The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes, is one of those books, proposing a radical new thesis, that had an enormous impact when it was first published (1976), but has since fallen into the backwaters of intellectual fashion. Today it still has an ardent cult following, but otherwise it is not so much rejected as it is not taken seriously in the first place, and thereby, it is almost totally ignored.
This neglect is somewhat unfortunate. While I don’t think there is any scientific “proof” for Jaynes’ argument, and while certain of his assertions are almost certainly wrong, his book remains intellectually provocative; it opens up some very important questions, even if we are not ready to follow its conclusions.
Basically, Jaynes argues that consciousness, as we understand it today, has only been possessed by human beings for the last four thousand years or so. (By “consciousness” he means, not the primary perceptual awareness that all mammals, and perhaps many other ‘lower’ organisms as well, seem to possess, but what I would prefer to call self-consciousness, or second-order consciousness: the ability to reflect upon oneself, to introspect, to narrate one’s existence). Jaynes proposes that, in the second millennium BC and before, human beings were not self-conscious, and did not reflect upon what they did; rather, people heard voices instructing them in what to do, and they obeyed these voices immediately and unreflectively. These voices were believed (to the extent that “belief” is a relevant category in such circumstances) to be the voices of gods; their neurological cause was probably language issuing from the right hemisphere of the brain, and experienced hallucinatorily, and obeyed, by the left hemisphere (which is where speech is localized today).
This is why Jaynes calls the archaic mind a non-conscious, “bicameral” one. Thought was linguistic, but it did not have any correlates in consciousness; people didn’t make decisions, but instead the decisions were made automatically, and conveyed by the voices. One half of the brain commanded the other, so that decision-making and action were entirely separate functions. Neither of these hemispheres was “conscious” in the modern sense.
It was only as the result of catastrophic events in the second millennium BC that these voices fell silent, and were replaced by a new invention, that which we now know as self-conscious, reflective thought.
Jaynes introduces his theory by making reference to the Iliad, in which there is almost no description of interiority and subjectivity, or of conscious decision-making; instead, all the characters act at the promptings of the gods, who give them commands that they obey without question. Jaynes suggests that we take these descriptions literally, that this was the way the mind worked for thousands of years of human history. After the opening section of the book, where he quite interestingly discusses a range of philosophical issues having to do with the nature of consciousness and its relation to language, Jaynes supports his argument almost entirely through an analysis of ancient texts and of archaeological discoveries.
Where to begin in discussing such a suggestive, even if overly simple and overly totalizing, thesis? First of all, Jaynes argues that language is a prerequisite for consciousness, rather than the (common-sensical) reverse. This seems to me to be unarguably true, if we mean reflexive, or second-order consciousness. His arguments for this thesis, coming out of the tradition of Anglo-American empirically-grounded psychology, are interesting precisely in their difference from deconstructionist, and other Continental philosophical, arguments to much the same effect. This is useful because Jaynes thereby is able to point to the (relative) primacy of language in the human mind, without getting lost in those rather silly skeptical paradoxes that the deconstructionists are partial to.
Second, I find incredibly valuable the way Jaynes presents his picture of the schizophrenic, pre-conscious “bicameral mind” as a mechanism of social control. The bicameral mind arises, according to Jaynes, in tandem with the development of agriculture and the creation of the first cities (i.e. the first stirrings of “civilization” in Mesopotamia, and perhaps also Egypt, the Indus River Valley, and the Yellow River Valley, at around 9000 BC). Its purpose is to ensure obedience and social harmony; it entails, and enables, the creation of vast, rigid, theocratic hierarchies, such as existed in ancient Sumeria and Egypt (and also, much later, in the Mayan cities of the Western Hemisphere, and in other civilizations around the world). This is the aspect of Jaynes that interested William Burroughs, with his investigations into language as a form of social control and as a virus infecting, even as it created, the human mind.
In describing the passage from bicamerality to self-consciousness, Jaynes is really proposing a genealogy of different regimes of language and subjectivity, in a manner that resonates with ideas proposed by Deleuze and Guattari at around the same time (see especially the chapter “On Several Regimes of Signs” in A Thousand Plateaus). For Jaynes as for Deleuze/Guattari (I assume that Jaynes was unacquainted with D&G’s work, and vice versa), a “despotic” regime is displaced and replaced by a passional, subjectifying one. (I need to be a bit careful here, because I don’t want to merely translate Jaynes’ terms and arguments into deleuzoguattarian ones. The specific interest of Jaynes’ book is how he defamiliarizes the bicameral mindset, shows how it cannot be reduced to the categories that we, subjective people, take for granted).
The latter parts of Jaynes’ book, where he gives massive evidence for his thesis, are somewhat disappointing; in part because the readings of the historical and literary record are so obviously so tendentious, and in part because Jaynes seems content just to reiterate his big idea, rather than really exploring its potential ramifications and implications. He does have a short and interesting discussion about how so many aspects of our world today, from scientists’ search for a “theory of everything” to the worldwide fundamentalist backlash, can be seen as continuing responses to the collapse of the bicameral mind, which still casts its considerable shadow, thousands of years after it happened. But all this is sketchy in the extreme. I note that Jaynes never published (hence, probably, was unable to complete) a promised second volume, devoted to The Consequences of Consciousness, in the twenty years he lived after publishing The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
How “true” is Jaynes’ theory, however? Some of Jaynes’ speculations on neurobiology clearly need to be revised, in the light of our far greater knowledge of the subject today compared to 1976. And I don’t know enough about classical texts to pass any judgment on his readings of the Iliad or Babylonian cuneiform.
But on a larger scale, Jaynes’ theory is pretty much like those of psychoanalysis and evolutionary psychology, and like Terence McKenna’s speculations on the psychedelic origins of consciousness: all of these are stories that cannot be backed up or “proven” scientifically, but that also can’t be simply dismissed, because they refer to issues that themselves demand some sort of self-conscious narrativization, that cannot be resolved by positivist means alone. Empirical investigation can disconfirm particular theories, but it can never succeed in getting rid of our need for such unprovable, metaphorical “just-so stories.”
(The weakness of sociobiological, or evolutionary psychological explanations, in comparison to those of Freud, McKenna, or Jaynes, is that the evolutionary psychologists lay claim to a positivistic grounding that they do not really have, as well as that these theories are totally reductive and unimaginative to boot. Evolutionary psychology theorists generally cannot see beyond their own noses; they fail to realize how tautological they are, in their repetitions of the cliches of our own culture, especially in matters of sex and gender. For all their differences, Freud, McKenna, and Jaynes, at least, are trying to think beyond the narrow prejudices of their own cultural situations; for they are all profoundly aware, as Steven Pinker is not, that their own perspectives are culturally constrained).
