Hello! The year is almost up, which means best of (and worst of) lists coming soon, as well as the annual Mithra Awards. For now, enjoy this…
PROJECT UPDATE
For my work on Gen X/nineties history, I read another real winner of a novel to go along with Schulman’s Rat Bohemia, Percival Everett’s Erasure (2000). I like when a writer of quality makes clear they’ve got an ax to grind. Everett’s got talent to burn and some axes he would dearly like to get good and sharp. Monk Ellison isn’t too different from Everett himself- a black novelist ensconced in academia, highly respected but little read outside of rarified circles. He comes from a middle class milieu and is a generally rather chilly, distanced man. He likes difficult books, fishing, and woodworking, and doesn’t like most other people and things, though he lacks the fecklessness of his counterpart, the Contemporary Literary Subject I’ve talked about here- he pays his bills and tries to help out with his increasingly dementia-addled mother.
The release of, and acclaim given to, yet another novel of black dysfunction aimed towards a white audience — “We Lives in Da Ghetto” — drives Monk something close to mad. He abandons whatever hyper-academic project he had going and pens an absurd parody of middlebrow ghetto fiction under an assumed name… which, and this is explained in the back blurb and would be predictable if it weren’t, becomes a huge hit with the same audience, complete with approval from an Oprah analogue. This was enough to draw me in on its own, as someone who read Push at fifteen because a girl I had a crush on had. Meanwhile, his life is coming apart- his doctor sister assassinated by an antiabortion fanatic, his other doctor (his dad was also a doctor- medical family) brother comes out as gay and experiences issues, his mother needs care, etc etc. Everett doesn’t draw easy connections or morals from any of this, but doesn’t do the contemporary humanities-person thing of deciding that a lack of easy, uncomplicated resonance means nothing has any feeling or commitment behind it. Whatever you might expect here other than “extraordinarily well done, intelligent, non-performatively mature prose,” you’re likely to only find in an unexpected form. I look forward to reading more of this guy.
A pretty substantial thread in my Gen X project is the trajectory of LGBTQ culture and the AIDS crisis, especially as it relates to “alternative” or bohemian culture. So I had a look at Herve Guibert’s 1990 memoirs/novel, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. This one “makes the rounds” (i.e. I see people other than friends of mine talk about it online) for two general reasons- one, it contains an all-but-open portrait of Guibert’s good friend and fellow early prominent French AIDS victim, Michel Foucault, and two, as a pioneering work of autofiction, a term that some online literary types seem to be waving around as a flag to rally the non-woke (now, I thought wokeness was supposed to be associated with millennial self-obsession as shown by said generation’s embrace of autofiction, but what do I know).
Guibert was a photographer and essayist, friends with many prominent French artistic types and not just Foucault. He writes this as a diary with dated entries, even if many of the entries are written as him trying to recall what happened a while before. In the “present” of the book, he’s in Rome, trying to finish one last work before he dies. In the “past” he’s writing as said book, there’s a lot of emphasis on false hope. The titular friend is a hot shot doctor with links to the American medical establishment, who keeps dangling assorted miracle cures in front of the coterie of French AIDS patients he knows. We all know how that story goes. As we’ve all had good opportunity to learn now, plagues make some heroes, sometimes, but that’s incidental. Plagues make victims and survivors. Death, especially mass premature death, isn’t easy to look in the face, and even when it’s omnipresent, even if you can look at it, knowing what to do and being able to do it… well, now I’m talking in generalities. I understood Guibert to be lingering on the ways in which people, especially those with a lot to lose, can evade the realities of their situation… for a while.
I read Notes from Underground (1997), a book on zine culture by sociologist Stephen Duncombe. It was in reading this book that I got my burst of enthusiasm for doing a zine, which it seems is not shared by the readers here… which is a relief, it saves me some work. I plan on using this book more as a sourcebook (he refers to a lot of zines I can go and track down) than as a source of arguments. It’s not that his arguments were bad. It’s just… zines are basically a lost civilization, now. Even if they make a comeback — I’m told some people are trying! — it’d be some new thing, maybe based on the old 80s-90s-00s culture but the same thing. Still and all, I need good sources through that space.
Finally, I read Bruce Sterling’s 1988 cyberpunk classic, Islands in the Net. Sometimes, I retain random opinions I picked up from utterly random people for very long spans of time. Some older dude in high school, a cyberpunk enthusiast, announced his opinion that Bruce Sterling is a good guy — largely on the strength for his defense of the hacker subculture — but a lousy writer. Well… I don’t feel able to assess his character. Islands in the Net doesn’t reveal a bad guy, to the extent any novel can of its author, though it honestly gets borderline racist in parts (in ways I doubt Sterling meant as derogatory). But I think I can say that yeah… not a great writer. Most of the interest is in the many head-scratchers this book throws up, in inoffensive but also uninspiring prose, from the worldbuilding premises on down.
