written a book of essays about his home town, The Colossus of New York. Whitehead is also a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. So what the hell’s he doing writing a zombie novel? Well, the reality is he is and he isn’t, which has left many Amazon readers perplexed (and the folk who have given the book one star truly proves the existence of zombies in our midst). “Then as now, they believed the magic of the island would cure them of their sickness.” The island is, of course, Manhattan and Zone One is essentially Whitehead’s paean to a lost city. Throughout one is reminded of the somewhat melancholic moments of Jonathan Lethem’s books (another writer who has dabbled in ‘genre’). Not surprisingly, a smidgeon of research reveals that not only are Lethem and Whitehead from Brooklyn, they even play poker each and every week when book tours don’t collide with their schedules. Both authors carry a burden of nostalgia for an older New York City, a far more multi-textured habitat, a place where “the city itself was as bewitched by the past as the little creatures who skittered on its back. The city refused to let them go.” This is not just a post-9/11 response (as Don DeLillo’s Falling Man clearly is), however the residents do suffer from PASD: “Post Apocalyptic Stress Disorder.” It is just as much a knee-jerk reaction to a city embroiled in bureaucracy and a Kafkian labyrinth of miniscule rules, a city that once prided itself on bridled anarchy and smoke-filled bars with dim lights and solid camaraderie. (Ironically, given the life expectancy in Zone One, one of characters chain smokes pilfered cigarettes while being harangued about the habits’ dangers by another.) In what is no doubt a nod to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, what are left of the major corporations ‘sponsor’ the war effort. Looting regulations protect only the corporate brands that actively sponsor the fledgling government’s tactics. It is, poignantly, the very minions of bureaucracy that suffer the worst fate, those who fill out pointless forms and photocopy meaningless documents ad nauseum. In Whitehead’s world there are different zombies (he never uses the term ‘zombie’ specifically, they are ‘the dead,’ ‘stragglers’ or ‘skels’ – short for skeletons). The stragglers are, at least for most of the book, relatively harmless. The sit or stand repeating the same mind-numbing function they did before the plague. In a particularly chilling moment, the central figure of the narrative, Mark Spitz and his compatriot ‘sweepers’ come across a straggler standing over a photocopy machine, staring into the abyss of its dead scanning screen. “Why don’t we let him stay?” Mark Spitz didn’t know why he said it. “He’s not hurting anyone. Look at this room. We’re standing in the most depressing room in the entire city.” They shoot the straggler, of course. But Whitehead has made his point; all too many of us are already stragglers, undertaking pointless, heart-drying tasks day in, day out. As Mark Dery notes in his 21C essay Dead Men Walking: “It’s only a matter of time, after the chairs are jammed against the doors and the windows are nailed shut, before the survivors succumb to power struggles and paranoia. Twenty eight days later, they’re eating each other. Worse yet, you can’t always tell Us from Them. ‘Eyewitness accounts described the assassins as ordinary-looking people,’ says a radio announcer in Night of the Living Dead.” Of course as things appear to stabilize, the sweepers are required to fill out paperwork for each ‘kill’ of the dead, “So tentative bureaucracy rose from the amino-acid pools of madness, per its custom.” Like Lethem, Whitehead is clearly not genre-phobic. As he says on his website; “If you are hung up on labels, yes, the book is ‘another genre outing’ for me. Zone One is a zombie novel in the way The Intuitionist is a detective novel,” and as such he leaps into many of the zombie cliché’s gleefully. Like most zombie novels, the toxic spermatozoa lies in cinema. “My childhood tutelage in the apocalypse came from movies, as opposed to books,” Whitehead writes. “A film festival covering the master texts for Zone One would screen the following (1956-1985): “The first Romero Trilogy (Sane Black Man Vs. The Crazy White People) John Carpenter’s Urban Blight (Assault on Precinct 13, Escape From New York) Heston as Last White Guy on Earth (Planet of the Apes, Omega Man, Soylent Green) S.A.V.’s - Sick Armored Vehicles (Damnation Alley, The Road Warrior) My Lover, My Monster (Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1956, 1978) Mr. Dan O’Bannon (Alien, Return of the Living Dead) ‘70s NY as Crucible of the Soul (Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver, The Warriors, et al.) “Are they trendy fast or classic slow? I like my zombies like I like my women: slow and implacable.” And, as he told Harpers magazine: “When I was a youngster, comic books and novels such as Lucifer’s Hammer and The Stand provided models of the apocalypse, but movies were my true primer – the glorious feel-bad dystopian flicks of the 1960s and 1970s. The inexplicable monsters of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead were my template for this book, as they are for everything we currently categorize as a zombie text. (Happy to discuss aspects of the novel I Am Legend with advanced students!) I was in fifth or sixth grade when the local New York PBS affiliate broadcast the original Romero movie for Halloween, and as someone who rarely encountered the Strong Black Protagonist in movies – outside of blaxploitation flicks – the movie was a revelation. Night of the Living Dead is the story of a black man on the run from the mob of white people who want to destroy him, literally devour him – in other words, it’s a crucial subplot of the America narrative.” Responding to a question about the divisions between ‘literary’ fiction and ‘genre’ fiction in The Atlantic, Whitehead places Godot on an asteroid. “They don’t mean anything to me. They’re useful for bookstores, obviously. They’re useful for fans. You can figure out what's coming out in the same style of other books you like. But as a writer they have no use for me in my day-to-day work experience. “I was inspired to become a writer by horror movies and science fiction. The fantastic effects of magic realism, Garcia Marquez, the crazy, absurd landscapes of Beckett – to me, they’re just variations on the fantasy books I grew up on. Waiting for Godot takes place on a weird asteroid heading towards the sun, that’s how I see it. It’s not a real place – it’s a fantastic