Hello readers!
I’ve been reading and thinking a lot for my Generation X project. I should probably have a… landing site? Is that the phrase? Some site I can link to that explains what the hell this Gen X project is, for people who don’t follow what I do that much. How about I do it right here? I actually did write up a relatively succinct explanation recently:
“The End” is an effort to write an intellectual history of Generation X. More than a history of what people born within a certain span of years did or thought, it will be a history of the concept of Generation X - what it meant, who it applied to, and what uses people put the concept to. The birth and rise to prominence of the more-or-less arbitrary identity category of “Gen X'' occurred during a historical era characterized by the reentrenchment of ruling class power in societies throughout the globe, all in a context of dizzying social, technological, economic, cultural, and ecological change. The strains that made the concept “Gen X” ran through this era, shaping it and being shaped by it. Alongside getting a better grip on what made Gen X and it’s era what they were, I also hope to gain insight into how to write intellectual history “in the vernacular” - about thought and expression as lived and experienced.
Or, hell, let’s bullet-point it:
History of Gen X
Are generations a stupid made-up category? Yes
The ways people use stupid made-up categories tell us a lot about how people think
How the idea of Gen X was made and used tells us specifically about the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, where a lot of important shit happened
Looking at how the idea of Gen X functions in the world also tells us about how to look at other, similar ideas
I guess that will do!
In any event, I have made a pretty big decision- I plan on starting the project as a narrative podcast series. Each of the chapters I had outlined could be a season- among other things, this will allow deeper dives into each area than I likely could do in a book aimed towards any kind of publishing. Maybe I’d have some chit-chat with a friend in the episodes (possibly my friend Quentin, who I’ve been talking to about sound editing), but mostly, it would just be narrative. I plan on writing the episodes out, and doing them in an actual studio (there’s an affordable one nearby), so it doesn’t sound completely amateur-ish. The scripts should be complete enough I could then turn them into a book, if anyone wants one.
It will be a long time before the first season – corresponding to what I was planning on being the first chapter, “Alternative/Mainstream” – will be ready for recording. But I plan on doing it, even if this will be a very long term project.
Anyway! How about some reading updates? Today I’ll talk about revisiting two writers I had read for this project before, and who I will likely read still more of, both being relevant and prolific.
Kathy Acker was/is the underground queen of late twentieth century American literature, though not so underground that other writers haven’t made a cottage industry out of books praising her, analyzing her, relating anecdotes about when they knew her, etc. Sarah Schulman might be the living American writer I respect most, and she has said words to the effect that Acker was the great hope of experimental literature in the United States, and that that hope died with Acker in 1997, a final nail in the coffin that had to remain shut for “the gentrification of the mind” to go as far as it has.
Well, split the difference- maybe Schulman’s right. Maybe I haven’t read the right Ackers- she wrote a lot. Maybe I’m a square, and definitely I am an overeducated white straight male nerd, so, perhaps not the target audience. I could actually see Acker being, in some sense, great… but in a way that simply doesn’t move or engage me, and not in a way where I feel bad about “not getting it” (I generally don’t feel bad about “not getting” any given work of literature anymore).
The two books I read of hers this year so far, Kathy Goes to Haiti and My Death, My Life, by Pier Paolo Pasolini, showed two different faces of Acker’s writing. I actually did pretty much like Kathy Goes to Haiti. Call it “autofiction” if you want (here’s something for my project- figure out when people started calling it that) - Kathy Acker, downtown Manhattan writer back when that meant something cool, takes a vacation in Haiti, sometime during the regime of “Baby Doc” Duvalier. Tourism was big in Haiti when the Duvalier dynasty, Papa et Bebe, kept things running smoothly (for tourists, anyway) through the use of terror against their people.
