Welcome to Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Greil Marcus’s collage-o-phonic booklike substance that rings with voices in a thousand registers.

“As I tried to follow this story [the one he perceives running through chapters filled with medieval heretics, Dadaists, Situationists, and the Sex Pistols: “I am an anti-christ,” sang Johnny Rotten]–the characters changing into each other’s clothes until I gave up trying to make them hold still–what appealed to me were its gaps. and those moments when the story that has lost its voice somehow recovers it, and what happens then…. [quoting an ad for Potlatch he found in a “slick-paper, Belgian neo-surrealist review” dated 1954:] ” ‘Everywhere, youth (as it calls itself) discovers a few blunted knives, a few defused bombs, under thirty years of dust and debris; shaking in its shoes, youth hurls them upon the consenting rabble, which salutes it with its oily laugh.’ ” (20)

Situationist gnome, 1963: “The moment of real poetry brings all the unsettled debts of history back into play.” (21) That’s getting personal: I’ve resisted reading this book for twenty years. Now that I have, and since you’ve read this far, I recommend you do, too. So much for the niceties of the book review. What follows is engagement with Lipstick Traces.

“For years that seemed like decades,” Marcus accurately notes, all you got on the radio was “Fire and Rain, “Stairway to Heaven,” “Behind Blue Eyes” and “Maggie May.” (44) That, and then one day in the 1980s, the music we heard on the radio in the 1970s became classic rock.

Everybody who gives a shit caps on Greil Marcus for what they perceive as a slight or jab at their own history of punk because he starts with the Sex Pistols. But, as he says, “If what is interesting about punk is something other than its function as a musical genre, there is no point in treating it like one.” (77) The whole point is the impossibility of pinpointing the origins of popular cultural phenomena: such things are subject to “blind inheritance,” presumably via memes floating in our shared mental marketplace, as punk inherited from British folk rocker Richard Thompson: “Take the sun from my heart / Let me learn to despise.”

Reading the film Five Millions Years to Earth, “a film make in England in 1967 under the title Quartermass and the Pitt” (80), Marcus writes:

They [the genocidal Martians] meant to perpetuate themselves on earth by making its history–by coding its end in its beginning. A passion for prophecy, it seems, is also a Martian trait: they loved drama as much as death. (81)

And of course it would be impossible to write a “secret history” of the 20th century without including Martians and Cro-Magnons, both of which are present at least in passing.

Really, though, Marcus is writing about “Spectacle,” and its as if he’s wrestling with a ghost or a being made of smoke: the ideas swirl and often slip away from him for pages at a time. The term ‘Spectacle’ had become a fashionable critical commonplace by the 1980s. It was a vague term, devoid of ideas. It simply meant that the image of a thing superseded the thing itself. Thus, “Rambo movies in the U.S.A. could win the Vietnam War backward, that consumers were being seduced by advertisement instead of choosing rationally among products” and “that citizens were voting for actors rather than issues.” In other words, something funny is happening in Lipstick Traces, though it never is exactly clear because Marcus is absolutely subject to epistemological uncertainty if for no other reason than a) not being there personally and b) eyewitness aren’t worth shit but you talk to them anyway.

For situationist Guy Debord, the spectacle was not merely a stoner-paranoid “collection of images, but a social relationship among people, mediated by images.” The spectacle really is a conspiracy of relationships that kept empires running (if rising and falling) just as an engine is a conspiracy of relationships that moves things down the road. The sense of going somewhere is just an illusion, though, as what spectacle gives spectacle also takes away: Anwar Sadat, for instance, “was a [spectacular] hero of the electronic revolution, but also its [spectacularly assassinated] victim.” (97)

But the other side of spectacle is seen in a point made by situationist Veneigem, where “objectivity… meant ‘I love that girl because she is beautiful’; subjectivity meant ‘That girl is beautiful because I love her.’” Such is the power of spectacle that it bends us most certainly to its cultural will but also gives us the power to believe we are able to bend the social fabric our way, and to desire “something different from everyone else.”