As an unprovable but tantalizing “just-so” story of how consciousness came to be, then, Jaynes’ book is valuable precisely for its sense of the contingency of what we take most for granted, of the ways that very deep parts of our mentality are culturally specific and variably, rather than being inscribed “in the genes.” (Or more precisely, how we are genetically endowed, precisely, with such a wide and weird range of mental potentialities). Jaynes’ observations on the neural substrate of bicamerality, on the one hand, and subjective self-consciousness, on the other, suggest new and as yet unfollowed possibilities of research, even if his particular formulation proves to be (as it probably is) incorrect.
The biggest flaw in Jaynes’ scheme, I think, is his failure to consider in any adequate way what might have come before the great bicameral despotisms. Though he only looks at a very narrow sample of ancient history — that of the Middle East, Greece, and Egypt — he claims results that are universally valid. (He suggests, for instance, that similar events took place in China, though he says that he cannot pursue the investigation himself, since he does not know Chinese). But even if we accept that the bicameral model applies to China, and to the Maya, Aztec, and Inca empires, this says nothing about all the so-called “primitive” peoples around the world, who never experienced the bicameral despotic state. He is right to suggest that such peoples are by no means outside of history, and that today they are as fully self-conscious as people anywhere else: the idea of “noble savages,” untainted by contact with “civilization,” is nothing but a racist and imperialist myth. Still, Jaynes seems to assume that all the peoples of the earth went through a period of bicamerality, that the pre-bicameral mind is not a fully linguistic one, and that “hunter-gatherer groups” have either already “been a part of a bicameral theocracy” in the past, or else were “like other primates, being neither bicameral nor conscious,” until learning consciousness by contact with other groups. But this is obviously wrong; Jaynes wants to locate the origin of language as recently as 12,000 years ago, when it certainly has to be much earlier, before the ancestors of modern Homo sapiens spread out from Africa. A major expansion of Jaynes’ theory is therefore needed, one that would consider the mentality of gift societies (Mauss), stateless societies (Pierre Clastres), etc, societies that know nothing of (and might even actively “ward off”) bicameral despotism.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes, is one of those books, proposing a radical new thesis, that had an enormous impact when it was first published (1976), but has since fallen into the backwaters of intellectual fashion. Today it still has an ardent cult following, but otherwise it is not so much rejected as it is not taken seriously in the first place, and thereby, it is almost totally ignored.
This neglect is somewhat unfortunate. While I don’t think there is any scientific “proof” for Jaynes’ argument, and while certain of his assertions are almost certainly wrong, his book remains intellectually provocative; it opens up some very important questions, even if we are not ready to follow its conclusions.
Basically, Jaynes argues that consciousness, as we understand it today, has only been possessed by human beings for the last four thousand years or so. (By “consciousness” he means, not the primary perceptual awareness that all mammals, and perhaps many other ‘lower’ organisms as well, seem to possess, but what I would prefer to call self-consciousness, or second-order consciousness: the ability to reflect upon oneself, to introspect, to narrate one’s existence). Jaynes proposes that, in the second millennium BC and before, human beings were not self-conscious, and did not reflect upon what they did; rather, people heard voices instructing them in what to do, and they obeyed these voices immediately and unreflectively. These voices were believed (to the extent that “belief” is a relevant category in such circumstances) to be the voices of gods; their neurological cause was probably language issuing from the right hemisphere of the brain, and experienced hallucinatorily, and obeyed, by the left hemisphere (which is where speech is localized today).
This is why Jaynes calls the archaic mind a non-conscious, “bicameral” one. Thought was linguistic, but it did not have any correlates in consciousness; people didn’t make decisions, but instead the decisions were made automatically, and conveyed by the voices. One half of the brain commanded the other, so that decision-making and action were entirely separate functions. Neither of these hemispheres was “conscious” in the modern sense.
It was only as the result of catastrophic events in the second millennium BC that these voices fell silent, and were replaced by a new invention, that which we now know as self-conscious, reflective thought.
Jaynes introduces his theory by making reference to the Iliad, in which there is almost no description of interiority and subjectivity, or of conscious decision-making; instead, all the characters act at the promptings of the gods, who give them commands that they obey without question. Jaynes suggests that we take these descriptions literally, that this was the way the mind worked for thousands of years of human history. After the opening section of the book, where he quite interestingly discusses a range of philosophical issues having to do with the nature of consciousness and its relation to language, Jaynes supports his argument almost entirely through an analysis of ancient texts and of archaeological discoveries.
Where to begin in discussing such a suggestive, even if overly simple and overly totalizing, thesis? First of all, Jaynes argues that language is a prerequisite for consciousness, rather than the (common-sensical) reverse. This seems to me to be unarguably true, if we mean reflexive, or second-order consciousness. His arguments for this thesis, coming out of the tradition of Anglo-American empirically-grounded psychology, are interesting precisely in their difference from deconstructionist, and other Continental philosophical, arguments to much the same effect. This is useful because Jaynes thereby is able to point to the (relative) primacy of language in the human mind, without getting lost in those rather silly skeptical paradoxes that the deconstructionists are partial to.
Second, I find incredibly valuable the way Jaynes presents his picture of the schizophrenic, pre-conscious “bicameral mind” as a mechanism of social control. The bicameral mind arises, according to Jaynes, in tandem with the development of agriculture and the creation of the first cities (i.e. the first stirrings of “civilization” in Mesopotamia, and perhaps also Egypt, the Indus River Valley, and the Yellow River Valley, at around 9000 BC). Its purpose is to ensure obedience and social harmony; it entails, and enables, the creation of vast, rigid, theocratic hierarchies, such as existed in ancient Sumeria and Egypt (and also, much later, in the Mayan cities of the Western Hemisphere, and in other civilizations around the world). This is the aspect of Jaynes that interested William Burroughs, with his investigations into language as a form of social control and as a virus infecting, even as it created, the human mind.
In describing the passage from bicamerality to self-consciousness, Jaynes is really proposing a genealogy of different regimes of language and subjectivity, in a manner that resonates with ideas proposed by Deleuze and Guattari at around the same time (see especially the chapter “On Several Regimes of Signs” in A Thousand Plateaus). For Jaynes as for Deleuze/Guattari (I assume that Jaynes was unacquainted with D&G’s work, and vice versa), a “despotic” regime is displaced and replaced by a passional, subjectifying one. (I need to be a bit careful here, because I don’t want to merely translate Jaynes’ terms and arguments into deleuzoguattarian ones. The specific interest of Jaynes’ book is how he defamiliarizes the bicameral mindset, shows how it cannot be reduced to the categories that we, subjective people, take for granted).
