Maybe all of civilization is bad?

Armchair Marxist literature, cool cyber punk, Keanu on speed, surveillance, and the evils and authoritarian allure of civilization

What’s the point?

Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes is a paved bike trail that starts in Plummer, Idaho and ends in Mullan, Idaho. 73 miles. It used to be train tracks owned by Union Pacific Railroad. My grandfather worked for Union Pacific Railroad in Idaho and Montana for 30 years. So the trail kind of belongs to me. (Just kidding. The trail definitely belongs to the Schitsu’umsh people).

One 4th of July I rode the Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes with my friends Ryan and Peter. Or part of it. Along the way we built a raft and floated around Lake Coeur d’Alene, took a nap, ate a meal, saw a moose, saw a turtle, and had several flat tires. By the time we got to Kellogg, Idaho, about 20 miles from Mullan, it was after midnight and we were done biking. We slept on the side of the trail. Ryan had a tent. Peter and I didn’t. I woke up before them and read Growth of the Soil. I’ve told this story before. Sorry.

Rather than finish the trail we decided to hang out in Kellogg. There was a celebration at the park. Ryan and Peter charged folks a dollar to draw caricatures. We made enough money to buy hamburger supplies from the grocery store. There’s a big ski resort in Kellogg. During summer months it’s used for mountain biking and hiking. We went to their hotel, used the kitchen in their lobby, watched Roseanne on cable and ate hamburgers.

After lunch we went to the resort’s indoor water park. We asked the teenager working if we could go in to check it out before we pay. He said, “Yes.” We asked if while we were checking it out we could go on all the waterslides for free. He said, “No.” We went into the water park and went on all the water slides for free.

Later that night a cover band from North Dakota called Out On Bail was playing in the parking lot of a motel. The bass player wore a gold sequined shirt and played a bass shaped like a scorpion. Once their first set was finished the bass player went into a hotel room for a few minutes. When he came out he was in a purple sequined shirt. For the next song he didn’t play bass. He sang Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell.”

As the bass player was singing “Rebel Yell” a woman came up to me, Ryan, and Peter. She asked if we were at the water park earlier. We said, “Yes.” She said she works there. She saw us. She’ll be there tomorrow and we can come while she is working and use all the water slides for free. We said, “Cool, we’ll definitely be there.” We didn’t go there.

The resort hotel had a hot tub on the roof. We got onto the roof and into the hot tub to watch fireworks. Back then we were always getting on roofs. Peter played patriotic songs like “Star Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful” on a harmonica. A wheat field caught on fire.

Our friends picked us up because we were too lazy to bike home. I slept in the car while everyone ate at Denny’s before driving home. The sun came up just as we got to the rolling hills of the Palouse. We stopped the car. Everyone got out and we took a photo. I was tired and so annoyed about having to get out of the care. I doubt the photo exists anymore.

It’s the only memorable 4th of July I can remember.

Happy 4th of July!

Normal People, Sally Rooney

Read this for the book club I run at the library. A poor boy (Connell) loves a rich girl (Marianne). Connell is quiet, thoughtful, and well-read. Also, a jock. Marianne is loud, eccentric, and well-read. Connell is popular. Marianne is not. Opposites. Connell's mother cleans Marianne's house. Connell and Marianne become friends. Marianne convinces Connell to go to the same college as her. At college Marianne is popular and Connell is not.

Their relationship goes through several phases. They struggle to understand one another. They hurt one another. They're friends. They're jealous. They're lovers. They're mad. They’re apart. They're together. When Harry Met Sally for millennials.

The novel does surface level Marxist analysis of their relationship so we don't have to. Connell's mother works for Marianne's family. Connell gets money from his mother. Connell spends the money he got from his mother on Marianne. Economics.

All Ears: Cultural Criticism, Essays, and Obituaries, Dennis Cooper

Cooper's profile of Courtney Love was published the day Kurt Cobain died, which makes comments like, "Nirvana is intact, Cobain is still writing cool shit, Hole is making better and better music, Frances Bean is healthy" more uncomfortable than intended. Cooper compares Cobain and Love to Ozzie and Harriet, which he admits in the introduction of the book reads weird after Kurt Cobain killed himself. The article aged quickly and poorly because of Kurt Cobain's death, but it's a fascinating window into a time that immediately disappeared.

Spin magazine was going to out Bob Mould and said he could either be involved or not. Mould ask that Cooper profile him. Cooper visits his home in Texas. Mould makes a surprisingly angry statement on being gay:

I am not a fucking freak... I'm not going to paraded around like a freak. I don't like the word 'gay' because I don't know what the word really means. The fact that I'm supposed to make outrageous statements to gain more column space in music publications is insulting. And if the gay community doesn't like it, then too fucking bad. I'm not your spokesperson, because I don't know what you're about. I'm a person, a human being. I'm an artist. I write songs. I'm a storyteller. I don't think, 'Hey, is it time to write a happy gay pop song, or is it time to write depressing gay pop songs?" Who the fuck sits down to think about that shit? Who in their right mind thinks like that? I don't. I expect to be judged on how I treat other people and how I carry myself as a human being. I do not flaunt my sexuality. It is not the public's sexuality. It is none of their fucking business. I don't do what I do for some flag that I'm supposed to wave. I do it for Bob

Maybe it’s not surprising, actually. Husker Du were angry. Apparently Cooper's profile of Bob Mould's hurt Bob Mould's feelings. Stuff meant just between friends was published. Prefacing the profile Cooper says Mould hasn't spoken to him since it was published. Some years ago, more recently than Cooper's profile, Mould said Cooper was cool and did a good job. They occupy a similar space in my mind. I want them to be friends.

When speaking with Keanu Reeves Cooper mentions an author they both love, Philip K. Dick was always on speed.