Capitalism benefits most from, is powered by, spectacle – and that makes it tricky business, “dangerous,” perhaps criminal. For the situationists, there was a double-edged sword in the thought that “comfort will never be comfortable enough for those who seek what is not on the market.” Therefore, Debord said years later, “Where there was fire, we carried gasoline.”

Punk and the rest of the major phenomena Marcus writes about in Lipstick Traces are basically forms of Sinopean skepticism. Diagnose of Sinope, like punks and situationists, the medieval Japanese poet Ikkyu and Chuang Tzu the aimless wanderer, refused to work, taking up sacred peregrination and (as Diagnose replied when asked what he was doing in Athens) “debasing the currency.”

The situationists practiced the dérive, the art of drifting lost through the streets, seeking “the Northwest passage” of a city, Paris most especially for years on end in the case of Guy Debord. Though they despised surrealism and especially its pope, André Breton, the situationists in their wanderings partook of the surrealists’ disponibilité, a state of existential availability – to anything, everything – an attitude of creative readiness and perpetual resistance to “the Society of the Spectacle.” As William S. Burroughs once said in a parallel context, Spectacle is a “vampiric process;” Burroughs advised resistance through the cultivation of good character.

The situationists, like the punks, “debased the currency”: punk “music” was (per the cliché) an oxymoron: those motherfuckers can’t play. The situations took “official” publications (cartoons that ran in newspapers were a popular target) and practiced détournment, doctoring texts or, like Burroughs, cutting up newspapers and magazines, then pasting them back together at will to new effect. Rock and punk designers took the technique as a signature for gig flyers.

For what if you really could warp reality? What if, through design, you could get people to come to a band’s show and drink too much? Wasn’t that, after all, the goal of every revolutionist? “What if you could really make it happen?” What if the man dreaming he was a butterfly woke up, finding himself a butterfly?

“The spectacle was itself a work of art, an economy of false needs elevated into a tableau of frozen desires, true desires reduced to a cartoon of twitching needs. Spreading the bad paper of détournment until it began to turn up everywhere, the SI [Situationist International] would devalue the currency of the spectacle, and the results would be total inflation.” (168)

As if; but somebody had to try.

Another technique for discovering “psychogeographic” highways and byways, methods for invoking the derive, include “gramologues’ or magical floating words and resonant sounds [that]… are irresistibly and hypnotically engraved on the memory, and they emerge again from the memory with just a little resistance and friction.” (206) Notice that gramologues don’t preclude semantic content and thus include a variety of gnomic utterances we call “catchy phrase”: tag lines, mottos and all manner of cursing would be included here. Gnomic utterances are noted for their suasive power as noted in their deployment in all campaigns of propaganda.

And that in turn points out the danger that rears its head occasionally throughout Marcus’s book: The danger is, per Nietzsche’s warning, that in fighting a monster one risks becoming one. (203) For capitalism and the spectacle are quite adept at détouring the détourners; after all, the practitioners (photographers, designers, writers) are ultimately the same people. Every dropout who tunes in while turning on others must also make a living, and PR is the default calling of every out-of-work revolutionary in need of a paycheck.

Then there’s the psychiatrists, also known as those who play both ends against the middle, who say (these are Richard Huelsenbeck the dadaist’s words, circa 1920 long after he’d switched practices): “Do you understand? We are psychiatrists; we are Germans; we have read Nietzsche; we know that to gaze too long at monsters is to become one – that’s what we get paid for!” (211) Huelsenbeck was always saying, “The dadaist is a man of reality who loves wine, women and advertising.” (213)

The punks couldn’t help but love the gramologues of advertising, even if they hated them, too, rejected their authority, and repelled them with taut fiber, venom and erosive sonic armies. They were born into an unavoidable and irresistible media milieu, so the only strategy left was to détourne the meaning of images of the spectacle: flyers for punk shows still stand as exemplars of graphic design.