place. So what makes it different from a small planet in outer space? What makes it different from a post-apocalyptic landscape? Not much in my mind.” What sets Zone One apart from most zombie/apocalypse texts is its joyful plundering of both high- and low-brow culture. On his website Whitehead supplies a ‘soundtrack’ to Zone One of three songs that came out between 1977-1992; Wire’s Reuters, Leonard Cohen’s The Future and Joy Division’s Decades. His book is divided into three chapters ostensibly running over three days (although embracing years as Mark Spitz reminisces), each beginning with a quote – Walter Benjamin from Dream Kitsch, Ezra Pound from Hugh Selwyn Mauberly and Public Enemy from Welcome to the Terrordome. Whitehead veers from the popularist to the philosophical in equal degrees while keeping his narrative on an essentially existentialist course. Zone One is a bravura performance indeed. “As it had been before, per the myth of this melting-pot city. The city did not care for your story, the particular narrative of your reinvention; it took them all in.” http://www.21cmagazine.com/Darren-Tofts-Memory-Trade http://www.21cmagazine.com/following/21cmagazine.com/Darren-Tofts-Memory-Trade Wed, 11 Jan 2012 00:19:01 +0000 21C Magazine 2582764 Memory Trade By Darren Tofts and Murray McKeich A free download from 21•C<img src="http://payload14.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2582764/memorytrade_700.jpg" border="0" width="690" height="587" width_o="690" height_o="587" src_o="http://payload14.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2582764/memorytrade_o.jpg" align="left" data-mid="13054989" /> Memory Trade is a pulsating romp through the pre-life of our digitized age. It is a hybrid stitch-up of text and image going mano-o-mano page by page. It is hyper-caffeinated scholarly musing with a touch of lysergic acid. It is a world where Samuel Beckett and Roland Barthes trade cigars with Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick and Giles Deleuze while William Gibson and James Joyce talk emailia and cyberspace. First published in 1998 in analog form, Memory Trade was conceived by Darren Tofts and Murray McKeich as a manic dialogue of thought and image. Like Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces, it is an ‘imaginary’ history of often unlikely, but all too accurate linkages. Memory Trade is an exploration, in text and image, of the unconscious of cyberculture, its silent, secret prehistory. From Plato’s Cave to Borges’ literary labyrinths, Freud’s Mystic Writing-Pad, and Joyce’s bairdboard bombarment, Memory Trade is an hallucinogenic palimpsest of contemporary culture. Memory Trade rapidly sold-out and has been much sought after ever since. Fourteen years after it first appeared Memory Trade refuses to age or become irrelevant, thus 21C is proud to see it arise, phoenix-like, as an e-book that is as sumptuous as the original. – Ashley Crawford, Editor, 21•C magazine, 2012 “Darren Tofts and Murray McKeich have made a valuable contribution to an emergent field. The irony, of course, is that rather than recycle outdated ideas in fancy computer hypertext, they have come up with an original way of thinking and writing the world in the familiar form of the book.” – McKenzie Wark, RealTime “Memory Trade is directed against the new-fangled, self- important idea that, in our cyber age, "the book", meaning old-fashioned literature, is dead and buried, along with all rational, linear thought. This book argues that we are always in between the old and the new, between the historical and the possible – and it argues that the poetic forms we already have already contain the possibilities for the slow revolution that will beset us in future cybercultures.” – Adrian Martin, preface for Memory Trade. “To speak of the prehistory of cyberculture means to manufacture one such context, and simultaneously to look into our future-past in search of the questions that we need to ask of the present. It is important work, and I’m happy that this great book is now set to resume it.” – Giovanni Tiso Bat, Bean, Beam “Memory Trade is an impeccably researched and stimulating book... Murray McKeich’s diabolically beautiful digital images reveal a clear resonance between writer and artist. The machine is firmly embedded within classical flesh in McKeich’s dark montages, echoing, but with more menace, Tofts’ arguments.” – Megan Heyward, UTS Review “You should make room on your bookshelf next to Marshall McLuhan and Walter J. Ong because – love it or hate it – you will want to own a copy of Darren Tofts and Murray McKeich’s Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture. Any text that gives birth to so many possible areas of future investigation is a rare read and one that invites us to return again and again.” – Carolyn Guertin, Resource Centre for Cyberculture Studies “Memory Trade is a major contribution to the current debate. This is an elaborate, complex and compact book which is as remarkable for its splendid satiric posthuman illustrations and its high quality production as for the intellectual and perceptual richness and the intensity of its writing.” – Donald Theall, Postmodern Culture “Part coffee table book, part academic analysis, Memory Trade blurs some boundaries with impressive results. There is a kind of palpable glee at work in the book as Tofts embraces his ideas with the playful relish of an idea-hacker who has stumbled onto a cache of good info, breathlessly linking theorist to theorist, idea to idea.” – David Cox, Leonardo “McKeich’s images echo the aliens’ fighting machine in the neo-Gothic Alien movies, the contorted dolls of Hans Bellmer, the graphic inventiveness of Svenberg and the acuity of photographer artist Frederick Sommer’s minutia. There is a sense of knowing here that amplifies the erudition of the text to produce an effect that counters the pundits and spin-merchants of the multimedia superhighway. – Mike Leggett, Fine Art Forum “In this tightly written volume, Australian author and academic Darren Tofts (internationally known for his essays with the fine science/cyberculture journal 21C) surveys cyberculture's hidden legacy in literary theory, surrealism, and semiotics. Tofts takes great care to critically reference his material, and the lavish artwork vividly conveys the book's high production values. Necessary reading to track the pre-World War II aesthetics and artistic culture that would give rise to Eisenhower's military-industrial complex, showing how artistic movements mutated as 'life conditions' (mass psycho-social, memetic, and economic baselines) changed into radically new forms.” – Alex Burns, Amazon A free download from 21•C http://www.21cmagazine.com/21-C-2012 http://www.21cmagazine.com/following/21cmagazine.com/21-C-2012 Tue, 10 Jan 2012 07:08:03 +0000 21C Magazine 2577371 http://www.21cmagazine.com/Ryan-Boudinot-Precious-Garbage http://www.21cmagazine.com/following/21cmagazine.com/Ryan-Boudinot-Precious-Garbage Tue, 10 Jan 2012 06:20:27 +0000 21C Magazine 2577194 Ryan Boudinot rebuilds the end in his blistering wunderkammer Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ashley Crawford, January 2012 <img src="http://payload13.