books

Belatedly realized Gene McHugh's "Post Internet" blog is available in book form. Also as a free PDF, formatted the same way.

Domenico Quaranta's Link Editions is publishing the book via Lulu. I ordered a copy and can vouch for the design and quality of the printing. I think I joked at one point that McHugh's work would end up as a book but it's actually my preferred way to read this material. The blog is pure text, often lengthy, and the handsome book format cuts the eyes and brain some slack so you can focus on the ideas, which are not slack.

After promising to post notes on Simon Reynolds' book Retromania I keep putting it down because it's so depressing. The nut concept, repeated over and over, is: after psychedelia in the '60s, prog and punk in the '70s, hiphop and house in the '80s, and rave and jungle in the '90s, why oh why* was there no new fresh, exciting, original music in the '00s?
My answers are:

1. Because, you, Reynolds, lost the passion and ability to make the case for "new" music. You're the critic but your job isn't just to complain that earlier generations were better.
2. Because all those earlier movements had one or two "stars" who broke through and were relentlessly promoted by businesspeople. Something like the chiptune scene could have been pushed to the forefront but the '00s also saw the collapse of "the industry" in favor of all the micro-trends Reynolds discusses. Malcolm McLaren even tried to play his old Sex Pistols svengali role with chiptunes but there was no industry to back it up and ram it home through relentless airplay and marketing. There was no Bit Shifter on Johnny Carson moment.

Reynolds excels at documenting all the backward-looking trends of the last decade -- we already discussed re-enactments -- and even the pre-'00s history of backward-looking trends. He makes intriguing sociological/semiotic observations about a couple of these:

The British "trad jazz" movement of the '50s. These folks eschewed bop or anything that smacked of "art" in jazz by keeping alive the freewheeling fun and danceability of New Orleans jazz of the '20s. Problem was they only knew this music through records. Reynolds quotes Hilary Moore that when playing live, the trad jazzers would faithfully mimic the "distorted instrumental balance and faulty intonation" of the music reproduced on vinyl 78s. Wish there was more detail about this but it takes your mind in weird directions.

The UK's "Northern Soul" movement fetishized classic Motown singles. Because American soul music had already moved on to funk and slower tempos, the Northern Soulsters tried to mine gold from the same overworked vein of older, almost-hits from Motown. Because the Motown "system" cranked out so many of these in search of a single monster hit, there was enough material to keep the UK scene alive for years. Reynolds: "Northern Soul found a strangely liberating gap within this system; it transformed redundant waste into the knowledge base and means-to-bliss of a working-class elite."

Again, pretty thought-provoking. Nuggets like this make the book useful even if its conclusions are repellent.

*Richard West: "[Daniel DeFoe] was the first master, if not the inventor, of almost every feature of modern newspapers, including the leading article, investigative reporting, the foreign news analysis, the agony aunt, the gossip column, the candid obituary, and even the kind of soul–searching piece which Fleet Street calls the ‘Why, Oh Why.'"

Charles Stross on what he thinks Amazon's e-book strategy is. Essentially a combination of monopoly on the consumer side and monopsony on the publisher side, all having to do with using the Kindle as a bottleneck. Frak that, I will consume landfill paperbacks for my few remaining years on earth but the statistic is chilling that e-books have gone from 1% to 40% of the market in five years. So here's Stross' prognostication on what the big six publishers are going to have to accept:

DRM on ebooks is dead. (Or if not dead, it's on death row awaiting a date with the executioner.)

It doesn't matter whether Macmillan wins the price-fixing lawsuit bought by the Department of Justice. The point is, the big six publishers' Plan B for fighting the emerging Amazon monopsony has failed (insofar as it has been painted as a price-fixing ring, whether or not it was one in fact). This means that they need a Plan C. And the only viable Plan C, for breaking Amazon's death-grip on the consumers, is to break DRM.

If the major publishers switch to selling ebooks without DRM, then they can enable customers to buy books from a variety of outlets and move away from the walled garden of the Kindle store. They see DRM as a defense against piracy, but piracy is a much less immediate threat than a gigantic multinational with revenue of $48 Billion in 2011 (more than the entire global publishing industry) that has expressed its intention to "disrupt" them, and whose chief executive said recently "even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation" (where "innovation" is code-speak for "opportunities for me to turn a profit").

And so they will deep-six their existing commitment to DRM and use the terms of the DoJ-imposed settlement to wiggle out of the most-favoured-nation terms imposed by Amazon, in order to sell their wares as widely as possible.

If they don't, they're doomed. And all of us who like to read (or write) fiction get to live in the Amazon company town.

I like Stross' characterization of Bezos:

...I do want to note that he came out of a hedge fund and he's ostensibly a libertarian; these aspects of his background make me uneasy, because in my experience they tend to be found in conjunction with a social-darwinist ideology that has no time for social justice, compassion, or charity. (When you hear a libertarian talking about "disruption" and "innovation" what they usually mean is "opportunities to make a quick buck, however damaging the long-term side effects may be." Watch for the self-serving cant and the shout-outs to abstractions framed in terms of market ideology.)