The plasticity of meaning is why controlling it matters so much – to the dadaists, the lettrists, the situationists, the punks – who gets to words and gramologues first, who controls the language. Before Dada, there was an ad for Dada Shampoo. (213) And that’s why so many of marks of social identity are rallying cries: paralinguistic, animalistic, and naively musical – catchy, memorable, amusing, provoking things that work especially well when there are crowds of people willing to be entrained. And that’s why the punks stripped playing music down to its pragmatically emotional essentials: one is either wailing in pain or in ecstasy: “you only had to tell the right story, and turn up the volume.” (362)

“Dada!”

The potential energy of the individual in the crowd inspired Debord to remark, “the future belongs to the passerby.” Readiness, disponibilité, to make answer to a passing look, to make responsibility out of the flow of anonymity is what distinguishes psychogeography, “the science fiction of urban planning.” (362)

(In his tale of two cities, latter-day science fiction situationist China Miéville takes psychogeography to its logical extreme. The City and the City is a hard-boiled murder investigation in overlapping twin cities whose inhabitants practice cognitive blindness in order not to see across state lines and “unsee” the other side of the street and its passersby. The derive is co-opted by authoritarian ideology through a détournment of cultural norms and social codes.)

We will not be prisoners to the fiction of utility, say the punks through Marcus’s trace detection system. And Marcus is no prisoner to the utility of literary criticism, and so has fun, chews, digresses. (369) With Marcus, we are always at the crossroads, one of the great themes of popular music since about the time people first met up there and had a jam session, “and, instead of passing by with eyes averted,” we pause and recognize that “Now, damn the consequences, we have met,” as D.H. Lawrence put it. (366)

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

Farber wrote scores of film reviews for The Nation, Time, The New Republic and other publications. But his reviews rarely fit into the “first this, then that, and I liked it because” box that most reviewers cram themselves into. Farber mused on the beauty of images, confronted actors’ choices, challenged directors, and digressed down rarely trod paths in order to introduce pertinent impertinences and relevant social revelations.

Farber was a self-described champion of “termite art”: he loved eccentric virtuosity rather than “white elephants,” conformist monstrosities that “pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance.” Termite art, in contrast, is “ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it.” White elephant art was seamless mass in “pursuit of… continuity” and “harmony,” while termite art participated in the world: it is “an act of observing and being in the world” and

goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, like as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.

Farber taught film classes at UC San Diego that, as professors at the university are (or at least were) wont to do, made huge demands on the student. You’d have to not only watch every film listed on the syllabus but remember every detail, too. Farber tore down the idea that a film is a whole, with first this, then that happening – which is, of course, the way the vast majority of people watch films. Indeed, per Farber, most people aren’t watching so much as being pickled in white elephant shit. In his classes, says Duncan Shepherd, who wrote film reviews for the San Diego Reader, “It wasn’t so much what he had to say… so much as it was the whole way he went about things, famously showing films in pieces, switching back and forth from one film to another, ranging from Griffin to Goddard, Bugs Bunny to Yasujiro Oz,” and playing clips without sound, backwards, mixed in with slides of paintings, and so on. Farber taught his students to observe, to ravage like termites.

The hundreds of film reviews in this book are, in short, a guide to Western culture in the 20th century. Your guide is witty, scathing, unforgiving, and never so high-browed that he’s afraid to love a good roll in the mud. One quote, from a 1953 review, will have to suffice: “Stalag 17 is a crude, cliché-ridden glimpse of a Nazi prison camp that I hated to see end.”

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

Witold Gombrowicz is a novelist of psychological entanglements, and Pornografia is a novel of erotic entanglement. It is often cruel and sometimes cruelly funny. It is a novel by a man certain that language in some profound way determines ontology, that what we hear and say sculpts the way we are.

Set in a country idyll with the war roaring dully in the background, two refugee intellectuals conspire to contrive a liaison between a pair of kids who have grown up together there in the Polish countryside. Pornografia is an unholy little novel, chillingly dark, at times dripping with cynicism, but at its best beset by bracing, high-brow hilarity and jaded, deeply sublimated hysteria. First published in 1966, it’s only recently that readers have begun to talk about Gombrowicz as a Latin American writer rather than a Polish one. The question of influence is good, if ultimately divisive. Division is precisely Gombrowicz’s strength; you imagine he not only enjoys taking the frog apart with a tiny knife, he begins to split the world apart as if it were empirically just an intimately interbleeding network of heartbeats.