Among other things… man, everyone outside of the Soviet Union thought it was gonna last forever, huh? Because it’s still alive and kicking in the 2020s, the decade on which this set! They’re around, but, Sterling wants us to know, governments matter less in the early 21st century than ~networks.~ There’s a good network of “economic democrats” (don’t even ask me what this is supposed to mean, my nineties studies advance, but not that deep yet) called Rizome. Rizome is made up of thoughtful, somewhat dour, mostly young professional types- think Gary Hart voters, “Atari Democrats.” They want the trains to run on time and think that being process-oriented non-yellers will get them that. Lauren, a Rizome… employee? Person? Who runs a sort of… enterprise-facing B and B? In hurricane-destroyed (again) Galveston? finds herself in a swirl of geopolitical chaos because of both bad and really bad networks. The somewhat bad networks are “data havens,” run out of mini-states like Luxembourg, Singapore, and Grenada. The really bad network is a sort of global anti-terrorist army (this is eighties anti-terrorism- think “Commando” wannabes) with a nuclear ace up its sleeve.
Lauren is our perspective-priss. In a lot of the book, she’s literally wired up to send footage back to Rizome so they can workshop what she’s up to as she visits various data havens, trying to figure out who did a murder at her BnB. You can say that Sterling admirably resists making her perfect, except that her decision-making instincts are usually always right. She — and also her whole milieu of Rizomers, including the men — are just pills, sour scolds who mostly just enjoy salads and work. In this, Sterling was somewhat prescient of a certain kind of futurism. contemporary managerial type! But like… these Rizome guys are also the good guys of the future.
The bad guys, as usual, are more interesting, but there’s issues there too. The freelance anti-terrorists are quite dull, in the way those attached to things like military hierarchy and the state often are in this sort of late 20th c small-l libertarian futurism. The most interesting people — unless you’re into the sociology of ghastly know-it-all bores who are in, some technical sense, “right” about various things, as I am — are the Grenada data pirates. They’ve got some kind of weird… communist/black nationalist/ecological/Maroon/narco/voodoo regime? The voodoo part is where things get sort of racist. It’s really weird to have the one group of independent black people in your story (there are white and other non-black people involved but there’s a lot of black nationalist rhetoric and imagery) rely on “voodoo tricks” that your prissy managerial white lady protagonist can see through and easily foil? Failure (tech people hadn’t learned to call it “iteration” yet) is a big part of this story, and that’s cool, but uhhh damn.
The tech stuff is also a real headscratcher in some places. Sterling gets some stuff dead to rights from way early, most notably wearable computers- everyone has a phone-watch. These phone watches, however, don’t connect to anything! The titular net is very important, and doesn’t involve flying around in VR, but Sterling way underestimates how quickly bandwidth and usage would scale up, and seems to also underestimate Moore’s Law in terms of how small and powerful computers become. If you want to access the net in his early 2020s, you have to go to a net terminal, and those aren’t especially common- a bit like finding a copier if you don’t happen to work at an office. There, you can download your emails, your prerecorded video messages from fellow “economic democracy” cult members, whatever you need to do.
One way this becomes funny- the data havens operate by piggybacking off of net systems, illegally hacking or socially engineering to gain troves of data, and selling it off. You just want to scream at these poor… Rasta-socialists and Islamist-Triads and Grey Wolf-Mafia guys, “just start a social networking site! Let college kids e-stalk their crushes and you’ll get all the information to sell that you want!” That’s one of the funny things about the Adbusters demographic- they despise marketing and advertising as though it’s the worst evil while also consistently underestimating it.
Like I wind up doing sometimes with books with entertaining premises and whacky bits, I’m almost certainly making this sound better than it is. The problem with this book is that it’s a novel, and not, say, a sourcebook for a roleplaying game. You have to follow characters and a plot. The plot unspools unevenly and isn’t that interesting to begin with. The characters… well, a lot of genre fiction (and not just genre, or fiction, but it’s especially strong there I think) of this period divides the world between pragmatists and fanatics. In Sterling’s hands, they’re almost equally boring- the fanatics sometimes get more “local color” but not much in the way of recognizable motivation beyond Third World peevishness. For his idea of pragmatists… it’s for archaeological interest only, as far as I’m concerned. You wouldn’t want them to be your traveling companions for 300 pages otherwise.
It’s a big project, figuring out the cultural/intellectual history surrounding a whole generational construct, but luckily, I have the best kind of helper.