I sometimes fantasize that I’m adopted and that David Bowie is my real father.
I don’t believe in books.
I started to stop believing in books back in college. I knew the great tomes of Modernism had seen their time…David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon hit the ball so far out of the park that they put the genre of the mega book to bed and ushered in the era of hypertext and hyper meaning. Not only were books getting shorter and smaller they were also appearing in new (and renewed) formats: zines and blogs and audio podcasts. So many new formats that the question arises: do we need books at all? The Beats and the Beatles and the hippies and hip-hop beat architects had unearthed, cut and pasted together a new culture—why should we insist on telling its story using the exact thing we spent so much time taking apart? A book is a closed system. A private Facebook profile. Password protected. A walled garden stacked 10 deep at Barnes and Noble where you can’t leave a comment. A book is done. Finished. A pretend totality floating in a pretend moment in time. I thought I’d blogged myself free from all of that. Yet still I’m caught by it’s siren song—steeped in nostalgia and powerful memories of my mind being opened up by the beauty of neatly typed words in the warm summer light. I thought I could write a book as a rhizome—a laterally growing root like that of the ginger plant that allowed for multiple connection points—like A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari. I believed the hype—that a book could be an assemblage of pieces instead of a reproduction of the world. In the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari claimed that the book that followed was an assemblage instead of an attempt at recreating an image of the world. The text formed a circle, like that of ancient texts, in which the story did not end as much as return onto itself. As such it could be read in any order. It turned out to be a fake circle, however, as in the end it was still a book—mass produced on pages bound together beneath a flashy cover—but I allowed myself to fall for it anyway. I told myself that I could do what D&G did—I’d create a book in the shape of a circle—assuming this was the best form possible for my work: a book in which the awareness of its own failings was already built in. It seemed the only way—but a part of me refused to believe it. There had to be a better medium to tell the stories that I wanted to tell the WAY I wanted to tell them—without compromise. A better form—a better conduit. A zone in between my brain and the internets where machine and skin became one—tied together by gummy circuits and veiny cabling…
Welcome…step inside to my innernets…where do u want to go today?