In 1939, Gombrowicz left Poland, escaping to Argentina, where he lived for the rest of his life. I think, as best he could, he 86ed the invasion of Poland by Germany in the fall of ’39 from his life while embracing it as an element in his biography. He wasn’t so much guilty as alive and smart. And that hurt, in that way that surviving disaster sometimes does. So he kept that quiet, at first, then, later, leaked it as attitude, insolence and fiction.

Above the street in Buenos Aires, Gombrowicz wrote a career of large intellectual appetites. His opus includes a major dent in the history of Argentinean theatre – but, in the 20th century, Argentina was so intellectually close to (some would say preoccupied with) French, Spanish and Italian thought that it is easy to see why Gombrowicz was mistaken for a European writer.

To my mind, Gombrowicz is in fictional league with the likes of John le Carré, who also writes as if he thinks that people can be made by the words shared by two or more people. Usually two. When a third is introduced, per Charles Sanders Peirce, randomness, sway and betrayal wag people’s tails (money and sex are the typical thirds played upon in the Gombrowiczian personality trade). Made here means made real: made to act in a certain way; to command; to be taken under the confidence or control of another.

The difference between the crypto-modernist spy novelist, whose philosophical imperatives and narrative interests significantly overlap those of Gombrowicz, is that Gombrowicz practiced point of view from the terrorist’s self-explosion while le Carré at the last minute rips the point of view from the victim to the perpetrator so that, at the wall, we witness the shooting of children, animals and, at his most wrenching, the beloved. With Gombrowicz, though, things are always kept at a distance.

And that’s the rip-off with most of modernism, and post-modernism, too: you never get to love the characters. You’re minimally or otherwise challenged to recognize them as antecedents, precedents and portents, without ever being rationed the responsibility of response in the dialogical sense of the word.

Like 1970’s-era J.G. Ballard (especially The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash), Gombrowicz’s novels make for a fascinating read, but don’t expect to be more than intellectually engaged.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

Gain

Not Clare, the transnational corporation whose history is charted across three generations in this saga of a novel. The company makes soap — a cleaning product that offers the homemaker so much to gain. And the company, of course, has gained, prodigiously, over the years: it has profited immensely.

Clare manufacturers its products in Lacewood, Illinois, where Laura Bodey is an estate agent. Laura has ovarian cancer. Her story – of her illness and how, as she disintegrates, her family reunites around her – is intertwined with the story of Clare International.

Long before the novel makes the facts plain, we’ve already drawn connections: our chemistry is killing us. The brilliant Powers draws parallels and cycles in abundance but, to his credit, he never once hits over the head with any moralizing message.

Perennial plants flower and die, and so do people and industries, he implies. It’s the way of the world. We can change things, perhaps and, after reading Gain, we may well join one crusade or another, seeking justice for victims of industries focused on nothing but gain or, contrarily, seeking to eliminate the tort system that is, at this point, the victim’s only source of recompense and punishment for the polluters who make us sick. Either way, or no way, that’ll be what you got out of the novel, not what’s there.Gain is a history of a cancer, then, but also a history of the American corporation — a frightening parallel, but also apropos. Clare starts out as just a few people but, because they are incorporated, they have all the rights of individuals but none of the responsibilities. In our lust to profit and consume in an environment unfettered by regulation or consequence, we too quickly forget this strange contortion of the Fourteenth Amendment. Written to declare the personhood of those held as slaves and thus set them free, it quickly came to be wielded as a blunt instrument in the creation of corporate personhood.

Corporations attained the rights of individuals (without the responsibilities – that is, they cannot easily and directly be held responsible of their actions) through a reading, an interpretation of the word “person,” in the U.S. constitution. So Powers is riffing on a cycle of healing and sickness: in the hands of a great writer, reading is curative. In the hands of lawyers, though, interpretative powers can be perverted and make us sick.