Acker just tells her story, of trying to find some sort of “authenticity” (and swimmable beaches), and the stories that people tell her. There’s not a ton of plot, but that’s fine. She relates an experience as she felt it, in blunt language. She wants authenticity and fun, the Haitians she meets want a variety of things from her. First, they want to know what she’s doing- foreign women don’t often travel alone in Haiti. They want money, because most of them are very poor. They often proclaim themselves Kathy’s husband or boyfriend, seemingly out of a combination of chivalrous urges – preventing this fraught scenario, the white foreign woman alone in Port-au-Prince or Cap Haitien – and desire for money and sex. Kathy has a lot of sex with a variety of Haitians. This isn’t a surprise- talking a lot about having a lot of sex, in a range of emotional states from passionately involved to chilly detachment, is a big part of Acker’s writing. I figure it dates the book- it came out in 1984, but you have to figure she took the trip a good deal earlier, before people, even downtown writers with many gay friends, knew about AIDS, memetically associated with Haiti as it is. There’s funny and real-seeming stuff in here. It’s fine!
I won’t say My Life, My Death by Pier Paolo Pasolini wasn’t “fine.” As far as I can tell, the real argument for Acker’s literary importance is in her application of the “cut up” method William S. Burroughs used – where he’d make writing out of semi-randomized snatches of writing – to intentional juxtapositions of “high” and “low” culture. She also ditched Burrough’s pathos/bathos in favor of a flat, declarative voice and the contrived depthlessness of postmodernism. Acker’s consciousness (and, often, her desire to degrade and abrade it) was her subject, but not her self-consciousness, at least not in what I’ve read, and the subject matter most writers go to when writing about their self-consciousness- their writing. That came with later writers, the ones who realized they came a little too late to be considered truly ground-breaking for rummaging in a near-century-old bag of tricks (i.e. that of modernism and its cousin postmodernism). That’s one reason she can still be seen as cool. She’s always vulnerable, but if she’s ashamed or feels the need to explain it away, it’s not there.
Anyway- as the title implies, Pier Paolo Pasolini isn’t about Acker, directly. It’s about the Italian director who made Salo, so, something of an aspirational figure for “transgressive” artists, from before Acker’s day to our own. And Acker deploys her cut-up style, all flags waving and guns firing. Re-done bits of Hamlet, stuff from a surrealist private eye, sections in French because why not, a lot of sex. It’s true, a guy like Pasolini would deserve to be memorialized in the form of dirty, confusing, artistic misdirection and reappropriation, not, probably, in straightforward narrative, let alone true crime investigation of his very real and very brutal murder. It’s also true, the rejoinder that the art world learned, after dozens of years of hearing it, to “my kid could paint that” - “well, your kid didn’t, it’s the fact someone did that makes it art.” Then into whatever the work is supposed to get at, with more or less obfuscation.
That’s fine, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it, or see it as particularly daring as pointing to anywhere other than “you’ll like this if this is the kind of thing you like.” I do think more highly of Acker’s more eccentric works, no matter how difficult I find them, than I do most of the plastic arts/installation art/whatever is in museums that comes from the sixties or after. Most of that art seems like a series of bad jokes. Among other things, unlike modern art, Acker novels aren’t also used as stores of value for the extremely rich- maybe if they were made into NFTs! I get that she’s doing something here. But beyond expressing the sensibility of the New York art scene back in a certain time and place (that I have my own reason for wanting to explore, mostly historical), what she’s doing in works like this or Empire of the Senseless doesn’t do much for me.
Bruce Sterling! He was less a great cyberpunk writer and more of a great cyberpunk cheerleader and definer. He edited the Mirrorshades anthology, did nonfiction reportage on the eighties hacker culture, and, I understand, is widely considered a very decent guy in SFF circles, a bridge-builder.
I read what’s arguably his signature cyberpunk novel, Islands in the Net, last year, and it confirmed some ideas I already had: Sterling has some good ideas, some baffling calls, seems a decent enough old type, and is not much of a writer. “Ok, Doctor Dolan is right, more or less- Neuromancer is the only great cyberpunk novel, and it burnt out the subgenre in its brilliance. Everything else was lesser writers and hangers-on for the aesthetic.” I have some quibbles involving Neal Stephenson, but that’s neither here nor there. Bruce Sterling, mediocre cyberpunk guy, ok!
