Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog

I did some searching, and found a wonderful resource. Head on over to Burroughs, Naked Lunch and the Beat Generation at the University of Bremen’s Literature in English section.

Burroughs has always been a favorite of mine because he has fewer preprocessor directives than other people. All of us have these directives to some degree, like remembering not to pick our noses in public or talk about death around the elderly. Burroughs lived as an outsider, being both a conflicted sexual abuse victim and an abuser who shot his wife to death “accidentally,” in addition to his habits of using drugs, living outside the law, and evading day jobs. Highly intelligent, he was either too disorganized or too deeply planning to write his book until age 39, at which point he unleashed it fully formed on the world.

Naked Lunch is a book without preprocessor directives; it is the ultimate techno-punk, in that it like sci-fi it looks into our future based on the inherent but not visible trends of our technology. It is a cold, calculating, cynical look that is also playful and spirited, extremely human. Burroughs chucked out the instruction manual and wrote his book as a series of overlapping radio plays that in their revelations of philosophical concepts resemble computer code, with parentheses scattered throughout the novel. It is also devastatingly funny, if your funny bone has a cold heart and a warm soul.

Naked Lunch has given its author a permanent place in literary history because of its formal innovations, its powerful attitude of revolt, and the controversy surrounding its publication. The censorship trials, of course, attracted publicity, but also attracted the attention of serious readers because of the authors and critics who testified on behalf of the novel. Critical attention was further drawn to Naked Lunch when Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer praised the book highly at the Edinburgh International Writer’s Conference in 1962.

Mailer proclaimed Burroughs “the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.” Mary McCarthy defended her statement at the conference with an influential essay on Naked Lunch, first published in 1963 and still the best single critical piece on Burroughs. Grove Press was able to obtain testimonials for Naked Lunch by Mailer, Robert Lowell, Terry Southern, and John Ciardi, among others, for a publicity pamphlet in 1962.

As a result of the high praise by well-known literary figures, Naked Lunch was widely reviewed in the United States and England. Many reviewers praised the book for its power and serious purpose, and Burroughs was compared to other avant-garde writers in the modernist tradition. But Naked Lunch received strongly negative reviews as well. Some reviewers thought the novel morally offensive, artistically worthless, and revolting to the sensibilities of most readers. The most notable of these protests, because of the correspondence they generated, are those of John Wain in the New Republic, William
Phillips in Commentary, and an unsigned review entitled “Ugh” in the Times Literary Supplement.

I witnessed kids between the ages of five and ten working in barracks with no ventilation, with people all around them burning everything from the metal components of computers to wires to extract the copper. When the PVC and the brominated flame retardant around the wires burn, they emit high levels of chlorinated dioxins and furans, two of the most persistent organic pollutants.

As a result, the local river is so contaminated that the levels of acidity are almost total. The water contains an estimated 2,400 times the recommended levels of lead, and it’s not hard to notice: The river is literally black from the toner of printer cartridges and from washing the burned motherboards. The toner contains carbon black, a known carcinogen, but the locals wash themselves, their clothes, and their food with this water. It’s so toxic that even boiling it doesn’t come close to purifying it.

Above the water, the air was thick with smoke. Around it, the land is so irreparably poisoned that nothing can grow. All the food and drinking water is imported from out of town.

It was a sea of garbage. The heaps of trash began accumulating next to the hotel walls and did not stop for as far as the eye could see. The whole town was a construction site, with the old wooden barracks being replaced by unfinished houses. The roads were in a constant state of
traffic jam with trucks, motorbikes, and even mules carrying parts to be “recycled.” It was hell. Thick smoke hung like storm clouds. It hurt to breathe. ^{^}

Like a vision out of “Neuromancer” or “Blade Runner.” Yet, real.

Soon the muddy track is flanked by piles of old TVs, gutted computer cases, and smashed monitors heaped ten feet (three meters) high. Beyond lies a field of fine ash speckled with glints of amber and green—the sharp broken bits of circuit boards. I can see now that the smoke issues not from one fire, but from many small blazes. Dozens of indistinct figures move among the acrid haze, some stirring flames with sticks, others carrying armfuls of brightly colored computer wire. Most are children. ^{^}

I wonder if it is possible to design wires with a seam, like a perforation, down one side so they can be more easily slit and extracted?

The enormous value of the delicacy has brought the Chinese Triad gangs to South Africa. In a cash-free transaction, the Triads swap the abalone for the ingredients to make methamphetamine, or ‘tik’.

