Just started reading the new Gibson, Spook Country. It is like stumbling upon an old friend. I promised myself I would savour it, rather than speed through it, but I fear I will have finished it well before the weekend.

I still find it remarkable how this guy has eyes and ears for all things futuristic. Even more remarkable is the fact that, while his last two novels have the present as a setting, you do not for a moment have the feeling that he is no longer writing science fiction. A bit like Ballard, but at the same time, worlds apart. Ballard writes about the dystopia inside all of us, while Gibson will always be writing about what is to come, but really already here. I know that sounds like a paradox, but this is a paradoxical age and Gibson catches the simulacrum of the era like no other. The dictum "The future is now" seems invented especially for reading Gibson.

A bonus, for me personally as a Belgian, is that the (ambiguous) man in the background in Pattern Recognition as well as in Spook Country is the Belgian advertising guru Hubertus Bigend. I cannot possibly imagine a Belgian with a name like that, but somehow he fits the profile nonetheless. I could not begin to fathom how Gibson manages to grasp the essence of what it is to be Belgian, but he does.

It is always a challenge to find the right music to go along with the reading of a Gibson. At the moment the latest Dopplereffekt releases and the most sinister parts of the Drexciya discography suit me just fine, with Tangerine Dream's Zeit and Atem as perfect replacements, should the reading turn nocturnal.

Deux Vérités de Marguerite

In France they still Love Literature with two capital L's. The ultimate proof are the Quarto editions on Gallimard. With those you get a load of essential texts of one writer in one book. The paper is ultra-thin but you get more than 1000 pages for a reasonable price.

So I was thumbing through the Quarto of Marguerite Duras and in the introduction she was being quite honest about being a writer. She said - and I am quoting from memory here - that "the essential thing about being a writer is daring to write. I have written incomprehensible things and they were read."

Two truths if there ever were truths. I mean, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, while still among the living, all they did was write, write, write. They were frequently accused of being opaque and rightout incomprehensible, and - this is what it is all about - they probably were, if you observe the thousand-plus interpretations that are to this day (and probably for many years to come) plaguing the blogosphere alone. I mean, I was reading Badiou's take on Deleuze (La Clameur de l'Être) and thanks to Badiou I now feel that I understand even less of Deleuze than before.

But I guess that it is what writing is about: Write now, think later.

Second truth, then. I remember reading Duras' Le Ravissement de Lol. V. Stein - a long time ago that was, tempus fugit - and to this day I still could not possibly fathom what that book is about (I even suspect that, with all the additional knowledge I have acquired since then about France's cultural climate at the time the book was written, I now will understand even less if I decide to re-read it). Bearing in mind Duras' quotation I am bound to believe that even the writer herself did not know what it was about.

A few years ago for me there would not have been any point whatsoever to reading an incomprehensible book. Now it has become a challenge. When incomprehensible (or seeming to be), literature becomes pure language again, the ground zero of writing, mere signs, signifiers and symptoms waiting to be deciphered, like hieroglyphs by an Egyptologue. Meaning leading to other meanings, "a Thousand Plateaus" of Meaning.

Why settle for one meaning if you can have all the truths in the world? Or how nihilism and holism are just two sides of the same coin.

Ground

"All of this we choose to forget. We devise a counter-system of elaborate forgetfulness. We agree on this together. (...) But the experience is no less deep because we've agreed to forget it."

Don DeLillo, from: The Names

I have now read three novels by Don DeLillo: White Noise, Underworld and The Names. And out of those reading experiences re-emerges the essence of what makes a great writer. The great writer, in essence, does not write about the so-called great themes of life. He does not write about (on) love, hate, loss, sex, health, madness, politics, ethics. No, the great writer writes about the things that escape the incidental, the surface look. He writes about what is beyond all those grand themes. He writes about what is beneath. He writes about the things under these things. He understands.

The great writer (Borges, Dick, Ballard, Pynchon) mentions, employs and deploys all these great themes to keep his story going and he may even say very meaningful things about them. But he does not position them as the essence of his story. His story is about the phenomena that are always there, so omnipresent that we tend to forget the realm of their importance. The noise, the murmur in the background (in White Noise), waste and junk, the things we use and then throw aside - and then are stuck with (in Underworld), language, the words we use, the way we express ourselves (in The Names).

In parallel you will see emerge other important undercurrents in Borges (language, myth, knowledge), Dick (reality, believe and make believe), Pynchon (science, history) and Ballard (violence, dis-ease, man against nature). It is not the believe in, the knowledge of, the science of, the myth about, the language with which that are important. No, it is the believe itself, the science and the knowledge themselves, language itself that need explanation, inquiry. It is not what those mechanisms produce, no, it is the mechanisms themselves that a great writer concerns himself with.

It is no coincidence, then, that the sentence that emerges as most important from those DeLillo's three books is the eternal "What does it mean?". The truly great writer does not care for surface, symptom or attributes. They all come second, they are a means. He is looking for the first causes. He is trying to unforget. He may not immediately find what he is looking for. Of course, he does not find what he is looking for. That is why he writes.