Gain is, in short, a brilliant, exhilarating novel that, like all Powers’ novels, deserves and rewards our closest reading. Richard Powers is without a doubt one of the two or three best living writers working in the English language. With Gain, he flexed his considerable muscles, letting us see ourselves through both the wide-angle lens of history and the microscope of the cancerous body. Gain is a major achievement, a novel of conscience for a largely unconscious culture. And he didn’t stop with Gain. Soon after came novels about terrorism, the environment, race and, most recently, a return to science in a novel about the creativity of genetic engineering (and the engineering of creative writing).

If you care about ideas and their power in the world, you should be reading Richard Powers.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

From 1958 to 1973, Bernstein delivered four TV music performance/lectures per year, illustrated lavishly with the likes of the New York Philharmonic: the Young People’s Concerts series is still one of the longest-running programs on classical music. Earlier in the 1950s, he delivered for Omnibus a handful of performances that are considered among the finest of the so-called “golden age of television.” Omnibus was a dignified, mid-century monumental series hosted by Alastair Cooke that explored art, science and the humanities.Bernstein posed his viewers questions: what made a certain composer tick, what is it about this piece of music that so captivates and moves us, what makes opera grand? He then proceeded with confident charm, humor and generous intelligence to systemically answer them.

Bernstein broke things down, created formal, patterned structures out of music that he could communicate in discrete bits that accreted and formed whole lessons — if you could stay with him all the way. But even if you couldn’t, Bernstein’s knack for breaking out and illustrating the structural bits — the rhythmic beams beneath our feet and they buttresses of melody soaring above our heads, he might say — meant that most people could grasp enough of a handle on him to gasp right along with him at the wondrously complex simplicity of the music all around us.

Bernstein made even opera sound good, while his programs on modern art music, musical comedy and jazz are sonically radiant and pedagogically masterful productions. In the almost 8 hours of TV on these four DVDs, Bernstein goes deep and wide through a variety of musical forms, all of them involving large numbers of players, singers and actors in need of collective direction under the will of a maestro.

There’s definitely a bias toward Western European art music with Bernstein, but he also rocked with popular culture. That bona vide had been laid down early on with his 1949 hit, West Side Story. “Summertime,” a song from West Side Story, is so deeply bound into the songbook of world musical culture that it long ago graduated from “hit” to “standard.”

Leonard Bernstein was the Walter Cronkite of classical music TV. He covered classical and modern musics in a fair and balanced way, was accessible, and made you feel smart. He was strikingly easy on the eyes and moved like both a dancer and like he was a good fuck and knew it. In places where Cronkite had to worry about his reputation, Bernstein, being a musician, an artist, was freer.

And so, over the years, a mystique grew up around Bernstein: he was a giant living among us; he brought the great halls of Manhattan into his viewers’ living rooms. He befriended his audience’s children — I was one of those children — and coaxed our minds to scale big ideas, to hear voices and ideas in the structure of a symphony, to fill our lungs with the narrative wave of a musical or do a kind of ecstatic shimmy while listening to the mathematical story ticking inside a piece by J.S. Bach.

A Bernstein show was never over when it was over: he deliberately and with aforethought incited riots of curiosity. He burned with an inner flame and he stoked the ego, suggesting that you could gain mastery of music if you followed his example.

In 1955’s “The Art of Conducting,” he hands over the keys to his kingdom, describes the path to his very door – but you’d better start practicing now if you were ever going to be as good as he is, to reach his castle and take charge of the keys.

Originally published at Curled Up with a Good DVD.

One of only three portraits of women by Leonardo da Vinci, the subject of the painting was the 16-year-old Ginevra de Benci, a member of a wealthy family. The portrait may have been Leonardo’s first commission; he is thought to have been 22 when he painted it in 1474. The picture hangs in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. – or, rather, the upper half of the painting hangs there.