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2577194/boudinot_700.jpg" border="0" width="690" height="345" width_o="690" height_o="345" src_o="http://payload13.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2577194/boudinot_o.jpg" align="left" data-mid="13023944" /> Ryan Boudinot. Image Source: Blueprints of the Afterlife. The world has, once again, come to an end, but if that’s become a cliché, Ryan Boudinot seems to have flung his arms in the air and yelled let ‘em come. His recently released Blueprints of the Afterlife has every cliché there is and the result is a roller coaster of hysteria and pathos, the clichés injected with pure adrenalin and a touch of lysergic acid. We’ve had global warming, we’ve had the battle with the cyborgian newmans against the human armies, sponsored, DFW-style, by the likes of Boeing and Coca Cola (who evidently moved from soft drinks to arms manufacturing for a brief stint). We have super-smart drugs and hyped-up nanotechnology and life extensions and cloning and conspiracy theory from hell via a mysterious institution known as The Kirkpatrick Academy of Human Potential all set in a world just post The Age of Fucked Up Shit. But somehow Boudinot holds this mayhem together and injects a fresh jolt of electricity into the melee, maintaining several fast-paced narratives and a cast of well-rounded and highly sympathetic characters even if one of them is a 100-year plus uber soldier and a dishwasher who has received an Olympic medal for his suds prowess. The apocalypse has been with us since The Book of Revelations was penned (and probably well before that) but there seems to be a plethora of recent apocalyptic books appearing from North America. Boudinot’s book sits comfortably alongside the surreal dystopias of David Ohle’s The Age of Sinatra, Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps, Matthew Derby’s Super Flat Times and Brian Conn’s The Fixed Stars amongst others. “I think an apocalypse is an efficient way for the imagination to cope with insurmountable problems,” says the Seattle-based Boudinot. “It’s actually a really easy way out. A really boring novel would be one in which the various nations of the world, through painstaking negotiations and countless hours of trial and error through research, come up with a reasonable way to confront global warming. An exciting novel is one in which entire continents are in flames and a choice few (we always flatter ourselves to imagine that we would be among these choice few) find a way to salvation. Apocalyptic narratives are about individual choices resulting in survival, whereas what’s needed to resolve an actual apocalypse is collective decision making on an unfathomably complicated scale.” J.G. Ballard aside, this seems to be a strongly North American tendency. Does this have something to do with Puritanical roots? The aftermath of the Cold War? “I think it has to do with intense, underlying guilt for consuming more than our fair share of the earth's resources,” Boudinot replies. “Apocalypse narratives are methods of cultural self-flagellation. But before you pin all this on North America, what about that great post-apocalyptic trilogy of Mad Max films?” The Max trilogy, the first of which appeared in 1979 directed by George Miller, is broadly considered one of the classics of dystopian cinema and was a purely Australian production and featured the countries already blasted and ominous landscape. Boudinot has favored the apocalyptic in books and movies since childhood. “Well, in addition to Mad Max, The Road Warrior, and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, there’s another Aussie film I’m fond of called The Quiet Earth. It haunted me as a kid. And the book I kept reading between age 12 and 15 was Stephen King’s The Stand. I don’t remember much of the gore from that book at all, but I do remember these wonderfully poignant scenes of various characters banding together and realizing they needed one another.” A cornerstone of Afterlife is the bizarre mission of building a full-scale replica of a presumably devastated Manhattan in Puget Sound. Boudinot has commented elsewhere of his sense of horror in finding Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York while he were still rebuilding Manhattan in his book, but there are also hints of Being John Malkovitch with his cloned Federicos (which included an extraordinary clone orgy). “When I exited the theater after seeing Being John Malkovich I had a smile on my face that I literally couldn’t control for a good 15 minutes. I believe my wife and I went shopping right after we saw it, and I was just giggling and grinning, unbelievably happy. The primary reason I voted for Al Gore in 2000 was that he mentioned that Malkovich was his favorite movie. I love Kaufman’s wavelength. Synecdoche is a masterpiece that will be studied a hundred years from now. The narrative architecture of his films is astounding.” Unsurprisingly, given Boudinot’s penchant for the bizarre, another filmic touchstone is David Lynch. “I can’t really overstate Lynch's importance to me, as a writer but also as a resident of the Pacific Northwest,” he says. “I first discovered him in high school, with Blue Velvet. No, I guess I saw Dune before that, but I guess that doesn’t count. I grew up in a rural part of Washington state and gravitated to weird books, movies, etc, so when Twin Peaks came out, I freaked out hard. A group of friends and I sought out his movies, driving to Bellingham to check out Eraserhead on VHS from the Western Washington University Library. During the one week that Wild At Heart played in my hometown (Mount Vernon), this group of friends and I went to every single matinee showing. We watched it seven days in a row. I worked for a time at Amazon and the pinnacle of my experience there was getting to have lunch with Lynch with a group of other editors one time. It’s an hour of my life I treasure dearly. I asked him how he was enjoying his chicken. He said ‘Fantastic! How's your pasta?’” The Age of Fucked Up Shit isn’t a singular apocalypse – it’s an amalgamation, a cocktail from hell. That we’re gnawing on the jugular of the planet is beyond dispute leading one to wonder just how pessimistic Boudinot really is. “It really depends. My mood changes,” he says. “One thing that’s really curious to me, though, is that this ‘cocktail from hell,’ as you put it, is happening at a time when our ability to understand and engineer our way out of it has never been greater. Think about it – what if the ancient Greeks, through some rudimentary technology of their era, had unwittingly destroyed the earth? Our capacity to understand and solve this set of problems we’ve devised seems to be keeping pace with the damage we’re doing. The weird thing is that we’re either choosing to not do what’s necessary to resolve climate change etc, or we’re incapable of making a choice. If civilization is actively choosing not to immediately halt all combustion of fossil fuels, then perhaps there is a deeper reason we’re fucking with the planet so blatantly. Maybe our purpose is to push ourselves to a point of global environmental crisis so that, while combating that crisis, we develop tools that enable us to spread life to other places in the heavens. On the other hand, maybe we are just a really, really stupid species.” Another bizarre fact of life in the Afterlife is the process of Embodiment, an extension of game-playing technology that allows ‘DJs’ to override the nervous systems of ‘players’. The result is reminiscent of the fate of some of the characters in DFW’s Infinite Jest. It also hints at elements of Philip K. Dick. Are we already embodied? “That's a great question. I sort of got that idea from an old video game called The Sims (I guess it’s not that old). In the game you design an avatar and have them go about the business of everyday life. My wife and I played it briefly in the late ’90s, and stopped playing after we started to look at our own lives in terms of the game. Interacting with other people to improve our ‘social’ score, etc. I suppose there’s some Infinite Jest in there, too. Any time one feels trapped in a routine, that’s basically the same as being embodied, I think.” Although Boudinot states that it was not his intention The Kirkpatrick Academy of Human Potential has a strong whiff of Scientology or Mormonism. “I had no intention of drawing a parallel between Scientology or Mormonism, mostly because I know very little about those religions,” Boudinot claims. “I’m interested in this notion, popular in young adult fiction, that there’s some secret organization that will be the only ones who recognize how special you really are, recruit you, respect you, and show you all sorts of incredible things. I suspect those fantasies have something to do with the systemic failures of the American public education system. Like, ‘Oh, if only some cool super-secret brotherhood that understands how the world is really operating would take me under their wing!’" Amidst the various narratives, on of the most gripping is an interrogation of a key player called Luke Piper, which leads one to wonder whether he is in the grips of a secret government organization or simply being treated in an asylum. But Boudinot either can’t, or won’t, give this away, claiming simply that: “I don’t know.” As an adjunct to the book, Boudinot’s website – http://blueprintsoftheafterlife.com/ – features a plethora of visual material concocted by a friend of Boudinot’s named Nate Manny. “I’ve known Nate for 20 years,” he says. “We met at The Evergreen State College as freshmen, and were in a band together in Olympia for three years. He was always the visual guy, I was always the word guy, and he influenced my creativity at a pivotal time. He went on to play guitar in a very well-loved Seattle rock band, The Murder City Devils, releasing a bunch of albums on Sub Pop. Now he has a design company called 51eggs and is doing some really great stuff. He designed the cover of the book, as well.” The first line of Blueprints of the Afterlife runs: “the world was full of precious garbage” and the detritus of the end-times runs through this book like molten noir, but despite the bizarre scenarios Boudinot paints (one of the characters is deliberately massively obese in order to grow spare body parts for others in a gross, and painful, process of cell generation – the only way in this fucked up world she can earn an income) it is the sheer humanity of the characters that somehow struggles through this morass of “precious garbage.” http://www.21cmagazine.com/Boxing-Television-Law-and-More http://www.21cmagazine.com/following/21cmagazine.com/Boxing-Television-Law-and-More Wed, 21 Sep 2011 05:17:15 +0000 21C Magazine 2033596 An interview with Sergio De La Pava, author of A Naked Singularity By Ashley Crawford September 2011 <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2033596/ans_700.jpg" border="0" width="690" height="368" width_o="690" height_o="368" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/2033596/ans_o.jpg" align="left" data-mid="10115585" /> Image Source: worldofweirdthings.com Over the centuries secret texts have been disseminated by stealth, often more rumor than parchment, considered heretical, too radical for broad dissemination. Sergio De La Pava’s A Naked Singularity, self-published in 2008, seems to have become one of those texts, a tome that once it is discovered sends shockwaves through the literary establishment, garnering positive comparisons to such leading lights as Wallace, Pynchon and Gaddis and inspiring fan status from such respected websites as the Quarterly Conversation, Conversational Reading and Known Unknowns (and now, 21C). Comparisons to Wallace’s Infinite Jest are inevitable. At 689 pages it is a sprawling epic of ideas that bullets along with a narrative that has more in common with a Neal Stephenson epic such as Cryptonomicon. Like Infinite Jest and Don DeLillo’s Underworld De La Pava’s tale has a sport motif. But Wallace’s tennis fixation and DeLillo’s powerful baseball setting pale beside De La Pava’s orgasmic boxing tableaux. On the surface ANS could be described as a legal thriller, but one injected with musings about the nature of Television (always capitalized), pure courtroom slapstick that recalls Pynchon at his best (and a truly laugh out loud moment of scatological grotesqurie). There are musings on the Human Genome Project and a moment of correspondence between our protagonist, the long suffering Casi, and a death row inmate that is as moving as Wallace at his best. There’s