The latter parts of Jaynes’ book, where he gives massive evidence for his thesis, are somewhat disappointing; in part because the readings of the historical and literary record are so obviously so tendentious, and in part because Jaynes seems content just to reiterate his big idea, rather than really exploring its potential ramifications and implications. He does have a short and interesting discussion about how so many aspects of our world today, from scientists’ search for a “theory of everything” to the worldwide fundamentalist backlash, can be seen as continuing responses to the collapse of the bicameral mind, which still casts its considerable shadow, thousands of years after it happened. But all this is sketchy in the extreme. I note that Jaynes never published (hence, probably, was unable to complete) a promised second volume, devoted to The Consequences of Consciousness, in the twenty years he lived after publishing The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
How “true” is Jaynes’ theory, however? Some of Jaynes’ speculations on neurobiology clearly need to be revised, in the light of our far greater knowledge of the subject today compared to 1976. And I don’t know enough about classical texts to pass any judgment on his readings of the Iliad or Babylonian cuneiform.
But on a larger scale, Jaynes’ theory is pretty much like those of psychoanalysis and evolutionary psychology, and like Terence McKenna’s speculations on the psychedelic origins of consciousness: all of these are stories that cannot be backed up or “proven” scientifically, but that also can’t be simply dismissed, because they refer to issues that themselves demand some sort of self-conscious narrativization, that cannot be resolved by positivist means alone. Empirical investigation can disconfirm particular theories, but it can never succeed in getting rid of our need for such unprovable, metaphorical “just-so stories.”
(The weakness of sociobiological, or evolutionary psychological explanations, in comparison to those of Freud, McKenna, or Jaynes, is that the evolutionary psychologists lay claim to a positivistic grounding that they do not really have, as well as that these theories are totally reductive and unimaginative to boot. Evolutionary psychology theorists generally cannot see beyond their own noses; they fail to realize how tautological they are, in their repetitions of the cliches of our own culture, especially in matters of sex and gender. For all their differences, Freud, McKenna, and Jaynes, at least, are trying to think beyond the narrow prejudices of their own cultural situations; for they are all profoundly aware, as Steven Pinker is not, that their own perspectives are culturally constrained).
As an unprovable but tantalizing “just-so” story of how consciousness came to be, then, Jaynes’ book is valuable precisely for its sense of the contingency of what we take most for granted, of the ways that very deep parts of our mentality are culturally specific and variably, rather than being inscribed “in the genes.” (Or more precisely, how we are genetically endowed, precisely, with such a wide and weird range of mental potentialities). Jaynes’ observations on the neural substrate of bicamerality, on the one hand, and subjective self-consciousness, on the other, suggest new and as yet unfollowed possibilities of research, even if his particular formulation proves to be (as it probably is) incorrect.
The biggest flaw in Jaynes’ scheme, I think, is his failure to consider in any adequate way what might have come before the great bicameral despotisms. Though he only looks at a very narrow sample of ancient history — that of the Middle East, Greece, and Egypt — he claims results that are universally valid. (He suggests, for instance, that similar events took place in China, though he says that he cannot pursue the investigation himself, since he does not know Chinese). But even if we accept that the bicameral model applies to China, and to the Maya, Aztec, and Inca empires, this says nothing about all the so-called “primitive” peoples around the world, who never experienced the bicameral despotic state. He is right to suggest that such peoples are by no means outside of history, and that today they are as fully self-conscious as people anywhere else: the idea of “noble savages,” untainted by contact with “civilization,” is nothing but a racist and imperialist myth. Still, Jaynes seems to assume that all the peoples of the earth went through a period of bicamerality, that the pre-bicameral mind is not a fully linguistic one, and that “hunter-gatherer groups” have either already “been a part of a bicameral theocracy” in the past, or else were “like other primates, being neither bicameral nor conscious,” until learning consciousness by contact with other groups. But this is obviously wrong; Jaynes wants to locate the origin of language as recently as 12,000 years ago, when it certainly has to be much earlier, before the ancestors of modern Homo sapiens spread out from Africa. A major expansion of Jaynes’ theory is therefore needed, one that would consider the mentality of gift societies (Mauss), stateless societies (Pierre Clastres), etc, societies that know nothing of (and might even actively “ward off”) bicameral despotism.
I loved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the new Charlie Kaufman/Michel Gondry film. It manages to be both funny and poignant, and to feel fresh even though it’s recycling some fairly hoary chestnuts of romantic comedy. As you’d expect from Charlie Kaufman, form trumps content, in a cleverly self-referential way. But to call the film “clever” is a bit unfair; such a characterization doesn’t do justice to the way its affect is simultaneously goofy and heartfelt.
It’s hard to talk about the film without, to some extent, giving it away. It’s not that the plot contains any real surprises, once you accept its outrageous premise. But the manner of presentation is frequently surprising.
The premise is a technology that allows you to selectively erase your memories. You can forget everything about an unhappy love affair, forget even the other person’s existence, with nothing else being affected. As presented in the film, this technology is hilariously sleazy and tacky — it’s done overnight in your bedroom, while you sleep, and the techs party, have sex, and drink up all your liquor, while they are supposedly monitoring the state of your brain on their laptops. (They chase down emotional memories that pop out in green from an MRI scan photo on the computer, as if they were killing enemies in a computer game).
So, Jim Carrey (pitch-perfect: unusually subdued, rather morose in fact, but also without the heavyhanded seriousness of his previous efforts to “act” in films like The Truman Show) and Kate Winslet (manic and overbearing, but engagingly and believably so) are a couple who break up: they love each other, but also get on each other’s nerves and wear themselves down through constant bickering. One day, after walking out on Jim, Kate has her memories of him wiped. When Jim finds out about this, he is distraught; he decides he needs to get his memories of her wiped as well. Most of the movie takes place in Jim’s brain, while he’s asleep, and the techs are giving his brain a washing. In the middle of it all, Jim changes his mind: he doesn’t want to forget Kate after all. He runs with her through memory after memory, trying to evade the relentless process of erasure. Hilarity ensues, as well as non-linear narrative hijinks.
So the narrative is scrambled; and it changes before our eyes, since truth is always a function of — always subject to — the vagaries of memory and desire. It’s not that it’s hard to follow: Kaufman isn’t interested in luring us into trying to solve a puzzle, the way Christopher Nolan does in Memento. Much more interestingly, the non-linearity of Eternal Sunshine allows Kaufman to link memories (plot events) associatively, like music, developing themes, repeating with variations, changing the feel of a scene by undermining and altering its context. This, together with Gondry’s quicksilver direction (continually varying mood through subtle visual and musical cues, plays of color and sound) is what makes the film so engaging and enthralling. Gondry uses a lot of technical tricks from his music videos, especially various sorts of visual composting; and miraculously (unlike what usually happens), they survive their transplant from the world of 3-minute videos to the vastly different world of feature films. They seem expressive, and not just gimmicky.
