Category: Books

I have continued my exploration of the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead by reading Science and the Modern World (1925), together with the first half of Isabelle Stengers’ commentary…
Continue reading “Whitehead (continued)”

The Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) is one of my all-time favorite writers, so I was glad to come across Three Novellas that had not previously been translated into English. Bernhard’s fiction usually consists of long paragraphs consisting of fragmentary sentences just piled on, one after another; the sentences are usually made of multiple layers of indirect discourse, speakers reporting on other speakers reporting on other speakers. Thus in the third and best of these three novellas, Walking, the narrator recounts to the reader what his friend Oehler recounts to him about what he said to the psychiatrist Scherrer about what Karrer, who has gone insane, said to him (Oehler). These convolutions in the narrative voice are accompanied by convolutions in the events narrated, as the multiply layered narrators circle around what they cannot directly describe, mixing anecdotes, rants, digressions, and obsessive repetitions. The overall effect is at once gruesome and hilarious: the narrators insist that life is unbearable, that suicide is the best and only way out, that Austria in particular is a nasty and unlivable country, filled with Nazis and charlatans and ignorant vulgar bullies with a violent, resentful enmity against true and original thought. But these monologues are comic more than tragic because they are so obsessive and so over-the-top. Reading Bernhard is exhilarating, and makes me laugh out loud, even though at the same time his fiction more than confirms my most negative, doom-ridden, and misanthropic feelings and thoughts. Bernhard’s books work because they implicate their narrators, and their readers, in everything they are ranting against: finally they are about the incapacity of thought – or of writing – to realize itself, to cohere with itself, to coincide with itself. Consciousness is always riddled with otherness: the otherness of the body, and of language, as well as of other people and society and nature. This makes thought a painful process, the more excruciatingly painful the more exacerbatedly turned back upon itself; but it always does turn back upon itself, like an itch that one cannot help scratching, even though this only makes it itch more in the long run. So Bernhard’s fiction, beyond its critique of the falseness and superficiality of Austrian culture, dramatizes the impossibility of mastering thought, of mastering one’s own discourse, of being triumphantly masterful and creative, which is what the myth of art and creativity in modern society comes down to. And yet Bernhard’s fiction is itself wonderfully creative, precisely by expressing, and wallowing in, this abject impossibility. Reading Bernhard means inoculating oneself against the nauseating myths of creativity, genius, mastery, moral uplift, etc. – one has to reject these myths, not because art is worthless and meaningless, but precisely because art matters, and Bernhard gives us an account of how and why it matters. The exhilarating laughter of excruciating pain and disgust.

Warren Ellis‘ Switchblade Honey is a Star Trek parody; Ellis warns us in his Introduction that “this isn’t me at my most blisteringly intellectual.” So it isn’t Transmetropolitan or Global Frequency. But it’s a hoot. I admit it, I get off on seeing starship crews smoke and drink and curse and wonder whether the human race is even worth saving.

The Tooth Fairy, by Graham Joyce, is a compelling and ultimately poignant coming-of-age story. Oh yes,and it’s also a weird fantasy novel. We follow the protagonist, Sam, and his friends from age four until they graduate from high school. The time is the 1960s, the place a working-class British town in the middle of nowhere (more or less). We get many of the usual, as well as some highly unusual, heterosexual-male childhood and adolescent traumas, having to do with parents and friends and authority and school and masturbation and girls and drugs; but we also get something more, because Sam is haunted by the Tooth Fairy, a foul-mouthed gender-shifter who originally appears to collect a fallen-out baby tooth, but keeps on coming back, insinuating to Sam, seducing him, repelling him, messing with his life, causing tragedies in all the people about him, and generally tormenting and obsessing him far beyond what his actual situation would seem to call for. Joyce leaves it an open question to what extent we should regard this apparition as “real,” and to what extent we can see it as just a kind of psychological projection. But the presence of the Tooth Fairy transfigures this otherwise more-or-less naturalistic story, giving it a haunting intensity that has absolutely nothing to do with the putrid, pseudo-poetic nostalgia that so often ruins adult reminiscences of childhood and adolescence. Instead, Joyce achieves the effect of a primordial beauty and terror amidst what is otherwise , and simultaneously, quotidian banality.