La Tristesse Postmoderne

A few weeks ago I finshed DeLillo's White Noise and now I have started reading Underworld and what strikes me about both books is that, despite the subtle humor that pervades them, the strongest undercurrents are quite different from the initial outlook. It is the aching distress and deep sadness that typifies postmodern man.

The sentence that keeps on returning again and again in White Noise is the existential "What does it mean". DeLillo's protagonists seem to be wandering a theme park where fun, fun, fun is the ultimate goal. But in the end (and sometimes that 'end' comes all to quickly) they always realize that fun, fun, fun only conceals the ever continuing search for a meaning that eludes them. They are not even sure (and we with them) that there is an ultimate meaning. To me they are erring souls, forever striving forward while all the way they do not know if there is something to be reached in the end. Irony seems to be the only way out when truth has been lost.

It makes a joyful reading of these books very difficult. Sure, you laugh a lot, but what, in the end, are you laughing with? There is no salvation, no real conclusion. Maybe Lyotard was right after all. There is no longer any belief in meta-narratives. But what has been constructed in their place leaves all to the imagination and painstakingly avoids any meaning whatsoever (cfr. David Lynch's latest films: sure, they are imaginative and alienating to an absurd maximum, but what does it all mean in the end?)

So we all flee into the detailed and the ultra-particular while never seeing (or should that be: unconsciously a-void-ing) the bigger picture that emerges. That is, total despair and the need to fill in the void regardless of what is being filled up and what we fill it up with. We have everything, but no direction. And the real danger is that when desperately looking for a direction, you choose the wrong one and end up doing very stupid things. You see, for postmodern man, lacking meta-narratives, it just is not necessary any longer to do the right thing. Frequently it seems already enough to do something.

It leads me to think that even the renewed fanatism of muslims as well as christian fundamentalists is no more than a cosmetic affair. After having relinquished religion and having chosen uncritically for wild capitalism, they find out that the chosen path leads to nowhere. But the return to faith is a case of self-deception at its worst. Because in the end they never entirely refute the principles of capitalism. In its place comes an ugly hybrid that combines everything that was wrong about both systems in the first place. So the so-called moral renewal becomes in the end no more than a moral fundament for laissez-faire capitalism. "New", all too often, is just a remodelling of the old forms.

If there were one word with which you would have to sum up our current civilization, it would be unsurprised.

Black and/or White

Pretty rare that one encounters a novel that is so full of interesting ideas. I have read that Aronofsky is preparing a movie based on this book. You would hope he did not.

Once again I was led back to my current obsession. As much as there have been theories about film over the last fifty years (they all get treated quite succinctly in Flicker), still not one satisfying theory about popular music has been proposed (I was reading Adorno's take on the subject recently and I almost laughed). Always theories about music are drawn inexorably into the sphere of cultural theory. Granted music is culture but if there is such a thing as film theory, then why, I ask you, is there not such a thing as music theory?

Sometimes I think that it may even be too late to come up with such a theory. The extreme process of democratization that has been ushered by the internet, where every single taste is covered by a niche, that, in turn, will defragment into smaller niches if necessary, will never again allow a unifying theory.

If the antithesis and cross-feeding between overground and underground once could have been a starting point for a sort of dynamic, then that time is surely over. The overground is no longer declared enemy of the underground. They just live seperately, with the overground sometimes absorbing the more effete characteristics of the underground (see Banhart or Coco Rosie as so-called "free folk"), the ones that are deemed not too overpowering for the general public.

Innovation thus seems a trifle point, it remains ever underground, amazing the few, but never reaching the masses, except in an extremely honed, and thus devoid of all critical, form.

Some Self

I have been reading a lot of Will Self's stories lately and I am going to have to reconsider my thesis that he is not a Ballardian writer, because he is. But where Ballard is always clinical and menacing, Self is funny and ironic. In a way he illuminates the same post-modern situations as Ballard, but the intended menace is somewhat subdued and the outcome always drole rather than Ballard's frequently harsh and cruel critiques.

His subject matter is also very different, though his characters are also very upper middle-class (artists, doctors, philosophers, psychiatrists, editors), but as opposed to the typical Ballard typology they are far less out of control, a kind of kindly perverted bourgeois. Where Ballard describes a world wherein psychosis has overruled neurosis, while still being called normal, Self describes the same loss of affect in a much more benign way. The conclusions are the same, but the consequences are never that far-reaching. A Ballard-light, quoi?

Of course the link between the inundated England of The Book of Dave and The Drowned World is self-evident, but I can hardly wait to discover the subtle differences in subject matter and characterisation (still waiting for the paperback). This is really a very stimulating writer. For the interested: try The Grey Area and The Quantum Theory of Insanity. As they are short-story collections, the Ballard parallel will be immediately made clear.

Mommy, What is an Illiterate?

I am, as you may know from reading this load of egocentric musings, a booky kind of person. Not only because I - duh! - love to read, but also because I am thoroughly convinced that reading an interesting and, more particularly, a difficult text can truly expand your mind (in that it keeps your brain physically sane in the long run), broaden your always too narrow view on this world and, lastly, because, you actually might learn something. Rather self-evident, you say. You really think so, hey? Think again!