enough paranoia for one to be reminded of a Philip K. Dick story and enough surrealism to keep a David Lynch fan content. It is both preposterous and profound, a philosophical thriller if you will set in a very gritty and very cold New York City haunted by a Golem-like creature that is depicted as a black void which could only be defeated by a naked singularity. Indeed, the title of the book becomes key to the strange sense of Apocalypse that grows throughout its pages. A singularity is a theory utilized in general relativity referring to the event horizon in a black hole where the gravitational force of the singularity is so powerful that light cannot escape. Thus, the singularity cannot be directly observed. A naked singularity, by contrast, is clearly observable. The theoretical existence of naked singularities would mean that it would be possible to observe the collapse of an object to infinite density. This would cause chaos for the theory of general relativity because in the presence of a naked singularity, general relativity cannot predict the future evolution of space-time. In De La Pava’s alternate world one suspects that many of the strange occurrences in his tome are indeed the consequence of an impending naked singularity. To say more would ruin one of the finest endings to a novel ever rendered. But given A Naked Singularity’s status as a self-published book it is far from naked to the mainstream and indeed, if it weren’t for the ever-growing support in the on-line world, it would likely be destined to reside in a very dark black hole indeed. The website With Hidden Noise attempted to summarize ANS thusly: “The book is narrated by one Casi (Spanish: “almost”; Italian: “cases,” not in the legal sense, but both are applicable here), last name left blank, a 24-year-old public defender in New York. Casi is something of a wunderkind, having maintained a perfect record; over the course of the book, he loses his first case and is brought low by the injustice of the world. The year is 2002; he lives in Brooklyn Heights with a set of college students who seem like they might be a television-mad version of the brothers Karamazov. His family is Colombian; a cousin has been put away for selling hot dogs without a license. The city is obsessed with a pair of seven-year-olds who have murdered an infant; there’s a blackout. A mentally impaired prisoner, failed by the legal system in every possible way, is on death row in Alabama. And there’s a heist, which doesn’t go according to plan: crime is imperfect. Through it all in interpolated a recent history of boxing, having as its center the career of Wilfred Benitez.” At its extremes ANS is positively giddy with cross-cultural references. Amidst the myriad strange conversational epics in the book, one goes thusly: “We have Homer… um… Simpson, Virgil. Aeneid. Who else did we say? Milton… Bradley. Bach, all the three B’s in fact, Bach, Leonard Bernstein and the other B. Hume, Kant, all the guys in that book, Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, anybody who went to Berkeley. In fact anybody who went to any institution named after a dead philosopher including naturally Georgetown and Stanford, which are of course named after Phyllis George and Stanford Marsalis respectively. Gutenberg who conducted the Gutenberg trial. Nureyev Rudolph. Rudolph Valentino. Engelbert Humperdink for that matter. The guy who invented the Gouldberg variations, T.S. Eliot Gould. Oppenheimer and Manhattan, you know, of the Oppenheimer project [. . .] Hannibal. American Vespucci. Verdi. Vendredi. Veni, Vidi, Vici, all three of them. The Marx Brothers, Karl and Groucho. The guys they worked with, Engels and Harpo. Socrates and the guy who poisoned him then put him in a hemlock. Darwin and the first guy who coined the term Darwinism. Don Quixote and his sidekick… Tonto... Villa I think. The guy who discovered the nap. The guy who founded the Freudian slip. Pasteur, the inventor of milk. The guy who unearthed the tango, the guy who discovered cash. Tango and Cash. Locke along with Stock… even Barrel.” 21C: The wonderful review of A Naked Singularity at The Quarterly Conversation raised the issue of genre, saying “a thriller for people who can’t abide mass-market tripe – a wonderfully-written genre novel that’s too smart for its genre.” Did you in fact set out to write a “legal thriller”? What is your take on issues of ‘genre’? Sergio De La Pava: Genres interest me only insofar as they can propel you into something new. Maybe the way a spacecraft will use the gravity of a massive object to slingshot forward. Genres are nicely massive that way. However, if the genre forgets its place and actually tries to dictate what’s written, the work dies and it should. The specific genre you mention, for example, is an abomination. Abominable because it takes two truly lovely entities, the law and literature, and somehow manages to debase both in their combination. So to those practitioners, please stop: how much land does a man need? Following on from that last question, it seems you have something of the Imp of the Perverse occurring. The book is self-published with essentially no author information. Whilst there have been indignant howls about the fact that ANS wasn’t picked up by a major publishing house, part of me wondered, given how good it is, whether you in fact always intended to self-publish? No, the initial plan called for lucrative and global domination with a book built to my precise, possibly insane, specifications. When that failed to instantly materialize I perhaps petulantly took my ball and went home, although the results did not prove as disastrous as I expected. One of the core themes of ANS is its scathing indictment of the legal system. What are your direct experiences of that system? Okay a competent answer here might take hundreds of pages, I’ll estimate about 689. I will say that I think it’s important to distinguish between an inanimate system and the human beings charged with animating it. But it’s a shorthand we all use. We’ll say can you believe what goddamn Wall Street did? when almost inevitably the malfunction can be traced to maybe a thousand people and a human frailty like avarice, not principally anything systemic. In the case of the U.S. legal system, for example, the rules in place, the nonhuman precepts, are often strikingly beautiful and represent some of mankind’s greatest achievements. The problems arise in their human application within a vast, complex, and emotional setting. Also, there are many inequities that become apparent in the criminal justice system but