And Sterling’s 1996 novel Holy Fire further confirmed this opinion. It’s worth noting that this came out a year after Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, to my mind the real gravedigger of cyberpunk, a great novel that definitively split “cyber” from “punk.” In 1996, Sterling turned forty-two, and like a lot of people in the nineties, seemed prematurely concerned with aging (Stephenson, a bit younger, seemed concerned largely with parenthood at the same time). Holy Fire is about a twenty-first century gerontocracy. After the disasters of the early twenty-first (I’m hearing you), the survivors became obsessed with prudence, safety, and the struggle against aging. A few decades later, old people (the ones who could afford the right treatments, and who chose the right ones when they were still experimental), like between 100 and 200 years old, run everything. They let the young kind of futz around with a universal basic income but it’s more or less impossible for them to own property, vote, or really upset the applecart at all.
Honestly, I could see this as being a compelling setting. And I could see the main character as being pretty compelling too. I can’t remember her name (not a great sign), but she’s a hundred-something year old medical economist whose friends, treatments or no, are starting to die. She hasn’t had a new idea or an orgasm in decades. She meets some young (-ish, in their thirties) artsy rebellious types, and decides to roll the bones. She takes on a radical rejuvenation therapy- really radical, basically replacing and regrowing most of the body. It does a number on the mind too! She comes out with the body of an attractive twenty-something, some fake id, impulses she hasn’t felt in a long time (if ever!), and decides to do a runner to Europe. The artistic youths mentioned Stuttgart as a center of fashion, so she tries to get there.
…Stuttgart? I mean, I don’t know Germany well, and it is towards the end of the twenty-first century, but… Stuttgart?? Well, anyway. Like I said, it’s a fun idea, and germane! I actually could see a future not too dissimilar to this, in broad strokes- a gray capitalist western gerontocracy/plutocracy paying off everyone else in chump change to let them run things. But honestly, Sterling doesn’t have a ton to say about it. The lady wants, and eventually acquires, the “holy fire” of trying new things and living alternative lifestyles. She is being pursued – her treatment was experimental and she wasn’t supposed to leave – but not in that scary of a way. Her new European artsy friends aren’t really rebelling. I get it, it’s the nineties, Sterling was a decent but terminally galaxy-brained soft-left type of dude. Obviously his rebels were going to be Adbusters types, not the PIRA. But damn… it does not for a thrill ride make. I think Sterling really thought he was doing a cool book where a demi-naif tours the lifestyles of the young and gerontocracy-frustrated, where we’re not invited to go “whoah!” or “damn!” but “hm, well, that seems in proportion.” Well, sic transit punk- from nihilism to becoming a responsible dad, we’ve seen that often enough. Especially from the ones who live into healthy and prosperous middle age!
So, I was prepared for further lack of interest in Sterling’s 1985 novel, Schismatrix. “Hey, at least this one is in space,” I thought, “maybe it will be cooler.” Well… it was! It was actually shockingly good. And it even reflected some of the same concerns as Holy Fire!
It’s… the early 22nd century? Maybe? Humanity has abandoned ecologically ravaged Earth for space habitats. Abelard Lindsay sits astride multiple fault points. One of the basic structuring divides in the Solar System is between Mechanists and Shapers. Mechanists are a bit like the gerontocrats in Holy Fire, the ones who figured out space habitation early, acquired monopolies, and became an aristocracy kept alive by cybernetic technology. The Shapers are more “organic,” and look to adapt humanity to space travel through genetics and what could be called memetics- weird hyper-advanced training in various things. Abelard gets their training to become a capital-D Diplomat, like a Bene Gesserit with social superpowers, being able to read faces and situations uniquely well. Abelard is involved in some youthful radical shenanigans in his home habitat, but makes an enemy for life out of a former comrade when they fail, and gets exiled.