Last year I decided to get myself a certificate so that I will be able in the near future to work in the municipal library, so that at least I can be in the vicinity of books all day.

So now I am following lessons with some 25 people who aim for the same certificate. And if I would state that at least half of them have not read a book in years, some even never, then I am probably underestimating the facts. There is even a girl (the kind of girl who never will grow up to be a woman, that kind of girl) following the course who already works in a small municipal library. She, quite bluntly, admitted to me once that she never reads any book whatsoever.

If you subtract from who remains the people who consider reading being equal to chew pseudo-books by Nicci French, Dan Brown, J.K. Rowling or John Grisham, then I guess you will end up with a core of some 6-7 people who actually read books. Whether they are reading any good books? Please, let us skip that question, in order not to loose complete faith in the brain-functions of humanity.

Second example. The last few weeks I have been working in a bookshop somewhere in a suburb of Antwerp. My colleagues there were two 24-year old girls. One of them reads books ('real' books actually - can you imagine? - although never in any other language but Dutch), the other one probably only knows books as being different from non-books, cookbooks being the only kind of book she can do something with.

Now I am asking you, why the fuck do you work in a bookshop if you never ever have read any literary work in your life?!? How can you seriously consider yourself a bookseller who needs to advise people on which book they shoud read, when you (incredibly dirty words censured)?!?

And then those awful clichés people always come up with when you tackle them about the fact that almost no-one at all takes the time anymore to read an interesting book. "It is better that people read stupid books, rather than not reading any books at all." What kind of reversal of values does such a cliché imply? I mean, that is a bit like saying "watching porn is better than not having any sex at all" (which, in turn, reminds of another sorry cliché - mostly stated by the prostitutes and pimps themselves - that states that "prostitution saves a lot of marriages"; yeah right! they actually mean that it saves the face of some marriages). Another one: "Reading solely the Coran (or the Bible for that matter) is better than not reading at all".

Me myself have, by reading alone, mastered the English and French languages and acquired at least a passive knowledge of German. [It is, dear readers, an illusion that you could ever learn a language by following lessons in your average secondary school, the level being much too low to acquire any fluency whatsoever.]

What I am trying to say here - because in my anger I too frequently digress, must work on that - is that people consider reading too much as an onus, while it is in fact one of the cornerstones of education as such.

And to prove that I am not complaining about nothing, this week came the rather horrible news that 800.000 of the 5.5 million people living in Flanders, have trouble with reading and writing an even simple text. That is, as you can deduct (do not laugh, dear reader, the news also stated that most of the people belonging to those 800.000 cannot make a simple mathematical calculation like an addition or subtraction), one out of six people.

My question then: how can you any longer state that you are one of the most developed regions in the world when confronted with these kind of numbers? We are doomed, dear readers, we are doomed.

Back 2 Business

After the inanities of the two previous posts (although, as always, they contain a lot of truth too; which part is truth, which is fiction you decide. As The Spaceape already stated: "the truth lies somewhere between a lie and a fiction"), I decided to reinject some sérieux into my mental household.

With that in mind I went out and bought my first ever German book. Over the last few years I think I have succeeded in mastering the English and French languages up to a point that I can express myself, in writing as in speaking, quite fluently in both. And I have always promised myself that it would not stop there. Before I leave this vale of tears I will at least be able to express myself fluently in Spanish and German. And if there is still some time left after that, as I am pretty sure there will be, I would like to acquire at least some notions of Portugese, Italian , Russian and Japanese too. Chinese will be for the next life, because it is well known that you will never truly master Chinese unless you start when you are very young. But hey, maybe if I limit myself to pidgin Chinese I might actually arrive there too.

German comes first, because last week I grabbed, rather incidentally, a Dutch translation of Elfriede Jelinek's 'Lust' and even through the bias of the translation I was totally astonished by the language that she employed. It was a kind of writing I had not read before. Very poetic, but also cool, very hard and laconic at the same time. Fascinating stuff, as is her always a little dark and perverted subject matter too. She asks questions about authority and those are incredibly important questions to ask. As Zizek frequently states, but Orwell already knew: authority and the control of sexuality are narrowly intertwined.

And then I thought: "Why not read it in German? You might learn something." And thus German entered the book case. It is only a start of course, but I cannot wait until the day that I will be able to read Kafka in German, as I hope one day to read Tolstoi in Russian. One can only understand the soul of a people if one understands its language, not?

Read motherfucker!

After having finished Bruce Sterling's amusing but sometimes a little too multitudinal on the ideas front Schismatrix I stood there in the bookshop today, trying to make a choice between Zizek's Interrogating the Real and Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

I chose The Road eventually, because I had been impressed to the bone by his No Country for Old Men and because I have been reading way too much Zizek already the last few weeks, Lacanian dynamics always wearing me out in the long run. Of course, it helps when Burial (And now I wanna know who that Burial guy really is!) and Steven Shaviro both like The Road too.

The new mammoth Pynchon was, as always, tempting, but for the time being, I will pass and wait until I hear some yeah-saying from the Omar-front.