David Edelstein rightly compares Eternal Sunshine to the great screwball comedies of the 1930s and early 40s. But where Edelstein is referring to the way that Sunshine, like those earlier films, is what Stanley Cavell calls a “comedy of remarriage,” the most striking parallel for me is one of agility and speed. I’m thinking of the rapid-fire exchanges of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, and even better the manic exchanges between Grant and Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby. In those films, Howard Hawks was a slyly laid-back director, cunningly arranging camerawork and editing in order to foreground his stars, and their repartee, as effectively as possible. Though Carrey and Winslet are terrific, Gondry and Kaufman don’t rely as exclusively on dialogue as Hawks did; but Sunshine‘s conceptual and visual conceits have the same effects of density and wit through sheer velocity that the screwball comedies had through dialogue and the stars’ physical presence alone.
I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface here; there’s a lot more to say. But that will have to wait until the film comes out on DVD and I can watch it again, several times. Suffice it to say that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is Charlie Kaufman’s best work yet; together with Mulholland Drive and Punch Drunk Love and perhaps Lost in Translation, it’s evidence that American filmmaking is still alive, in spite of everything, in the twenty-first century.
I loved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the new Charlie Kaufman/Michel Gondry film. It manages to be both funny and poignant, and to feel fresh even though it’s recycling some fairly hoary chestnuts of romantic comedy. As you’d expect from Charlie Kaufman, form trumps content, in a cleverly self-referential way. But to call the film “clever” is a bit unfair; such a characterization doesn’t do justice to the way its affect is simultaneously goofy and heartfelt.
It’s hard to talk about the film without, to some extent, giving it away. It’s not that the plot contains any real surprises, once you accept its outrageous premise. But the manner of presentation is frequently surprising.
The premise is a technology that allows you to selectively erase your memories. You can forget everything about an unhappy love affair, forget even the other person’s existence, with nothing else being affected. As presented in the film, this technology is hilariously sleazy and tacky — it’s done overnight in your bedroom, while you sleep, and the techs party, have sex, and drink up all your liquor, while they are supposedly monitoring the state of your brain on their laptops. (They chase down emotional memories that pop out in green from an MRI scan photo on the computer, as if they were killing enemies in a computer game).
So, Jim Carrey (pitch-perfect: unusually subdued, rather morose in fact, but also without the heavyhanded seriousness of his previous efforts to “act” in films like The Truman Show) and Kate Winslet (manic and overbearing, but engagingly and believably so) are a couple who break up: they love each other, but also get on each other’s nerves and wear themselves down through constant bickering. One day, after walking out on Jim, Kate has her memories of him wiped. When Jim finds out about this, he is distraught; he decides he needs to get his memories of her wiped as well. Most of the movie takes place in Jim’s brain, while he’s asleep, and the techs are giving his brain a washing. In the middle of it all, Jim changes his mind: he doesn’t want to forget Kate after all. He runs with her through memory after memory, trying to evade the relentless process of erasure. Hilarity ensues, as well as non-linear narrative hijinks.
So the narrative is scrambled; and it changes before our eyes, since truth is always a function of — always subject to — the vagaries of memory and desire. It’s not that it’s hard to follow: Kaufman isn’t interested in luring us into trying to solve a puzzle, the way Christopher Nolan does in Memento. Much more interestingly, the non-linearity of Eternal Sunshine allows Kaufman to link memories (plot events) associatively, like music, developing themes, repeating with variations, changing the feel of a scene by undermining and altering its context. This, together with Gondry’s quicksilver direction (continually varying mood through subtle visual and musical cues, plays of color and sound) is what makes the film so engaging and enthralling. Gondry uses a lot of technical tricks from his music videos, especially various sorts of visual composting; and miraculously (unlike what usually happens), they survive their transplant from the world of 3-minute videos to the vastly different world of feature films. They seem expressive, and not just gimmicky.
David Edelstein rightly compares Eternal Sunshine to the great screwball comedies of the 1930s and early 40s. But where Edelstein is referring to the way that Sunshine, like those earlier films, is what Stanley Cavell calls a “comedy of remarriage,” the most striking parallel for me is one of agility and speed. I’m thinking of the rapid-fire exchanges of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, and even better the manic exchanges between Grant and Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby. In those films, Howard Hawks was a slyly laid-back director, cunningly arranging camerawork and editing in order to foreground his stars, and their repartee, as effectively as possible. Though Carrey and Winslet are terrific, Gondry and Kaufman don’t rely as exclusively on dialogue as Hawks did; but Sunshine‘s conceptual and visual conceits have the same effects of density and wit through sheer velocity that the screwball comedies had through dialogue and the stars’ physical presence alone.
I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface here; there’s a lot more to say. But that will have to wait until the film comes out on DVD and I can watch it again, several times. Suffice it to say that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is Charlie Kaufman’s best work yet; together with Mulholland Drive and Punch Drunk Love and perhaps Lost in Translation, it’s evidence that American filmmaking is still alive, in spite of everything, in the twenty-first century.
Cory Doctorow‘s latest SF novel, Eastern Standard Tribe (also available for free download), doesn’t reimagine utopia as Disneyland, as his previous novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, did. Eastern Standard Tribes is more mundane, and set closer to the present.
Indeed, the only even slightly futuristic technology in EST is the “comms”: an integrated mobile phone and PDA with extreme ease of use, desktop-worthy memory and storage, and ubiquitous fast wireless access to both the phone system and the Net. Something, in other words, that has already been conceptualized clearly, though with details that haven’t been worked out yet in practice.
In essence, therefore, EST is a novel of the almost-present, and it reads well as a light, zippy satire on the high-tech yuppie culture of techno-savvy “road warriors.” The book is funny and ultimately upbeat: I don’t really see any irony in its celebration of user-friendly tech and entrepreneurship. Nonetheless, the plot does turn upon betrayal, something that clues us in to the naivete and limited understanding of its likable narrator/protagonist.
Doctorow, like William Gibson and Sofia Coppola, sees jet lag as emblematic of the postmodern, globalized condition. The novel’s title refers to the fact that the narrator’s associations and allegiances, for both work and leisure, are with people in eastern North America (New York, Toronto, Boston). This means that he has to keep himself and his schedule on Eastern Standard time (GMT-5), so that he can remain in real-time touch with his friends (through phone and online chat on his comms) even when he is somewhere else in the world entirely (like London, where much of the book’s action unfolds). The resulting clash between local time and Eastern Time wreaks havoc on his circadian rhythms, and he stumbles through most of the novel in a kind of haze, oscillating unsteadily between excessive alertness and extreme fatigue.