Hundreds of tonnes of abalone is smuggled out of the Cape every year, to be exported through Hong Kong, according to Wildlife Department officials who say that the local abalone is on the brink of extinction. ^{^}

Giant black centipedes? No, abalone. For the literary reference, check out “The Meat Eaters” in Naked Lunch.

Traffickers in the Black Meat, flesh of the giant black centipede – sometimes attaining the length of six feet – found in a lane of black rocks and iridescent, brown lagoons, exibit paralyzed crustaceans in camoflage pockets of the Plaza visible only to the Meat Eaters.

During the bienal Panics when the raw, pealed Dream Police storm the City, the Mugwamps take refuge in the deepest crevices of the wall sealing themselves in day cubicles and remain for weeks in biostasis. In those days of gray terror the Reptiles dart about faster and faster, scream past each other at supersonic speed, their flexible sculls flapping in black winds of insect agony.^{^}

You’ve put on your virtual reality helmet and gloves, picked up your Wiimote, dropped a tab of dex and hit the mainline, pure crystalline geometries unfolding in your mind… this is cyberspace, the final frontier. From a distance it appears as a glowing cube but as you approach you find that like the consciousness of language, each point of light can expand to infinite folds of parallel spaces. As you reach an apex of complexity, a culmination of connection, suddenly you find: a microwave.

That is how I would summarize William Gibson’s “Spook Country,” the novel of his which owes an obvious complete tribute to Thomas Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49.” Like Pynchon’s work, it starts with vast potential and ends up being the same old thing, buying into some failed philosophies from the past that my generation and I reject. At the beginning, it is mystical; at the end, it is as much an off the shelf offering as the latest microwaves from Samsung and GE. It fails because it cannot constrain all of its initial complexity to make a complex point, and so we end up with a simple dichotomy: good people versus bad people, good ideas versus bad ideas. That would be well and good, except that we’re in a book that argues against such dichotomies. Oh well.

Gibson trots out the usual brilliant, in-depth Googling of consumer culture and writes with a Burroughsian depth of abstract metaphor. He also in Pynchon/DeLillo style has brought to the table a number of paired divided abstractions, the best of which is characters describing themselves as “agnostic” regarding data. Do they fully believe, or are they sceptical? Hence agnosticism, which is a hilarious and eerily accurate. It mirrors the main point of the book, which is a semi-amorphous plot about Homeland Security Republicans versus the New World Order Multi-National hipster. Could it get more boring or obvious, or more product-oriented, since we know (gnostically) that there’s a paying audience for such views?

As usual, Gibson is at his best when writing female leads, and in this case, Hollis Henry is as real as Oedipa Maas and then some, which is odd for someone who says little about what she believes. Some of the devices are trite, like the dead former friend, the dubious past, the hip single city kid trying to live a life away from the system without admitting they hate society. A lot of the other observations Hollis offers us are more mature, a Nietzschean fusion of aesthetics and ideology coming out in a simple preference which like most Gibson characters she emphasizes with her feet, dramatically attempting quiet exits from any number of failed situations.

His male characters are tempting as belief-objects but hollow in that they show up like Hollywood actors making cameos (think of the hamfest that was the final half hour of Ocean’s Twelve) and are too aware of how slick they are and how much they can over-gesticulate their emotions. Like most books founded on an aesthetic premise, this one starts out promisingly mysterious (even gnostic in its mystical depth) but after the halfway point, falls to pieces as it tries to tidy all of its complex observations into a simple dichotomy. The promisingly neurotic characters who are from the bad side turn into dumb thugs like Hollywood Russians, and the promisingly neurotic characters from the good side turn into… neurotic Wonder Women and Clark Kents.

In this tendency, the book is most like Pynchon’s longer works, from Gravity’s Rainbow to Mason & Dixon. After the middle crease, it’s a more coherent narrative that is incoherent compared to the sense of ambiguous space previously created, and a boiling down of complexity into a handful of divided concepts. What made The Crying of Lot 49 different was what Pynchon left out, which was an attempt to make sense of his world of observations, which made the book truly like a cyberspace in which we could read anything into it, at first, but that would lead us through a series of logic gates to test our own faith against the observations of the incredible, quite credible observer in Oedipa Maas.

Maas was a sort of Marlowe on a raft of confusion drifting past the ruins of colonial Africa as she tours California in search of an unknown protagonist or manipulative force, finding nothing except different groups who have dropped away from the dystopia and constructed their own realities which in some cases are sustainable. There was more of that vision in Pattern Recognition, which I’m already going to say is what we’ll remember Gibson for outside of Neuromancer. We get none of that sense of survey in Spook Country, because where it reaches its apex it backs away from the depth it has discovered in order to present us some tidy, gift-wrapped conclusions that don’t change our outlook at all.