We follow Abelard from habitat to habitat. There’s much more vitality in these worlds than in anything of Sterling I had read previously (all of which were published after Schismatrix). We get something like the profusion of factions and individuals that he likes to pepper his work with, but he isn’t as tedious about them as you see in later novels, most of them do weird cool shit (or are just evocative names, a perfectly good use of a proper noun in my opinion), even when their plans are daffy they fit into the internal logic of the world. They’ve got all these habitat colonies, for instance, as far away as Uranus (heh), but nobody just settles on the lunar surface, or Mars? Eventually they get to Europa… very eventually… still!
Also a good touch- not everything is just “Shaper vs Mechanist” spammed over and over across the solar system. It’s a world of numerous intersecting conflicts and agendas that Abelard negotiates like a Yojimbo. In this, Sterling shows himself an astute student of the Cold War, and there’s Cold War feel all over this in the best way. Yeah, there’s two basic principles, but each habitat has its own politics and they all overlap. The worlds are lived-in – what world could feel more lived-in than a centuries-old space station? – and the stakes feel real. They live in fragile space habitats - of course they’re going to be keyed up about resources, management, and systems, even by normal human standards.
Sterling writes great action in this one, too. There’s an extended battle between space-miners-turned-pirates (implicitly Mechanist but not the fancy kind) and a handful of the latest generation of Shaper brain freaks, sent out to carve out an asteroid shelter on their own to prove their Darwinian bona fides. They’re stuck on the same comparatively small space rock, they depend on each other to stay alive (and both could blow the other to smithereens, but only at the cost of destroying themselves), both are plotting to do in the other on first contact and both sides know the other knows it, but they need to act friendly at first anyway. Abelard tries to keep the peace and fails. Soon, it’s welding torches, improvised flails, knives, low-gravity jiu jitsu, and above all, the worst weapon, fire, in the dark and the near-zero-gravity. I’ve had nightmares like that, and I mean it as high praise.
That part ends in a deus ex machina, but not in a bad way. Call it aliena ex machina- aliens show up! In terms of their modeling they remind me of the Omicron Persei 8 aliens from “Futurama,” you know, “why does not Ross, the largest Friend, not simply eat the other five?!”
First contact, and with a peaceful species, unites humanity… for a while. It turns out these aliens aren’t all that enlightened, they’re chintzy cheap wheeler-dealers. Old conflicts arise. Abelard gets some good years in Shaper territory but eventually his old comrade from the bad old days comes calling. Old comrade cares about power and principles (though most of the principles are about power and how he should have it). Abelard is about peace, growth, the organic processes of life (“maaaan”). The back half of the book was a bit slower and more philosophical than the first, but also has some good action, like when the two have to duel in some kind of… alien consciousness video game? Hard to tell, but whatever it is, Sterling sells it.
Anyway! I was very pleasantly surprised. It was good fun. I wonder if it’s just that early Sterling was better? Or maybe Sterling is a dude who gets taken by zeigeists. Maybe the early eighties was the last time you could really sell yourself on the idea that the battle over what it is to be human would take place in outer space. Maybe the closing horizons eventually closed in on Sterling, to the point where he could only convince himself that the human future would be decided in distinctly colorless art scenes and councils of healthcare bureaucrats, with barely any voices raised, right here on the “old jumping dirt” of Earth. Well, points for realism, of sorts. I wouldn’t say Holy Fire is really realistic – someone would shoot someone, eventually – but it probably gets across what being alive is like as we get towards the mid-twenty-first century better than high stakes space habitation drama.
That’s weird- we are, indeed, facing high stakes issues with our space habitat i.e. Earth. Where’s the drama worthy of it? “In the interstices of semi-forgotten culture from the recent past,” I want to say, but I know that’s more evocative than really true.
Sometimes, Mithra joins me in the long watches of a winter night’s reading-