What makes the book work overall is Doctorow’s sly sensibility. He throws out ideas with a prodigality that is only matched by their understatedness. It’s easy to read right through the novel’s suggestions and scenarios, and only realize retrospectively (if at all) how clever and crazy they were. And that’s what gives this book (like Doctorow’s other fiction) its alluring and refreshing affective tone: things often seem ever so slightly off, or empty, or not quite real, but in a pleasing, displaced sort of way. Eastern Standard Tribes does not have any overt references (unless I missed them, which is a possibility) to Disney and Disneyland (objects of Doctorow’s self-confessed obsession), but the feel of the book conveys a strange hint of what it might be like if a Disneyesque, blandly feelgood sensibility were deployed in the service of offbeat eccentricity, instead of (the Disney Corp.’s actual) normative values.
Cory Doctorow‘s latest SF novel, Eastern Standard Tribe (also available for free download), doesn’t reimagine utopia as Disneyland, as his previous novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, did. Eastern Standard Tribes is more mundane, and set closer to the present.
Indeed, the only even slightly futuristic technology in EST is the “comms”: an integrated mobile phone and PDA with extreme ease of use, desktop-worthy memory and storage, and ubiquitous fast wireless access to both the phone system and the Net. Something, in other words, that has already been conceptualized clearly, though with details that haven’t been worked out yet in practice.
In essence, therefore, EST is a novel of the almost-present, and it reads well as a light, zippy satire on the high-tech yuppie culture of techno-savvy “road warriors.” The book is funny and ultimately upbeat: I don’t really see any irony in its celebration of user-friendly tech and entrepreneurship. Nonetheless, the plot does turn upon betrayal, something that clues us in to the naivete and limited understanding of its likable narrator/protagonist.
Doctorow, like William Gibson and Sofia Coppola, sees jet lag as emblematic of the postmodern, globalized condition. The novel’s title refers to the fact that the narrator’s associations and allegiances, for both work and leisure, are with people in eastern North America (New York, Toronto, Boston). This means that he has to keep himself and his schedule on Eastern Standard time (GMT-5), so that he can remain in real-time touch with his friends (through phone and online chat on his comms) even when he is somewhere else in the world entirely (like London, where much of the book’s action unfolds). The resulting clash between local time and Eastern Time wreaks havoc on his circadian rhythms, and he stumbles through most of the novel in a kind of haze, oscillating unsteadily between excessive alertness and extreme fatigue.
What makes the book work overall is Doctorow’s sly sensibility. He throws out ideas with a prodigality that is only matched by their understatedness. It’s easy to read right through the novel’s suggestions and scenarios, and only realize retrospectively (if at all) how clever and crazy they were. And that’s what gives this book (like Doctorow’s other fiction) its alluring and refreshing affective tone: things often seem ever so slightly off, or empty, or not quite real, but in a pleasing, displaced sort of way. Eastern Standard Tribes does not have any overt references (unless I missed them, which is a possibility) to Disney and Disneyland (objects of Doctorow’s self-confessed obsession), but the feel of the book conveys a strange hint of what it might be like if a Disneyesque, blandly feelgood sensibility were deployed in the service of offbeat eccentricity, instead of (the Disney Corp.’s actual) normative values.
Forget Baghdad, a documentary film by Samir, tracks the complexities of “identity” in the Middle East. I caught it today at the Seattle Jewish Film Festival, after missing it last month at the Seattle Arab-Iranian Film Festival.
Samir, the director of Forget Baghdad, is a Shiite Muslim Iraqi emigre, living in Switzerland. (His father, an Iraqi Communist, had to flee the country to escape Saddam). In the film, he interviews four elderly Jewish Iraqi emigres, all ex-Communists, who were forced to leave Baghdad for Israel in 1951, when almost the entire Iraqi Jewish community was prevailed upon (by both the Iraqi and Israeli governments) to emigrate. (A fifth interviewee is Ella Shohat, born in Israel of Iraqi Jewish parents, and currently teaching film at NYU).
All the interviewees are articulate, and display very mixed emotions. They all miss Baghdad, and regret the disappearance of the multi-religious society that existed in Iraq (as in many parts of the Arab world) prior to 1948; they all feel their Arabness as fully as they do their Jewishness; they all have experienced discrimination in Israeli society, as Mizrahim (“Oriental” Jews) rather than Ashkenazim (European Jews).
By their accounts, no discrimination against Jews existed in Iraq before 1941, when a pogrom was unleashed by nationalist putsch against the pro-British monarchy, with support from the Nazis. (It remains true today: anti-Semitism, so-called, is a European import into the Arab world).
Forget Baghdad isn’t a great film, but it well demonstrates, once again, how the lines of ethnic and religious turmoil that bedevil the world today are not “age-old” rivalries, but modernist inventions. It shows, too, how “Jews” and “Arabs” are, culturally speaking, much closer kin than is usually acknowledged.
Forget Baghdad, a documentary film by Samir, tracks the complexities of “identity” in the Middle East. I caught it today at the Seattle Jewish Film Festival, after missing it last month at the Seattle Arab-Iranian Film Festival.
Samir, the director of Forget Baghdad, is a Shiite Muslim Iraqi emigre, living in Switzerland. (His father, an Iraqi Communist, had to flee the country to escape Saddam). In the film, he interviews four elderly Jewish Iraqi emigres, all ex-Communists, who were forced to leave Baghdad for Israel in 1951, when almost the entire Iraqi Jewish community was prevailed upon (by both the Iraqi and Israeli governments) to emigrate. (A fifth interviewee is Ella Shohat, born in Israel of Iraqi Jewish parents, and currently teaching film at NYU).
All the interviewees are articulate, and display very mixed emotions. They all miss Baghdad, and regret the disappearance of the multi-religious society that existed in Iraq (as in many parts of the Arab world) prior to 1948; they all feel their Arabness as fully as they do their Jewishness; they all have experienced discrimination in Israeli society, as Mizrahim (“Oriental” Jews) rather than Ashkenazim (European Jews).
By their accounts, no discrimination against Jews existed in Iraq before 1941, when a pogrom was unleashed by nationalist putsch against the pro-British monarchy, with support from the Nazis. (It remains true today: anti-Semitism, so-called, is a European import into the Arab world).
Forget Baghdad isn’t a great film, but it well demonstrates, once again, how the lines of ethnic and religious turmoil that bedevil the world today are not “age-old” rivalries, but modernist inventions. It shows, too, how “Jews” and “Arabs” are, culturally speaking, much closer kin than is usually acknowledged.
Richard C. Francis’ Why Men Won’t Ask for Directions is a powerful critique of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology that makes its points almost entirely in carefully worked-out scientific terms. That is to say, it doesn’t spend much time asking why, for instance, the evolutionary psychologists are so obsessed with tracking down supposed gender differences that are allegedly “in the genes”, as opposed to many other equally plausible research programs and subjects of interest. (This is an important question, but one that cultural critics can handle well enough by themselves). Instead, Francis gives a detailed and devastating critique of the (pseudo-)science behind all too many sociobiological claims.