Norman Spinrad‘s 1969 SF novel Bug Jack Barron has its roots in the Sixties, when it was written, but deals with issues that are still relevant today: the power of the media, the power of drugs, what it means to “sell out” (and how it’s impossible not to), race relations, the quest for power, and the quest for immortality. The protagonist, Jack Barron, is a former “Berkeley baby Bolshevik” who has cynically dumped his political ideals in order to become America’s most popular TV personality. But he finds his cynicism and his past idealism both put to the test, when he is sucked into a maelstrom of political intrigue centering on a rich man who controls the secret of human immortality. Certain aspects of the book seem dated: particularly its lame, all-too-typical-of-its-era portrayal of the main female character. But for the most part, Bug Jack Barron is still powerful and relevant, with its Burroughsian insights on the vampiric price of personal immortality (something today’s Transhumanists would do well to keep in mind), and its understanding of media spectacle: “He suddenly realized that to the hundred million people on the other side of the screen, what they saw there was reality, reality that was realer than real because a whole country was sharing the direct sensory experience, it was history taking place right before their eyes, albeit non-event history that existed only on the screen.”

I’ve started reading the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead 1861-1947). Whitehead, like his almost exact contemporaries Henri Bergson (1859-1941), and John Dewey (1859-1952), was famous and highly esteemed during his lifetime, in the first half of the twentieth century, but was almost entirely forgotten during the second half…
Continue reading “Whitehead”

Lucky Wander Boy, by D. B. Weiss, is a smart, funny, and ultimately poignant novel about love and illusion, creativity and commerce, and video game addiction. The twenty-something narrator is obsessed with the (now obsolete) video games of his youth; these games are not only the focus of his passion, but provide a mythical template for his life. The novel itself plays with this as a metafictional conceit, in a way that is totally compelling (rather than, as it could easily have been, corny): the video game as the codification of dream logic, or of the desires, or better, the self-deceptive fantasies, that animate us. Along the way, we get – among other things – disquisitions on the Gnostic subtext of Donkey Kong, the best definition I have ever seen of what it means to be a geek (“A geek is a person, male or female, with an abiding, obsessive, self-effacing, even self-destroying love for something besides status”; which is true – I should know – although the most painful part of it is that this configuration does not exclude, but is indeed usually coterminous with, narcissistic self-absorption, such as the narrator exhibits throughout); and a great satiric account of the dot-com boom and bust. This is a novel that remains light on its feet, even as it goes ever further out on a limb that it keeps on sawing off behind itself (a strained metaphor, I admit, but a good account of the book’s actual accomplishment; and if it sounds too much like a back-of-the-book blurb, so be it; the inextricability of commerce and commercial promotion from our innermost fantasies is something that this book doesn’t insist on, so much as it simply takes it for granted as an aspect of The Way We Live Now).

I learned about Derek Raymond from Warren Ellis’ recommendation; The Devil’s Home on Leave is about as grim and downbeat a crime novel I have ever read. The detective narrator recounts a talk with the psychopathic murderer whom he wants to arrest: “He droned on, completely – and what was worse, unconsciously – absorbed in himself, and suddenly I realized what hell it meant, not only to be a killer, but a bore. You think nothing of taking life, but your own existence fascinates you, and that’s the imbalance that we mean by evil… This neat, dull man, crouched in a sort of mass over his own hands, that freaked me.” This book is all about the drab everydayness of horror, grotesque tortures perpetrated by unimaginative bores in a drab industrial setting where it’s always raining. Everyone is wounded, and everyone has their reasons (though these are usually foul ones). The narrator’s stoicism, and his determination to catch the killers even though he knows it won’t do any good, are the only things that keep him from killing himself – it’s that bleak.