For at some point in its past, the picture was mutilated: the bottom half was cut away, so that Ginevra is portrayed only from about mid-bust upwards. Ginevra’s Story shows how art historians, using computer-aided design technology, reconstructed the bottom third of the painting. The reconstruction is based on sketches of Ginevra’s hands in the Windsor Castle art collection, and on comparison with Ginevra’s “sisters,” the Mona Lisa and the “Lady with an Ermine.”The documentary also shows how the painting was restored. The varnish Leonardo applied to the surface of the painting had yellowed over the centuries, considerably dulling its colors. Before-and-after images show how Leonardo was, already at 22, a master of shading and subtle detail. And X-ray and infrared reflectography delve beneath the surface of the painting to reveal Leonardo’s preparations for the picture.

Like all of da Vinci’s women, Ginevra is enigmatic. This girl, especially, is austerely so: her pale skin, faraway eyes and sad expression make her appear as if she were resigned to a life without joy. In fact, she was likely a very expressive poet (though none of her work survives) and was the muse to the poet and Venetian diplomat Bernardo Bembo, who courted her with a knightly, platonic devotion that was the custom in Florence in her day. But, too, she was married to a much older man whom she may not have loved, so life may indeed have been sad for her.

Narrated by Meryl Streep (in English) or Isabella Rossellini (in Italian), Ginevra’s Story is highly recommended for art lovers and educators.

In Powers’ hands, the relation between the two themes is laid bare: they both are concerned with the nature, manipulation, and enhancement of reality. In recent years, we’ve seen the formerly innocuous genre of memoir mutate into the high-stakes blockbuster industry of creative nonfiction. And woe unto he who fudges the truth in his memoir, who tells a lie, however small. What used to be par for the course in memoir is now a cardinal sin: remember James Frey and A Million Little Pieces?

A character in Generosity — the narrator, in fact — says, “Feelings are the new facts. Memoir is the new history. Tell-alls are the new news.” And novels, moreover, are a “kind of Stockholm syndrome – love letters to the urge that has abducted us.” “Creative nonfiction,” meanwhile, “comes down to this: science now holds routine press conferences.” PR hacks spin the message while pundits amplify the noise of their best-paying clients.

So it’s no surprise that the genetic engineering – or genomics, as it’s now called – twine of the novel makes its public debut on a talk show. Or that from time to time the narrator in this (seemingly) third-person omniscient work of fiction obtrusively presents himself in the first person – but therein lies another aspect of Powers’ magical sleight-of-hand that the reader needs to witness for herself.

It’s also no surprise, perhaps, that the novel begins in that location so central to the decadence of the culture we find ourselves rollercoastering in, the creative writing workshop classroom. Russell Stone is a once-rising star of creative nonfiction who, via heartbreak and other disenchantments, has fallen to translating personal testimonies into Standard English for a Web site (everything has become “content” plugging in holes in the messaging machines) and teaching writing night classes at a Chicago art school.

In his workshop is a refugee from the Algerian revolution, that war that was so bitter it tore the country into a million little pieces and left Thassadit Amzwar the sole survivor in her family: “Ten years of organized bloodbath have reduced a country the size of western Europe to a walking corpse.” She should suffer from post-traumatic stress, depression, be suicidal and dark. But she’s happy, strangely upbeat; she’s so delightful that her jaded classmates (who range from a dressed-in-black Goth to a socially inept cyber-nerd) call her Miss Generosity: “Thassa has emerged from that land glowing like a blissed-out mystic.” She has a voice like a “mountain flute,” and her stories, written and otherwise, enchant her classmates and everyone she meets. WTF, Stone wonders, is up with that?

Powers allows — and is up-front with us in this aspect of the novel writer’s craft — one minor and one major coincidence in his story (this is hilarious because it’s a rule of thumb in every creative writing textbook, but saying so in a novel is akin to a magician explaining his sleight-of-hand via a slo-mo demonstration), and thus Miss Generosity is connected to Thomas Kurton, wizard of genomics and CEO of Truecyte. The plot of Generosity forms a double helix.

