RECOMMENDED READING

Here are a few books I've enjoyed recently.
(See also my book reviews)

My Tiny Life, by Julian Dibbell

Julian Dibbell's book is an account of "crime and passion in a virtual world," and specifically of the time the author spent living his life online, in a virtual space called LambdaMOO. Thoughtful and well crafted, the book raises all sorts of issues about how the "worlds" we are beginning to create online relate to the "real life" we live everyday in our actual, physical and social bodies. It is also a compelling, sometimes weird narrative, definitely the equal of many a good novel. But above all, this book is simply an account--the best account I have ever come across--of what life online, life in a virtual world, is actually like. It's a book that you can read with great interest, even if you've never been on a MUD or a MOO. But speaking as someone whose social life was entirely focused on LambdaMOO for something like a year and a half, and who had at least a peripheral relationship to some of the people and events the book describes, I must say that My Tiny Life hit me with a violent rush of recognition. I am not speaking of nostalgia, but of something more like an acid flashback. The intensity, the weirdness, the exhilaration and pain, the wonderful and terrible all-embracing realness of my early times on the MOO: they were all there, just as I had lived them several years before.

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Slaughtermatic, by Steve Aylett

Steve Aylett is the most interesting new, younger writer I have come across in quite some time. Aylett is really smart and really funny. Slaughtermatic reads like a Keystone Kops comedy set in a cyberpunk futuristic landscape. Everything is topsy-turvy in Aylett's world (which makes it uncomfortably similar to the world we actually inhabit). Crime is indistinguishable from performance art, and everyone speaks in puns and metaphysical conundrums. The cops seek only to frame the innocent and consume as many donuts as possible, while the crooks seem more concerned with demonstrating their cleverness, or making spectacular displays of firepower, than with actually getting away with their heists. But what really blows my mind is Aylett's brilliant and hilarious prose style. The book is filled with outrageous, over-the-top, extended metaphors, which don't make any rational sense, but somehow seem bizarrely coherent, as if Aylett were channelling the wacky, alien logic of some whole other realm than our own. It's sort of like William Gibson meets Lewis Carroll, as narrated by Vladimir Nabokov while he was tripping on LSD.

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Steve Aylett's website

Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, by Dave Hickey

Dave Hickey is an art critic, but he writes much more about general American culture than he does about High Art. This collection of essays contains pieces on jazz and rock'n'roll (including a very beautiful one in memory of Chet Baker), on why Hickey loves living in Las Vegas, on why he enjoyed his 4-year stint at running an art gallery in Austin in the late 60s (despite not making any money at it, and especially despite the disdain for commerce that is de rigeur among his current academic colleagues), and on the greatness of Liberace. Hickey's style is low key rather than gonzo, but he thinks and writes in a slyly subversive manner that I have come more and more to appreciate.

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American Nomad, by Steve Erickson

Steve Erickson was hired to cover the 1996 Presidential campaign for Rolling Stone magazine. But he never completed his mission. The magazine fired him, concerned that Erickson's dispatches were sounding more like his surreal novels than like any sort of conventional reporting. Erickson continued on his own, driving across America to find out what the election really meant to ordinary Americans. That didn't work either, because nobody really cared about Clinton and Dole. So this book becomes an absurd quest to discover an America that doesn't exist anymore. Despite the sharp political observations, the life of American Nomad lies mostly in its brilliant digressions. The book contains a number of wonderful set pieces, mini-essays on such figures as Frank Sinatra, Bruce Springsteen, and Philip K. Dick. There are also evocations of the emptiness of the Western landscape that Erickson sees out his car's window, and the simultaneous overfullness of the mediascape he hears on the radio. There are visions of Los Angeles menaced by earthquake and fire. And there are Erickson's wry, self-deprecating asides, and his meticulous accounts of encounters that fail to take place. All in all, the book is more a journey into Steve Erickson's own soul, than into the state of mind of America as a whole. And that is precisely its strength. Erickson is a superb writer who transforms our society's cultural schizophrenia into an intensely and precisely observed inner landscape.

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Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon

The mystery man of American letters has done it again. Mason & Dixon is an historical novel, set in the 18th century. It is the story of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the astronomers who surveyed the border between Pennylvania and Maryland in the 1760s. The Mason-Dixon line is of course famous as the boundary between North and South, between slave states and free. The actual lives of the surveyors are much less well known. Mason and Dixon emerge in the novel as vivid characters, with much more depth than the cartoony figures of Pynchon's earlier works. They are an odd couple, an ill-matched pair, as is common in stories of male bonding. (Think of Oscar and Felix, or Laurel and Hardy). Mason is melancholic, forever mourning his late wife, and given to glum metaphysical speculation. Dixon is more the pragmatist and outgoing hedonist, though he's a moral worry-wort beneath it all. The book gets much of its emotional weight from describing the twists and turns of their relationship. Some of the novel's most arresting passages are turns upon the age-old themes of love and friendship, longing and loss, the pathos of growing old, and the inevitable disappointments that life has to offer.

The book is filled with wacky digressions and hilarious throwaway vignettes. Indeed, there's so much weird and wonderful stuff going on, that I'm hard-pressed to keep track of it all. Should I tell you about the talking dog? Or the mechanical duck that comes alive, and finally develops into a kind of angel or demigod? How about the notorious Werebeaver of the western Pennsylvania woods? Or the six-foot-tall carrots and cucumbers, or the monuments in the wilderness that may have been left behind by aliens? Benjamin Franklin makes an appearance, amusing the crowd with his electrical experiments. So does George Washington, smoking bowls of hemp provided by Martha, and trading banter in Yiddish with his Black/Jewish servant, Gershon. And then there's Captain Zhang the feng shui master, hopelessly adrift in the New World, and appalled that Mason and Dixon are violating the laws of natural energy by drawing a straight line across the face of the earth.

But the real star of the book is Pynchon's gorgeous prose style. His long, lush sentences weave their way sinuously down the page. To give a period feel to the book, Pynchon adopts a mock 18th century diction. Speech and narration are filled with carefully balanced rhetorical flourishes. Archaic words are used freely, nouns are often capitalized, and spellings vary capriciously between modern and old-fashioned usages. None of this is hard to follow, once you give yourself time to become used to it. The result of this play with language is a kind of continual stylistic shifting back and forth, between the mid-18th century, when the action in the book takes place, and the here and now, at the end of the 20th century, when the book is actually being written and read.

In taking on the 18th century, Pynchon actually addresses many of the same themes that concerned him in his earlier masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow. The novel powerfully reimagines the Age of Reason, whose ambiguous legacy still haunts us today. It's an age--much like our own--in which science and technology rule, but whose public life is also characterized by massive anxieties, painful dislocations, and confused spiritual longings. Moreover, the book's portrait of America just before the War of Independence is refreshingly irreverent and demystifying. It reminds us that this country's historical heritage includes, not only a laudable drive for freedom, but also slavery, genocide, environmental destruction, and religious fanaticism.

All in all, Mason & Dixon is one of the great texts of our current end of the millenium.

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