Francis spends most of the book considering instances of sexual differentiation in vertebrate species other than human beings; this establishes a baseline for considering claims about the “innate” differences between men and women. He compares cases in which the differences between the males and females of a given species can convincingly be argued to be a direct result of natural selection and/or sexual selection, from those in which other, more proximate, explanations seem to fit the facts better.
Francis’ real target is extreme adaptationism: the doctrine that every observable characteristic of any organism needs to be understood as a direct adaptation of some sort. Of course, Richard Lewontin and the late Stephen Jay Gould started criticizing adaptationism way back in the 1960s. They introduced the ideas of exaptation (the transfer of a characteristic that evolved for one purpose, or in one context, to another context or purpose) and spandrels (features that have no adaptive purpose of their own, but exist as unavoidable side-effects of other features that did arise adaptively). Gould also famously criticized sociobiologists for their “just-so stories”: their tendency to argue on the basis of narratives of what primordial human conditions might or should have been like, even in the absence of any hard evidence for the truth of these narratives.
But Francis goes beyond Lewontin and Gould, to mount a more general attack on the teleological bias of adaptationist explanations: in asking “why-questions” (what is a particular feature of an organism for? what purposes does it serve?) at the expense of “how-questions” (how could a particular feature actually have arisen historically? what role does it have, given the previously-existing constraints that the organism faces?), adaptationist biology (and even more, its offshoot evolutionary psychology) has in effect reinstated the “argument from design” of pre-Darwinian “natural theology.”
In ignoring “how-questions,” adaptationists assert meaning and purpose without any ability to explain in causal and material terms how such meanings and purposes could possibly have come about. They separate the logic of adaptation from its material causation, just as cognitive scientists divorce “information” from its physical instantiation. For all their talk about “optimization” under ecological “constraints,” adaptationists ignore how the contingencies of history, and the constraints arising from how organisms are already “locked-in” to particular mechanisms and patterns of development, limit and channel evolutionary possibilities. (A parallel could be made, as well, to the way “free-market” economists ignore history, not to mention patterns of unequal power and distribution, in their quest to reduce everything to “efficiency”).
If extreme adaptationism is so problematic when it comes to discussing spotted hyenas and marsh tits and cichlids, how much more so is it when we come to consider human beings? Unlike certain “humanist”, idealizing opponents of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, Francis doesn’t make his argument depend upon the supposed uniqueness of the human species. It is precisely on the grounds of recognizing human beings as biological organisms that we have to reject all this simplistic “biologizing.” Francis is devastating, for instance, in discussing how evolutionary psychologists make so much of sexual dimorphisms between men and women that are minute (if they exist at all) in comparison to such dimorphisms in other vertebrate species. And he underscores the importance of looking for social causes of physiological and psychological differences, not in defiance of biology, but precisely because of it. The largest irony here is that, not only do the adaptationists in effect replace Darwin with theology; they also ignore the basic facts of neurophysiology and endocrinology, in their efforts to proclaim essential, “hard-wired”, and transhistorical differences between men and women.
Richard C. Francis’ Why Men Won’t Ask for Directions is a powerful critique of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology that makes its points almost entirely in carefully worked-out scientific terms. That is to say, it doesn’t spend much time asking why, for instance, the evolutionary psychologists are so obsessed with tracking down supposed gender differences that are allegedly “in the genes”, as opposed to many other equally plausible research programs and subjects of interest. (This is an important question, but one that cultural critics can handle well enough by themselves). Instead, Francis gives a detailed and devastating critique of the (pseudo-)science behind all too many sociobiological claims.
Francis spends most of the book considering instances of sexual differentiation in vertebrate species other than human beings; this establishes a baseline for considering claims about the “innate” differences between men and women. He compares cases in which the differences between the males and females of a given species can convincingly be argued to be a direct result of natural selection and/or sexual selection, from those in which other, more proximate, explanations seem to fit the facts better.
Francis’ real target is extreme adaptationism: the doctrine that every observable characteristic of any organism needs to be understood as a direct adaptation of some sort. Of course, Richard Lewontin and the late Stephen Jay Gould started criticizing adaptationism way back in the 1960s. They introduced the ideas of exaptation (the transfer of a characteristic that evolved for one purpose, or in one context, to another context or purpose) and spandrels (features that have no adaptive purpose of their own, but exist as unavoidable side-effects of other features that did arise adaptively). Gould also famously criticized sociobiologists for their “just-so stories”: their tendency to argue on the basis of narratives of what primordial human conditions might or should have been like, even in the absence of any hard evidence for the truth of these narratives.
But Francis goes beyond Lewontin and Gould, to mount a more general attack on the teleological bias of adaptationist explanations: in asking “why-questions” (what is a particular feature of an organism for? what purposes does it serve?) at the expense of “how-questions” (how could a particular feature actually have arisen historically? what role does it have, given the previously-existing constraints that the organism faces?), adaptationist biology (and even more, its offshoot evolutionary psychology) has in effect reinstated the “argument from design” of pre-Darwinian “natural theology.”
In ignoring “how-questions,” adaptationists assert meaning and purpose without any ability to explain in causal and material terms how such meanings and purposes could possibly have come about. They separate the logic of adaptation from its material causation, just as cognitive scientists divorce “information” from its physical instantiation. For all their talk about “optimization” under ecological “constraints,” adaptationists ignore how the contingencies of history, and the constraints arising from how organisms are already “locked-in” to particular mechanisms and patterns of development, limit and channel evolutionary possibilities. (A parallel could be made, as well, to the way “free-market” economists ignore history, not to mention patterns of unequal power and distribution, in their quest to reduce everything to “efficiency”).
If extreme adaptationism is so problematic when it comes to discussing spotted hyenas and marsh tits and cichlids, how much more so is it when we come to consider human beings? Unlike certain “humanist”, idealizing opponents of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, Francis doesn’t make his argument depend upon the supposed uniqueness of the human species. It is precisely on the grounds of recognizing human beings as biological organisms that we have to reject all this simplistic “biologizing.” Francis is devastating, for instance, in discussing how evolutionary psychologists make so much of sexual dimorphisms between men and women that are minute (if they exist at all) in comparison to such dimorphisms in other vertebrate species. And he underscores the importance of looking for social causes of physiological and psychological differences, not in defiance of biology, but precisely because of it. The largest irony here is that, not only do the adaptationists in effect replace Darwin with theology; they also ignore the basic facts of neurophysiology and endocrinology, in their efforts to proclaim essential, “hard-wired”, and transhistorical differences between men and women.