in a sense predate it. So there’s a confused etiology whereby the system gets blamed as if it were the illness when in fact it is only a very good location for seeing the inevitable symptoms of a wider, more virulent, one. As I say, this is severely condensed. There have been numerous (flattering) comparisons to Gaddis, Pynchon, Wallace et al. Were these guiding lights or were there others? I think the main trait I’d like to share with those three is their integrity. All three seem to have rigorously pursued a personal ideal with little attention to anything else, like fashion or material reward. I like. The sustained sense of morality did indeed remind me of Infinite Jest. The book moves too fast to become a lecture – the moment of court-room scatology had me laughing out loud, the heist read like a moment out of Mission Impossible (sans Tom Cruise) the boxing scenes make Norman Mailer’s equivalents pale and the correspondence with the death-row inmate was moving beyond belief – but at it’s heart would you describe the book as a tale of morality? Yeah, a lecture would be bad, but assuming we’re using the term the same way, morality does seem to suffuse it. Why? Because I detect nothing that approaches it in importance and I want to traffic in that stuff, not all the time, that would be tedious, but certainly when I’m working. The ongoing presence of (the always capitalized) Television and a channel that plays nothing but advertising is downright chilling. What is your take on mass entertainment? I have about the take on mass entertainment [what] you’d expect a novelist to have. Where I maybe add another layer of concern is in detecting a growing mean-spiritedness to it all. The mass consumption of that strain of sensory input cannot be good news for rather critical entities like empathy and generosity can it? The surreal erosion/development of Casi’s life reminded me of the strange physiological mind-shifts in Philip K. Dick’s books – is he in any way an influence? Haven’t read him so no. But like a true dimwit I have seen all the movies and could debate those with you chapter and verse, good grief. References to science abound such as the Human Genome Project, the theoretical existence of naked singularities in the very title. What role does science play in today’s society? By far the most interesting aspect of science for me is in the area of repercussions. So no sooner do I feel like I might have a tenuous grasp on something like The Uncertainty Principle than my thoughts turn to what it might imply for the problem of consciousness for example. Where I suspect I part ways with so many is in construing what those implications are, as I see a lot of pretty indefensible illogic emerging when science and us laypersons meet, usually in the area of unwarranted if not grandiose epistemological claims. As Casi’s world begins to disintegrate there are hints of an impending Armageddon. Apocalypse seems to riddle North American culture at the present moment, especially in novels and film. Why do you think that is? With respect to novels and movies, am I wrong to suspect a possible longing for simplicity? Because no one cares what you think about goddamn Facebook when people are desperately eating each other. It’s a nice shortcut right to some meaty stuff that can then be mishandled. A Naked Singularity can be ordered here. http://www.21cmagazine.com/David-Foster-Wallace-Pale-Kingdoms http://www.21cmagazine.com/following/21cmagazine.com/David-Foster-Wallace-Pale-Kingdoms Sun, 01 May 2011 03:56:14 +0000 21C Magazine 1379093 An interview with Nick Maniatis, founder of the pre-eminent David Foster Wallace website, The Howling Fantods. by Ashley Crawford <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/1379093/dfw_700.jpg" border="0" width="690" height="304" width_o="690" height_o="304" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/26234/1379093/dfw_o.jpg" align="left" data-mid="6707564" /> David Foster Wallace. Image Source: Endoplast.de The publication of The Pale King has reignited the fascination that David Foster Wallace seems to inevitably ignite. His books, especially Infinite Jest, have inspired books in themselves and his suicide in 2008, at the age of 46, garnered not dissimilar coverage to that of Kurt Cobain. Indeed, DFW became the literary equivalent of a rock star. There was good reason for this. As anyone who has delved into Wallace’s disparate world(s) will attest, he had a voice like no other, regardless of whether he was working in obsessive reportage style or moments that border on pure surrealism. At times Wallace’s conceits border on the science-fictional – his first novel, Broom of the System, is set in and alternate Ohio, where the primary landmark is a 100-square mile artificial desert of black sand, complete with imported scorpions and known as the Great Ohio Desert, or G.O.D., constructed to give its denizens a reminder of their pioneering roots. Similarly a Cleveland suburb has been re-built to emulate the outline of Jayne Mansfield’s body. In Infinite Jest he transforms the entire northeastern United States into an uninhabitable feral zone – an almost Ballardian virtual tropical jungle generated by dumping toxic waste in the area. In this instance, the U.S. has graciously given this land to Canada after ruining it for future civilizations. It is dubbed the Great Concavity to Americans and the Great Convexity to Canadians In this world North America envelops the United States, Canada and Mexico and is known as the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.). Corporate entities secure naming rights to each calendar year, eliminating traditional numerical designations, thus Jest is undertaken during The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (Y.D.A.U). And then there is one of the central tenets of Jest – the mysterious video-entertainment that is literally deadly. The Pale King eschews much of this other-worldly wizardry, but, Wallace being Wallace it’s not quite the real world either; IRS agents are issued new Social Security numbers, all beginning with the number 9, [a fiction] the IRS building facade is a gigantic 1040 form, picked out in terra-cotta tiling and one of the agents has the ability to levitate when truly engrossed in his work. Wallace’s work, Infinite Jest in particular, created a somewhat obsessive fan base, as reflected via a number of devoted web sites, key amongst them Nick Maniatis’ The Howling Fantods. Maniatis read Jest in 1996 and in early 1997 the Fantods was born. “By the start of 1997 I maintained a Geocities home page and in a section about