Parts of this book are as embarrassing as the now-dated 3MB of RAM in Case’s Hosaka from Neuromancer, in a time when wristwatches have more than that amount. The unpaid iPod commercials throughout the first one hundred pages are embarrassing. Some of the praise of 60s garage rock seems slick until, like the really neat guy who seemed to have all the answers you met at the record shop, you look through the references and see it’s little more than a namedrop. The real sadness is the last one hundred pages, when all of that crystalline interconnectivity of geometric parallels that Gibson built us up to expect folds down into a story as divided between hollow ikons of good and evil as the Gore-Bush debates. I still believe in Gibson, but not this book. Eschew this disconnected pile for the greater clarity of Neuromancer or Pattern Recognition.

Mark Snesrud and Bob Mayo took on the public art challenge, leading them to W.A.S.T.E. cash on some fancy radios, find hidden XML files, use computer programs to generate a 4,142 page equation that explained the signals but signified nothing, and finally crack the code to find the building is continually broadcasting the text of Thomas Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49.” (Are they paying royalties on this or just betting that Pynchon is too cool to sue?) The whole explanation of how they broke the code is in this 18-page document (in PDF form, of course) ^{^}

Lest you forget, there’s this old page… San Narciso Community College Thomas Pynchon Page. Circa 1994, updated 1997.

Thomas Pynchon captured the imagination of many of us, but probably no work was more influential than The Crying of Lot 49 because in this short book, he stopped the goofy metaphor-play and tackled industrial society with a biting critique of the loneliness and randomness of survival in this time. It always made me think of a postmodern analysis of The Great Gatsby without the delicious layers of irony. It’s the clearest-sighted of his books and one of the most loved as a result.

POP legend Sir Elton John wants the internet closed down. “The internet has stopped people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff. Instead they sit at home and make their own records, which is sometimes OK but it doesn’t bode well for long-term artistic vision. We’re talking about things that are going to change the world and change the way people listen to music and that’s not going to happen with people blogging on the internet. In the early Seventies there were at least ten albums released every week that were fantastic. Now you’re lucky to find ten albums a year of that quality. And there are more albums released each week now than there were then.”^{^}

I don’t know enough about pop music to care either way regarding his claim, but it applies quite aptly to the world of fiction or as it was once called, literature. Over the past decade I’ve been the hovering dragonfly listening at parties, noting down potential scores in the realm of the Good Read, and I’ve prowled Half Price Books and indie bookstores until my feet hurt. At the store, it’s easy to make the first cut, and I took the rest home. Probably a hundred books over the past decade representing the “best” of the new work out there, from Vollman to Danielewski.

I’ve just gotten done throwing out the last it. It was dreck. I feel all of it is incredibly well-written, very aware of its market, and yet completely devoid of anything meaningful to say. These are novels by lonely artists about being lonely artists, and there’s no solutions, no growth, no desire for anything different. Most of what it seems to show off is the author’s cleverness, in that cloud-style postmodern style pioneered by Pynchon, where a general idea (sameness is entropy) becomes an umbrella for disconnected observations preached at you rather than shown.

It’s the self-satisfied novel, and it reminds me a lot of the rather silly blog postings I see around the internet. “Today I ate this, I watched this, and then this and that happened, and I thought this, and now I’m ready for tomorrow.” It’s like we’re so afraid of dying we won’t even acknowledge the day to day changes of life, so we’re hiding out in these little mental ‘hoods of our own creation. Literature should be, as Vonnegut put it, the canary in the coal mine not just of “society” but of our own souls. If these books were our soul guardians, we never had a chance.

Again, it may be said that there are three kinds of authors. First come those who write without thinking. They write from a full memory, from reminiscences; it may be, even straight out of other people’s books. This class is the most numerous. Then come those who do their thinking whilst they are writing. They think in order to write; and there is no lack of them. Last of all come those authors who think before they begin to write. They are rare. ^{^}

Is it too hard for us to admit that the reason the publishing industry is in trouble is that it is cranking out crap? We have no problem admitting the music industry’s decline for the same reason. When Hollywood has a bad season, we feel perfectly fine stating the obvious, that their movies didn’t make the cut. We can’t do the same for literature.

Over the past six years, I have picked up and tried to read the grand opuses of many new authors. I have to say that I’m less than impressed. Their technical skill is good enough, and they make witty turns of phrase easily. There are plenty of metaphors. The characters are fully fleshed-out. But I feel like I’m reading the end results of the world’s best creative writing course. It’s all method and no substance.