The World of Arthur Russell is the most gorgeous music I have heard in ages. Russell (1951-1992) was an 80s disco producer with an avant-garde/classical music background. (See Sasha Freire-Jones’ article in The New Yorker for background). All Russell’s songs have a driving disco beat, a rhythm that’s less straightforward than it might seem at first, but that makes them instantly accessible and infectious. At the same time, there’s always something about them that’s deeply weird: a bit of unexpected instrumentation, a vocal that just seems somehow off, an out-of-pace shift of tonality…
Russell’s music is too quirky and strange to be called simply “charming”; but too quicksilver to be taken ponderously. It seems just the right thing to be listening to right now, on one of Seattle’s (rare) sunny days; there’s always a tinge of melancholy, but one that only seems to enrich the music’s overall cheerfulness (cheerfulness in the Nietzschean sense, gai savoir).
The World of Arthur Russell is the most gorgeous music I have heard in ages. Russell (1951-1992) was an 80s disco producer with an avant-garde/classical music background. (See Sasha Freire-Jones’ article in The New Yorker for background). All Russell’s songs have a driving disco beat, a rhythm that’s less straightforward than it might seem at first, but that makes them instantly accessible and infectious. At the same time, there’s always something about them that’s deeply weird: a bit of unexpected instrumentation, a vocal that just seems somehow off, an out-of-pace shift of tonality…
Russell’s music is too quirky and strange to be called simply “charming”; but too quicksilver to be taken ponderously. It seems just the right thing to be listening to right now, on one of Seattle’s (rare) sunny days; there’s always a tinge of melancholy, but one that only seems to enrich the music’s overall cheerfulness (cheerfulness in the Nietzschean sense, gai savoir).
Jacki-O’s “Pussy” (or, in the censored-for-radio version, “Nookie”) is the latest rap song (following Lil Kim, Khia, and Missy Elliott, among others) in which a woman celebrates her “wet and deep” orifice.
What’s fascinating about Jacki-O’s song (and — depending upon your perspective — either deeply weird or all-too-symptomatic of normative conditions) is the balance it negotiates between pleasure on the one hand, and power and money on the other.
The lyrics mostly celebrate pussy power as what can “pay my bills… I don’t pay for weed, I get in clubs free… Girls, we got power cuz’ we got pussy.” Jackie-O boasts that men are just slobbering to sample what’s between her legs: “He need this pussy/ He smell this pussy/ He wanna taste this pussy/ You gotta pay for pussy.”
In hip hop’s current battle of the sexes, this is probably only to be expected, as a response to male power. Money continually trumps desire on both sides of the fence. (Remember, the most woman-positive thing Jay-Z can ever bring himself to say is: “ladies is pimps too.” And even Missy reminds her girls to “get your cash” when you are getting off). Still, there’s nothing here that matches Lil Kim’s demand for clitoral pleasure from her men (“How Many Licks”), or Missy’s gleeful hymn to the vibrator, thereby dispensing with men entirely (“Toys”). Jacki-O seems concentrated on cash and luxury (emphasized in the video), to the exclusion of all else.
Does the pussy have more than instrumental value for Jacki-O?
Here’s where, I think, the song means more (and differently) than the words. The music sets a heavy beat against an almost nursery-rhyme-like melody (reminiscent of the Ying Yang Twinz’ “Naggin'” (a misogynistic battle-of-the-sexes song itself, with a “Part 2” ladies’ response). This makes the song sillier, and more playful, than it would be with a different instrumental track. (“Pussy” mash-ups, anyone?) And Jackie-O’s sultry, slightly slurry voice suggests an immense narcissistic pleasure, rather than calculation for gain.
Where Missy is comfortably laughing and gossiping with her girlfriends, and where Lil Kim is both boasting to the world of her sexual prowess, and warning her men that they’d better have what it takes to keep her satisfied (all this amplified by the irony of the video for “How Many Licks,” which turns Kim into a series of commercial sex-toy dolls), Jacki-O sounds like she is only talking to herself. Which makes it seem like the cash is only an alibi for the pleasure, rather than the reverse.
Of course, as Freud (among others) says, nothing’s more seductive to heterosexual men than a woman who seems totally narcissistic and self-contained, so that apparently she doesn’t need them; so maybe Jacki-O’s voice in this song is really nothing more than a calculated ploy after all. And it works: she did indeed seduce me to buy her song for 99 cents (plus tax) from the Apple Music Store.
Which brings it all back to performance. We are always performing, calculatedly putting on various personas. But we cannot do this with impunity; we always become, to some extent, what we are merely pretending to be. Which is part of what popular music does for its listeners: it seduces us, it gives us points of identification and irony, as it slides from one identity to another, forever proclaiming authenticity in the most artificial, factitious way possible, exploring/exploiting the fault lines of our culture.
Jacki-O’s “Pussy” (or, in the censored-for-radio version, “Nookie”) is the latest rap song (following Lil Kim, Khia, and Missy Elliott, among others) in which a woman celebrates her “wet and deep” orifice.
What’s fascinating about Jacki-O’s song (and — depending upon your perspective — either deeply weird or all-too-symptomatic of normative conditions) is the balance it negotiates between pleasure on the one hand, and power and money on the other.
The lyrics mostly celebrate pussy power as what can “pay my bills… I don’t pay for weed, I get in clubs free… Girls, we got power cuz’ we got pussy.” Jackie-O boasts that men are just slobbering to sample what’s between her legs: “He need this pussy/ He smell this pussy/ He wanna taste this pussy/ You gotta pay for pussy.”
In hip hop’s current battle of the sexes, this is probably only to be expected, as a response to male power. Money continually trumps desire on both sides of the fence. (Remember, the most woman-positive thing Jay-Z can ever bring himself to say is: “ladies is pimps too.” And even Missy reminds her girls to “get your cash” when you are getting off). Still, there’s nothing here that matches Lil Kim’s demand for clitoral pleasure from her men (“How Many Licks”), or Missy’s gleeful hymn to the vibrator, thereby dispensing with men entirely (“Toys”). Jacki-O seems concentrated on cash and luxury (emphasized in the video), to the exclusion of all else.
Does the pussy have more than instrumental value for Jacki-O?
Here’s where, I think, the song means more (and differently) than the words. The music sets a heavy beat against an almost nursery-rhyme-like melody (reminiscent of the Ying Yang Twinz’ “Naggin'” (a misogynistic battle-of-the-sexes song itself, with a “Part 2” ladies’ response). This makes the song sillier, and more playful, than it would be with a different instrumental track. (“Pussy” mash-ups, anyone?) And Jackie-O’s sultry, slightly slurry voice suggests an immense narcissistic pleasure, rather than calculation for gain.
Where Missy is comfortably laughing and gossiping with her girlfriends, and where Lil Kim is both boasting to the world of her sexual prowess, and warning her men that they’d better have what it takes to keep her satisfied (all this amplified by the irony of the video for “How Many Licks,” which turns Kim into a series of commercial sex-toy dolls), Jacki-O sounds like she is only talking to herself. Which makes it seem like the cash is only an alibi for the pleasure, rather than the reverse.