my interests I listed David Foster Wallace,” Maniatis recalls. “To flesh out the links section I went hunting for David Foster Wallace stuff and found a couple of sites, Bob Wake’s Infinite Jest: Reviews, Articles, & Miscellany and a Wallace page by Andrew Sandley [Now only available via The Wayback Machine]. “I got to know Bob Wake reasonably well via the internet, but I always felt Andrew’s page was my direct competition because we both had a broader Wallace focus whereas Bob’s was Infinite Jest. I think Andrew started up early in March 1997, the same month I did, but slightly before me. My competitiveness took over and I tried to compile more content than what was available elsewhere. I’m still going strong today.” The name of the site was inspired by Infinite Jest after the phrase ‘the howling fantods’ which is used, in various forms, eight or so times throughout the novel, Maniatis says. “The OED defines the fantods/fantads as ‘A state of fidgetiness, uneasiness, or unreasonableness; the fantods, nervous depression or apprehension, the fidgets, ‘the creeps’.’ It’s not a phrase coined by Wallace, but it’s certainly a feeling that I felt was evoked by the novel. For a few days the site was actually named ‘The Screaming Fantods’ (which is another common variation). I must have discovered it when trying to learn more about the howling fantods. Thankfully a reader emailed me and I corrected it to match the book.” Maniatis hoped that the site might evoke ‘The Howling Fantods’ in anyone stumbling across it. “I’ve noticed some Wallace fans and people writing about Wallace fans referring to themselves as ‘fantods.’” Maniatis says. “I’m not quite sure how this makes me feel, except for that I never refer to myself as a fantod, it doesn’t sit well with me (and part of me worries it’s diluting a great word).” Wallace knew that there was a listserv discussing his work and that Fantods existed. “My understanding/impression is that it was difficult for him to think about a dedicated group of people discussing his work and posting about everything he was working on. When I got wind of his feelings I decided that The Howling Fantods would focus primarily on his work and try to avoid his personal life. That’s changed a little since he died, but on the whole I’m still very careful about what I post.” “If I try and put myself in his position I find it quite easy to empathize with his feelings,” Maniatis says. “It would be very hard to keep producing work if you have to directly acknowledge those consuming, discussing and dissecting it in detail.” “I made a decision not to contact him and I regretted this for a while after learning of his death. Many people claim to have had their view of the world changed by his work – I’m one of them – it was very hard to resist sending him a postcard to thank him for that. But I’m now confident that I made the right decision.” Having read The Pale King it is not difficult to wonder, had we not known about DFWs much publicized death and, had not ‘An Unfinished Novel’ been plastered all over it, whether we would actually consider it unfinished. This may be a huge compliment to the book’s editor, Michael Pietsch, but TPK does read extraordinarily consistently and DFW was never a great one for tight endings, indeed, Broom of the System actually ends mid-quote.... “I agree,” says Maniatis. “While some of The Pale King seems a bit rough around the edges, a good portion of it had been worked and reworked multiple times. A lot of it is amazingly polished – the drafts of chapter nine currently online at the Harry Ransom Centre add spectacular insight to this. In fact, even knowing how incomplete TPK is, it is spectacularly coherent thematically, and reveals a maturing, paring back, and focus that, I think, begins to appear in his Oblivion collection. I was honestly expecting TPK to be a bit of a mess that left me sad for what it might have been. I didn’t expect there to be so many moments of polished brilliance and clarity as well as a mature, almost new, voice for Wallace.” “Little Brown, Micheael Pietsch, Bonnie Nadell, and all the people working to get The Pale King into published form deserve massive praise for their restraint. They could have marketed this book by promoting that some if it is the best stuff written by Wallace. Instead they let it function as a gift to anyone that reads it. Allowing readers to experience for themselves how great it is. “I’m making my way through a second read now and there's certainly quite a bit I missed on my first read that is opening up on my second. Once again, the same type of experience I’ve had with much of the body of his work.” A strange parallel could be drawn between TPK and the work of Philip K. Dick (especially A Scanner Darkly) in terms of Dick’s obsession with what it is to be ‘human’ in the face of overwhelming and crushing organizational tedium. “I went through a bit of a Philip K. Dick phase about 10 years ago after I’d discovered Wallace,” says Maniatis. “And yes, I do see a bit of a link. Although the big difference that I perceive is that Wallace gives his characters, and readers, the tools to escape, even transcend, the tedium. Dick, at least to me, seemed to wallow in it – make it oppressively overwhelming and destructive.” Like Dick, Wallace loved manipulation of environment, the almost science-fictional aspect of his work; the G.O.D. in Ohio; turning the entire northeastern United States into an uninhabitable feral zone – a virtual tropical jungle; rendering an entire building as an IRS tax form. Apart from the staggering imagination at play here, there is also a strong sense of the semi-apocalyptic / alternate universe occurring. “Absolutely,” Maniatis says. “In fact, I think it’s crucial for some of his work to sit in a kind of alternate universe, it helps readers to see our world anew, and it protects it from aging. I think it’s similar to the way that some science fiction writing can be powerful and timeless because it is not of our world. I’m thinking here of Dick, Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. “There’s great reliance on the reader to suspend disbelief when reading Wallace. Sometimes I think people forget this. Maybe it’s because the worlds he constructs are so full of life and so real that it doesn’t even cross one’s mind that they’re not real. The suspension of disbelief is only noticeable when you make lists like you have.” “There is also a very interesting paper about the things Wallace does with landscapes in the volume edited by David Hering, Consider David Foster Wallace, critical essays. It’s by Graham Foster and has a close look at the ways in which Wallace uses ‘man-made’ landscapes in his fiction (e.g. the Great Ohio Desert, or the Great Concavity/Convexity) such that ‘The environmental landscape is reflective of the cultural landscape, and Wallace depicts a land where escape from ‘a corrupt and mercantile civilization’ is impossible, a land where there is nothing beyond this commodification’.” There are hints throughout Wallace’s writing of a frustrated ‘magical realist.’ Even in TPK there is a levitating accountant and an infant with an adult voice. “I can’t recall if Wallace ever spoke about magical realism. What’s interesting to me is how many reviewers, critics, fans and academics try to pigeon hole Wallace into a neat category. Is it Postmodern? Post post-modern? Magical realism? Hysterical Realism? Look at the difficulty people are having in placing Infinite Jest in a neat category. Maybe Wallace is his own new category? I’ve had this discussion with a few people in recent weeks and it’s an important one to be having. Where is Wallace’s place in contemporary literature? Where exactly does he fit in? Adam Kelly does a pretty good job of contextualizing Wallace’s work in David Foster Wallace: the Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline.” In this context it is intriguing that there was such a close friendship between DFW and Corrections author Jonathan Franzen. Franzen if his 2002 essay, ‘Mr. Difficult,’ in which he chronicles his growing disenchantment with the novels of William Gaddis, seems to be decidedly anti any sense of experimentalism. In it Franzen raises his concern that if the novel makes too many demands on the reader it will go unread and forgotten, beaten by other forms of entertainment such as movies and video games. It’s hard to imagine Wallace subscribing to this dumbing down of literature – his jarring use of intricately detailed footnotes alone suggests a writer unafraid to break the rules. In turn the die-hard experimentalist Ben Marcus (The Age of Wire and String) ripped into Franzen in an infamous essay in Harpers magazine in 2005 ‘Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It.’ As stylists it is far easier to imagine Wallace and Marcus in the same camp rather than Wallace and Franzen. “I’m far from an authority on Franzen. I read and enjoyed The Corrections when it was published, I’ve read his collection of essays, but I have not read anything else. Based on the first two pages, I’m looking forward to reading his short piece, Ambition, in the latest issue of McSweeney’s that arrived last week. “I think everyone forgets that Wallace and Franzen were close friends. I can imagine them having all manner of discussions about their work and the directions they were both trying to take it in. Surely it was mutually beneficial that they weren’t competing in the same stylistic landscape. That is, if we even consider that Wallace was an ‘experimentalist’. What if he wasn’t? There’s so much in his writing that isn’t as cutting edge, new, or experimental as many reviewers try to make it out to be. Non-linear narrative? Creative language play? Substantial shifts of narrative and voice? Encyclopaedic text? Metafictional devices? None of this is new. If anything, the experimentalism is derived from Wallace’s attempt to use these devices to unseat the irony and self-awareness they have more recently represented. “The other aspect that is worth noting is that Wallace trains his readers, through his own writing, to become better readers. I think that many reviews of Infinite Jest missed the fact that it is fun, entertaining, and enjoyable to read. There were many readers during Infinite Summer who expressed their surprise at how funny and easy the novel was to read. Yes, it’s dense, and packed with so much detail that it’s possible to miss a lot of it during a single read, but it’s certainly not unreadable. “What’s experimental, in my view, is how he’s trying to use all these things to get back to real sincerity, emotion, love. He’s not burning bridges and alienating readers, he’s building them and connecting us. “I guess I’m trying to say that I don’t think it is surprising that they were friends if we think it through.” Now that we no longer have another DFW tome to look forward to where do we turn? “We certainly don’t go looking for another David Foster Wallace or we’ll be disappointed. But I’m in a bit of a tricky situation to try and answer this one. I’ve now got two young children (11 months and four years) so I read much less than I would like to, I just haven’t had the time. Which hasn’t stopped me buying books – the size of the pile is depressing. “Thanks to Wallace’s writing I guess I’m now looking for authors trying to grapple with similar themes. I’m particularly taken by Wallace’s ongoing career arc that I think considers matters of how to behave and live your life in a way that is responsible and moral for our times, minus the irony, with a focus on sincerity. “I’m currently reading Nam L’s short story collection, The Boat, and loving it. Some of the highlights in the last year or so: Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland was excellent, and Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision: A Novel was good fun. William Gibson’s most recent three novels have had me glued to the page, characters trying to live and survive in a rapidly changing, very near future earth – but I still find his endings completely unsatisfactory – I focus on the journey rather than the destination in those. Cory Doctorow’s young adult fiction titles Little Brother and For the Win explore the loss of personal rights and freedoms to new technologies and the new kinds of working environments enabled by them – both read like an uplifting call to arms for the youth of today. Giving young people tools to i) be sceptical about restrictions of personal freedoms imposed by new technologies while ii) learning to manage impulsive/compulsive use by c) embracing them and using them in the ways that were never intended by the companies that introduce them. Fun stuff, particularly for teenagers, but not exclusively. “Sitting prominently on my shelf calling out to be read are Rick Moody’s Four Fingers of Death, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Thomas Pychon’s two most recent novels, and the big one, Sergio De La Pava’s self published novel, A Naked Singularity, which I was sent years ago because I run the Howling Fantods but I kind of avoided until the reviews started appearing – and now I can’t find time for it, and much of the other unread things on my shelves.”