The average book now starts off with a few typical modern people in a typical modern circumstance. They’re broke. Their relationships have failed. They are alienated from their parents. Strangely, they never seem to question why this is so prevalent among all the people they know. Eventually, there is some cryptic and cathartic event, and after that, they accept fate. We assume they then become good consumers who watch enough television to numb the pain, or whatever it is.

These books ring hollow, and not just to me. Consumers are still buying a lot of books. They’re not finding any brands, however. Literature was once able to make brands because you could read The Sun Also Rises and think, not only was that well-written, but it was informative. I want to read more from that author, and other authors in the same literary circle, and people inspired by that author, and influences of that author. You weren’t buying a book as much as you were finding a whole line of books to explore.

Now, all of these books are about the same. You read one, you set it down. What changed in your mind? What changed in your life? Not bloody much. The characters and setting were different, but the story was the same, and no matter how “well written” it was, it was empty. So you forget about it 48 hours later, because it was like a TV program, just a restatement of the same ideas you’ve heard before. There was nothing intangible to link you to it.

In 200 years, people will read Jane Austen and Mary Shelley. They’ll read Ralph Ellison. They’ll read William Faulkner and William S. Burroughs, Oscar Wilde and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, Sophocles and Tennesse Williams. When they look at the books of the current time, they’ll see a gap in history, and wonder what people used to try to fill it.

From a recent interview with author William Gibson:

The trouble is there are enough crazy factors and wild cards on the table now that I can’t convince myself of where a future might be in 10 to 15 years. I think we’ve been in a very long, century-long period of increasingly exponential technologically-driven change.

You can see it in corporate futurism as easily as you can see it in science fiction. In corporate futurism they are really winging it – it must be increasingly difficult to come in and tell the board what you think is going to happen in 10 years because you’ve got to be
bullshitting if you claiming to know. That wasn’t true to the same extent even a decade ago.
^{^}

Gibson’s been through the cycle of trying to predict the future a few times. He probably winces everytime he thinks about the “three megabytes of RAM in that Hosaka” from Neuromancer, a book which admittedly shows its age in a time when 3MB is what a watch carries. With his newest, Spook Country, hitting bookshelves this week and sounding very much like Pynchon and Burroughs hybridized in the laboratory of Philip K. Dick, it will be interesting to see what conjectures he makes.

“I don’t write books to express any political philosophy I might have. Partly, I write them to discover what I do think about things. … I don’t want people to believe what I believe, but I love it if I’m encouraging people to ask questions and find their own answers.” ^{^}

Someday, all of these William Gibson interview links will be added.

William Gibson: Something that started with Pattern Recognition was that I discovered I could Google the world of the novel. I began to regard it as a sort of extended text — hypertext pages hovering just outside the printed page. There have been threads on my Web site –readers Googling and finding my footprints. I still get people asking me about “the possibilities of interactive fiction,” and they seem to have no clue how we’re already so there. ^{^}

Why bother making novels hypertext anymore? Google is the footnote finder for footnotes that weren’t footnoted. I don’t think this constitutes “true” hyperfiction, in that it is one-way links from text to linear footnotes, but maybe if Gibson got together with the people with the highest page rank on each term, he could set up his own link maze to keep people happy.

The truth is, you have to learn how to be edited just as much as you have to learn how to edit. And learning how to be edited teaches you a lot about writing, about distance and objectivity and humility, and ultimately about yourself.

In any case, real editing is something different. It takes place before a piece ever sees the light of day — and it’s this kind of painstaking, word-by-word editing that so much online writing needs. If learning how to be edited is a form of growing up, much of the blogosphere still seems to be in adolescence, loudly affirming its identity and raging against authority. But teenagers eventually realize that authority is not as tyrannical and unhip as they once thought. It’s edited prose, with its points sharpened by another, that will ultimately stand the test of time. There is a place for mayfly commentary, which buzzes about and dies in a day. But we don’t want to
get to the point where the mayflies and mosquitoes are so thick that we can’t breathe or think. ^{^}

This article is worth its weight in gold. An old-school newspaper or book editor had three roles: first, pick the stuff that has the potential to go somewhere. Next, re-arrange it so it makes sense. Finally, the physical role of editing, or making the sentences as clean and efficient as possible and eliminating errors. It’s similar to how writing is first picking a concept, next expressing it well, and finally the mechanical process of writing, whether with pen or keyboard.