Kurton is working on programming (and patenting for Truecyte) the human genome. He’s hot on the trail of the happiness gene and, in Thassa Amzwar, he thinks he’s found it. Kurton runs tests on Amzwar, finds his magic bullet of a gene, and finally publishes the paper that tells the world that enhancement of the human personality is a matter of proper engineering:

“The script that has kept us in gloom and dread is about to be rewritten. Labs across the globe are closing in on those ridiculous genetic errors that cause life to suicide.”

The crowd, as they say, goes wild – and the shit hits the fan.

Powers’ magic is that in “enhancing” the truth of a story it becomes truer still, and creative nonfiction is no exception. How decadent, perhaps even pre-apocalyptic, that Oprah should have kicked James Frey’s ass for telling a white lie in his book. Frey’s enhancement did no harm, but he lied to Oprah. Powers has such literalism locked in his sights: the showdown between Thassa and the geneticist takes place on Oona, a dead ringer for the Oprah format, book club and all.

Thassa, it turns out, is really fairly normal. Genomics, and designs derived therefrom, aren’t the answer leading to a Prozac nation full of smiley-faced people-drones; it’s another kind of lying, enhancement, story telling. And fiction, creative non- or otherwise, is nothing without conflict. The cognitive engine of culture and all our creative endeavor is, perhaps sadly, certainly for better and for worse, conflict.

MacArthur grants aside, devoted readers have known since at least The Gold Bug Variations that Powers is, in fact, a genius. He’s one of the few writers working who has such a sure grasp of science, its ethical and political dimensions, and a fully realized literary voice. Generosity brings to the fore all Powers’ talents and passions in a refreshingly succinct and accessible read that is as amusing as it is thought-provoking.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

Anyone who came into science fiction during the late 60s and 70s would have been aware of Joanna Russ. Even if you never read any of her relatively few novels or stories, you couldn’t avoid the name. Of the three great women writers who did so much to transform science fiction at this time, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree Jr., and Russ, Russ was far and away the most controversial. So much so that it was known for her name to be greeted with boos at an sf convention, and believe me even in the conservative world of fandom that was unusual.

Joanna Russ is an incredibly important figure in the history of science fiction and the author of a couple of novels and several short stories that deserve to endure. This beautifully produced collection of essays is a fitting tribute to her, and even those who know Russ’s work well will learn from many of these essays. Even so, this is still only telling part of the story about an elusive and complex writer. We’d be better off if all her work were back in print, but until that happens this is a superb reminder of what a valuable and important writer she is.

The other review is by Cheryl Morgan who makes a point about book reviewing that is near and dear to my heart; snip:

it occurs to me that those people who complain that book reviews should always be neutral and objective, and not bring in the reviewers personal viewpoint in any way, are very like those people who claim that books that have no obvious character ethnicity (and are therefore default white) are good because they are “colorblind”. If you get criticized for standing out from the cultural norm it is probably because you have said something interesting and subversive.

The eye, of course, was supposed to be the trump card of the cadre of crypto-creationists known as the intelligent design underground. The plan, as outlined in the infamous Wedge document, was to stealthily sow doubt and infiltrate key positions in order to get creationism taught in schools, along with morning prayers and the Ten Commandments mowed into the lawns of every courtroom in the U.S. Alas, the trial in Dover, Pennsylvania (a case fondly, if very unofficially, remembered as A Couple Dumb Cluck School Board Members and Their Discovery Institute Allies vs. Common Sense), put the kybosh on intelligent design.

Which might mean that Susskind’s 2006 book is passé and no longer useful. The influential and admired theoretical physicist wrote it, he says in his introduction, because he thinks the universe – quirky, special, and weirdly tuned as she is – can be explained without recourse to “supernatural agents.”

In fact, though, and except in the introduction, Susskind has way too much fun ogling the universe’s sexy features to really spend much time bashing creationists. He’s got “branes” on the brain while luxuriating in “a bubble bath universe,” washing off the mud (or whatever that stuff is) being slung in “the black hole wars.” Creationism be damned, let’s do math!