Of course, as Freud (among others) says, nothing’s more seductive to heterosexual men than a woman who seems totally narcissistic and self-contained, so that apparently she doesn’t need them; so maybe Jacki-O’s voice in this song is really nothing more than a calculated ploy after all. And it works: she did indeed seduce me to buy her song for 99 cents (plus tax) from the Apple Music Store.
Which brings it all back to performance. We are always performing, calculatedly putting on various personas. But we cannot do this with impunity; we always become, to some extent, what we are merely pretending to be. Which is part of what popular music does for its listeners: it seduces us, it gives us points of identification and irony, as it slides from one identity to another, forever proclaiming authenticity in the most artificial, factitious way possible, exploring/exploiting the fault lines of our culture.
Karloff’s Circus is the fourth (and presumably last) novel in Steve Aylett‘s “Accomplice” series. Aylett is one of my favorite writers, but his books are so singular that they are extremely difficult to describe. They don’t fit into any known categories.
It’s sort of like Aylett is writing old-fashioned British farce, except that it is taking place somewhere that is considerably weirder than anything any of the Surrealists ever imagined. Bits and pieces of pulp fiction of various sorts pop up now and again, somehow rearranged by a crazed anatomist into grotesque new patterns. The books are hilarious, but with a humor that seems to be equal parts P. G. Wodehouse and William Burroughs (an impossible combination if there ever was one — Monty Python is the nearest analogue I can think of, but it doesn’t really come close).
Aylett creates imaginary worlds as rigorously and capaciously imagined as those of any of the great works of fantasy; but he does this comically, satirically, and sarcastically — qualities not usually associated with fantasy literature.
Aylett’s prose is unbelievably careful and precise. There are no wasted words; every sentence glistens with a hard, epigrammatic luster; every last detail is meaningful and carefully placed; and the books are all plotted out with the rigor of an Agatha Christie novel. Their nonsense, like that of Lewis Carrol, is rigorously logical, even if based on ridiculous premises.
Aylett’s novels have to be read very carefully, because details are never repeated to make things easy for the unattentive reader. In this way, Aylett’s books have a certain puzzle- and play-like aspect, in the manner of many modernist (Joyce, Faulkner) and postmodernist (Calvino, Perec) writers before him.
The Accomplice series is more difficult to get a handle on than Aylett’s “Beerlight” series, set in a futuristic American city where crime is the only occupation of the citizens, and the only art form (The Crime Studio, Slaughtermatic, and Atom), but not as dense and impenetrable as The Inflatable Volunteer, a book that could be described as sort of a punk version of Raymond Roussel.
The Accomplice books feature insectoid demons and corrupt politicians and guileless innocents who take venomous snakes out for walks because they just love animals. There are also battling religious sects (one worships guns, the other venerates porcelain dolls), and evil clowns, and “floor lobsters” (sort of like two-foot-long cockroaches). Amidst all this, the demented characters exchange pithy epigrams, in nasty exchanges and asides, as if they were at a Noel Coward tea party.
Karloff’s Circus is the fourth (and presumably last) novel in Steve Aylett‘s “Accomplice” series. Aylett is one of my favorite writers, but his books are so singular that they are extremely difficult to describe. They don’t fit into any known categories.
It’s sort of like Aylett is writing old-fashioned British farce, except that it is taking place somewhere that is considerably weirder than anything any of the Surrealists ever imagined. Bits and pieces of pulp fiction of various sorts pop up now and again, somehow rearranged by a crazed anatomist into grotesque new patterns. The books are hilarious, but with a humor that seems to be equal parts P. G. Wodehouse and William Burroughs (an impossible combination if there ever was one — Monty Python is the nearest analogue I can think of, but it doesn’t really come close).
Aylett creates imaginary worlds as rigorously and capaciously imagined as those of any of the great works of fantasy; but he does this comically, satirically, and sarcastically — qualities not usually associated with fantasy literature.
Aylett’s prose is unbelievably careful and precise. There are no wasted words; every sentence glistens with a hard, epigrammatic luster; every last detail is meaningful and carefully placed; and the books are all plotted out with the rigor of an Agatha Christie novel. Their nonsense, like that of Lewis Carrol, is rigorously logical, even if based on ridiculous premises.
Aylett’s novels have to be read very carefully, because details are never repeated to make things easy for the unattentive reader. In this way, Aylett’s books have a certain puzzle- and play-like aspect, in the manner of many modernist (Joyce, Faulkner) and postmodernist (Calvino, Perec) writers before him.
The Accomplice series is more difficult to get a handle on than Aylett’s “Beerlight” series, set in a futuristic American city where crime is the only occupation of the citizens, and the only art form (The Crime Studio, Slaughtermatic, and Atom), but not as dense and impenetrable as The Inflatable Volunteer, a book that could be described as sort of a punk version of Raymond Roussel.
The Accomplice books feature insectoid demons and corrupt politicians and guileless innocents who take venomous snakes out for walks because they just love animals. There are also battling religious sects (one worships guns, the other venerates porcelain dolls), and evil clowns, and “floor lobsters” (sort of like two-foot-long cockroaches). Amidst all this, the demented characters exchange pithy epigrams, in nasty exchanges and asides, as if they were at a Noel Coward tea party.
Well, my new PowerBook arrived today, and this is the first post that I am making with it. (I’m using ecto as my blogging client).
I was a Mac user for a long time, from c. 1991 to 1998; I switched to Windows because I wanted to have a really small laptop, 3 lbs or less — which didn’t (still doesn’t) exist for the Mac. But I missed the elegance and simplicity of the Macintosh aesthetic. Especially as OS X was developed, I felt that I was missing out on something I really wanted (though arguably — or just say, obviously — I didn’t need it, given that Windows XP does just about everything you need, albeit much more clunkily).
So finally, after looking at the state of my finances, and convincing myself through specious arguments that I could afford the additional charge on my credit card, I took the plunge.
The 12″ PowerBook is still too heavy (4.6 lbs) but I’m determined to carry it around with me everywhere anyway.
Well, my new PowerBook arrived today, and this is the first post that I am making with it. (I’m using ecto as my blogging client).
I was a Mac user for a long time, from c. 1991 to 1998; I switched to Windows because I wanted to have a really small laptop, 3 lbs or less — which didn’t (still doesn’t) exist for the Mac. But I missed the elegance and simplicity of the Macintosh aesthetic. Especially as OS X was developed, I felt that I was missing out on something I really wanted (though arguably — or just say, obviously — I didn’t need it, given that Windows XP does just about everything you need, albeit much more clunkily).
So finally, after looking at the state of my finances, and convincing myself through specious arguments that I could afford the additional charge on my credit card, I took the plunge.
The 12″ PowerBook is still too heavy (4.6 lbs) but I’m determined to carry it around with me everywhere anyway.