A.A. Attanasio, Wyvern. Intense, violent, mystical re-imagining of the pirate tale. A half-white, half-native man raised in the Borneo jungles and trained as a shaman gradually sheds his animist, Castaneda-psychedelic belief systems as he moves "up" through stages of Dutch/English/American society: first as pirate, then as husband of a renegade English noblewoman, and finally as Gentleman merchant in colonial Brooklyn. Bloody, exciting, unpredictable, ultimately somewhat narcissistic novel with a continual focus on masculinist coming of age tropes. Our hero becomes the mercantilist power ideal he despises but this is treated as inevitable, hard-won growth rather than a disappointment. Attanasio's tripped-out, poetic writing enchants through every level of the adventure.

Four by Charles Stross:
In Accelerando's and Glasshouse's post-human milieu, materials and consciousnesses are uploaded and shunted around the galaxy by means of A-gates and T-gates (I forget which is which). Glasshouse imagines a group of re-embodied souls participating in a voluntary Psych experiment modeled on 1950s suburbia inside a hollowed-out asteroid cut off from the rest of society. Or perhaps it's a captive breeding program run by a repressed faction that once thrived during an earlier, Balkanized phase of the cosmos-spanning Net...
The Atrocity Archives. Some interesting ideas of combining technology and magic but Lovecraft and breezy do not mix well.
Rule 34. The best of the four, a more or less pure cyber-thriller with scheming Turing-complete beings who may have more control than anyone knows.

Richard Stark's last three novels, episodes in a single narrative. In Nobody Runs Forever, amoral tough-guy hero Parker and two other hoods rob a string of armored cars using anti-tank weapons. The gang's exit doesn't go as planned so the men hide the money and separate. Ask the Parrot, one of Stark's most gripping novels, concerns the detour Parker takes as he holes up in a nearby town and plays mind games with the locals in order to survive -- and still has time to commit a second robbery. In Dirty Money, the gang returns to the scene of the original heist to claim the cash; they're now at cross-purposes after one is arrested spending some of the bills (which turn out to be numbered), and escapes, shooting a guard. The writing is terse and economical but Stark has a strong sense of place: the rural and post-industrial locations of Massachusetts and upstate NY seem vivid for only being rendered with a few strokes.

Mark Mellon
Roman Hell. Horror novel set in 1st Century Rome. Mellon's trademark unsympathetic characters, including a weaselly emperor Domitian and a down-and-out poet who attempts to curry his favor, become snared in a plot involving vicious and powerful witches. Story and characters are secondary to a historically researched Rome that is almost hallucinatory in its detail: sounds, smells, architecture, and customs contribute to a mood of mounting strangeness. The alien-ness of the setting and uncertain morality of the distant past keep the reader on edge.
Napoleon Concerto: A Novel in Three Movements. More dazzling, incantatory detail, this time concerning a naval plot to conquer England by an Irish patriot working for Napoleon and aided by genius steampunk-transplant Robert Fulton. The English are such asses that you actually want Napoleon, richly depicted in the novel as strutting, order-barking maniac, to clean their clocks.

Two by Jeff Noon
Might have been blown away by Vurt if I read it in my teens but its world of club kids racing around in a van in post-apocalyptic Manchester, with bureaucratic authority almost completely absent, just seems unlikely. There are token cops but they are mostly buffoons who disappear for long stretches as the kids trip out on hallucinatory feathers and navigate various parallel universes. Nymphomation, a prequel written later, at least has recognizable antagonists and a plot structure that doesn't entirely involve questing in videogame-like worlds. Noon's language play scintillates in both books.

Minor edits.

book jacket from wikipedia

Belatedly coming to novelist Michel Houellebecq's 1991 essay on Lovecraft, Against the World, Against Life. Strange argument that "those who love life do not read" and that because HPL hated life the most he is the writer who will show us the way: "a supreme antidote against all forms of realism." A strong, passionate case is made for HPL as a poetic writer.

Houellebecq delves into HPL's racism more than most critics, asserting that had the author not encountered and been repelled by the "swarthy masses" at the moment of his most dramatic personal failure (his two years in New York when he couldn't find work), he never would have retreated to Providence to write "the great texts" (8 stories listed by Houllebecq, unquestionably Lovecraft's best work) about alien entities breeding with Earthlings and otherwise meddling malignly in our affairs. No racism, no depictions of transcendent, life-hating evil.

Interestingly, African American sf writer Octavia Butler also spun metaphors from racism but instead of evil her books present aliens as agents of implacable, inevitable change. In story after story, a people or culture encounters a superior force and yields to it, becoming something new and other. Lovecraft, the self-identified Yankee patrician without money, despised change and personified it on a demonic, cosmic level. To Houllebecq this is noble, no matter how questionable or ignorant the roots (at least, I think that's what he's saying--he quotes some of HPL's worst letter-writing vitriol without the expected layers of apology). According to Houllebecq, once the great texts were vomited out, the personal racism abated -- or at least, HPL changed his mind about admiring Hitler.

Houllebecq notes that HPL avoids two topics: sex and money. (This led John Banville a few years ago to wonder why Houllebecq liked Lovecraft so much.) I would add, HPL's stories cloak their politics almost to invisibility, regardless of the author's privately-expressed views.