Or, since there aren’t any actual equations in The Cosmic Landscape, let’s do the diagram rumba and follow the squiggly lines that compose a Feynman diagram – but watch out! The dance floor is folding according to the weird rules of its own private geometry. And: energy is mass with no clothes on so, parents, shield your children from the wonders of the universe.

But that, ultimately, is Susskind’s point: you don’t need to bring in supernatural intelligence to explain the weird goings on in the universe; you don’t need “intelligent design” or, as brainy physicists with a metaphysical bent like to call it, the “anthropic principle.” The anthropic principle is the idea that the universe is designed just so, so that – guess who – humans can thrive in it. Things are neither too hot nor too cold; neither too inflationary nor too contractionary. It is kind of spooky. Better, though, Susskind says, to take a look at what he called “the physicist’s Darwinism.”

Survival of the fittest, that is, only as it applies to the laws of physics. Just as with biology, where you get highly adapted and complex things like eyes and duck-billed platypuses, the universe has strings, and branes and black holes. The laws that work, continue to work. The ones that don’t, stop being laws, either dying out or changing. There is, Susskind claims, a “landscape of possibilities” Out There – and The Cosmic Landscape is his delightful tour of it.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

It’s a novel. It’s a poem. It’s (as one shrill Amazon reviewer has it) the ranting of a LIBERAL ATHEIST JUNKY. It’s (drug-induced or not, take your pick) stream-of-consciousness. It’s the first prose cut-up. It’s pornography. It’s the end (or beginning) of (post-)modernism. It’s The Bomb, it’s a how-to-be-a-writer manual. Here’s the definitive answer to all that: Yes, it is. Naked Lunch is all that and more.

Naked Lunch is one of the most written-about books of the twentieth century. It’s up there with Ulysses and The Wasteland for the title of “book most likely to generate a graduate thesis.” That’s because, like those other two, it’s an open text: you’re quite likely to find there precisely what you go looking for.

Everything, that is (as a different Amazon reviewer complained) except stuff about lunch and nudity: “doesn’t anybody like to eat in the nude?”

So what does this all add up to? It adds up to this: You should read Naked Lunch. It’s an essential part of who we are (as Burroughs wrote somewhere, a paranoid is someone who knows something of what’s going on; if you’re not paranoid, you’re not really alive). It’s part of your education (did you know that language was a virus from outer space? Quick: read this book), it’s part of your sexual being (“If I had my way we’d sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes”), it’s an essential document of the American Century (“In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom”).

And Naked Lunch is a hell of a lot of fun – if your idea of fun is being burned at the stake and reincarnated as a dope fiend on the run from an evil doctor trying to get you to shoot bug powder while simultaneously being gang-buggered by the security forces of Interzone.

Really. It’s that funny, that much fun. Here’s a sample – the Benway mentioned below is the self-same doctor who wants you to shoot bug powder (a note: we don’t do bug powder in this era of high-tech entomological toxins, but think roach poison and you’ve got the idea):

What’s with the serum?”

“I don’t know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The man’s not to be trusted. Might do almost anything… Turn a massacre into a sex orgy…”

“Or a joke.”

“Precisely. Arty type… No principles…”

This fiftieth-anniversary edition is a beauty: cloth-bound, slip-cased, all purple and green in the style of the first Olympia edition (Paris, 1959) with a restored text “faithful to Burroughs’ original composition” (whatever that means; Burroughs didn’t “compose” Naked Lunch; Allen Ginsburg assembled the book by collating extracts from letters written to him by Burroughs; with Naked Lunch, there are only ever variorum editions), and an “insightful afterword” by critic David Ulin. Forget the marketing hype and the DVD-like “extras”: at the price, this hardcover book is a great value. If I recall correctly (and I doubt that I do), Burroughs said something along those lines: Cheat your landlord (if you must), but don’t shortchange the Muse.

So don’t shortchange yourself. Read Naked Lunch, learn to write like a maniac, god-eating atheist dope-shooting creative genius, and then start a blog: let us know what you really think.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010