Keanu Reeves: I want to be on speed! I've never been on speed. I want to be a speed freak for a while.

A year later Reeves would star along side Sandra Bullock in the 1994 action/adventure hit film Speed. Is Dennis Cooper is responsible for Speed. Too many coincidences in this book.

No pedophilia, no coprophilia, no incest, no rape, no dismemberment, nothing uncomfortable really, yet still somehow patently Dennis Cooper. Profiles of Sonny Bono, Stephen Malkmus, Nan Goldin, interview with Leonardo DiCaprio (before Titanic), obituaries for River Phoenix and Bob Flanagan, essays about raves, AIDS, junkies, and John Lyndon (Johnny Rotten). Short, readable, funny, insightful, but the main feeling reading this book is it is a time capsule. How things were just before they became the things we know.

Neuromancer, William Gibson

Honestly, this book is hard to follow. Fucking cool as shit though.

The Jungle, Upton Sinclair

Charles Burns drew the cover. A perfect cover. An animal head. Skinned and red. One sad eye, startingly alive. Surprisingly The Jungle is barely about meat or meat production. Mostly it's sad. Mostly about the terrible working conditions of the early 20th century. The struggles of immigrants and the false promises of America. It's about how work destroys a person and a family. Excitement for the future is replaced with excitement to get obliterated through drink. Building a strong community where people care for one another and don't take bullshit from bosses and politicians is the only hope. Jurgis finds that hope through communism. It's inspirational, but feels impossible in our god blessed America.

The novel has a clear message and like most novels with clear messages (no matter how inspiring), it's not a great novel. It becomes predictable. Every paragraph where something good happens is followed by a paragraph with unimaginable tragedy. On page 236 the protagonist, Jurgis, has a new job, he has overcome the despair of his wife dying during childbirth. The child, Antanas, is old enough to repeat everything Jurgis says, "The first time the little rascal burst out with 'God-damn' his father nearly rolled off the chair with glee." Finally, once again, Jurgis is in a good place, "[he] began to make plans, and dream dreams." On Page 237 Antanas is drowned in the street. Jurgis abandons his job, his family, wanders the country working odd jobs, drinking, trying to forget his life.

The same construction, the same turn happens so many times the tragedy becomes comedy. Hyperbole makes the point, but dampens impact.

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State by Kerry Howley. Published by Knopf in 2023.

Whistleblower Reality Winner was arrested for sharing classified documents with The Intercept, a news publication founded for publishing classified documents provided by whistleblowers. The Intercept clownishly mishandled the documents. The documents showed that Russia interfered with the 2016 presidential election. After receiving The Intercept showed the documents to the NSA trying to suss out their veracity. The documents were watermarked. Time stamped. The printer serial number was clearly visible. In no time the NSA figured out who printed the documents and sent them to The Intercept. Before the documents were published Reality Winner had been arrested.

Reality Winner was denied bail because she sent texts to her sister complaining about her job and the government (she worked for the NSA). Every text was available. Every Google search was available. Every Facebook post was available. All of it was used against her in a court of law.

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs tells Reality’s story. It also tells the story of data, surveillance, and torture. It loses focus. Drops threads. Fails to connect. But it's very readable. Reading it will make you disgusted with America. It won’t tell you anything you don’t already know.

The government indiscriminately collects data on every person in the country. Storing the data in a warehouse in Utah is wasting billions of gallons of water and microwaving our planet. Just in case a terrorism happens and we need data. The majority of data goes unexamined, but if they need it, they have it, can find it, and will use it to fuck you.

“We tend to think of privacy as the freedom to keep intentional secrets separate from public knowledge, but privacy has been the freedom to live as if most of what passes for experience will not endure.” Everything we do endures whether we like it or not, and it doesn’t belong to us. Our experiences, thoughts, searches belong to tech companies. Tech companies happily give the government anything they ask for. I am typing this on Google Docs. I am posting it on Substack. I can delete the document. I can delete the substack post, but if I ever commit a crime against the government Google and Substack have the document and the post. They will give it to the government and I will go to prison. If you subscribe to my newsletter or god forbid "like" this post on Substack and later commit a crime against the government. Substack will give your data to the government. You will be put in prison for reading and liking a post by a known eco-terrorist. Sorry.

Moment of Freedom by Jens Bjørneboe

Bjørneboe is probably Norway's most cosmopolitan writer. He was born in Norway, spent time in Sweden, Germany, and Italy. Most Norwegian writers that get translated and read in English for better or worse are provincial. Knut Hamsun is antagonistic to the idea of cosmopolitanism and thinks people should own some land and farm. Tarjei Vesaas was born and died on the same farm. He barely left. Jon Fosse has lived and traveled all over, but his novels are all set in rural Norway and are usually focus on poor farmers.

The narrator of Moment of Freedom is similarly cosmopolitan. He has lived across Europe. He's seen the best and the worst civilization has to offer and has decided that civilization is evil.

The narrator can't remember his name. He works as a janitor in a court in a small town in the alps. One night while cleaning up the court house he finds photographs of respectable members of town--judges, politicians, etc.--orgying with each other, with children, with animals. He is working on a multivolume work of philosophy and sociology called "The History of Bestiality." It is about the problem of evil in the world.

Evil is material. It is not abstraction. Of the Germans the narrator writes, "these people have spread the monstrous lie about themselves that it was nazism which ate six million Jews--and who are now trying to convince the world that it was an abstract idea and not themselves, not the Teutons, who killed them--that Jews were killed by a concept, by an ideology, and not by human beings." Humans are material and there actions are material and the consequences are material. An idea doesn't murder. A person does. The narrator draws a comparison. Nazi doctors were prosecuted for scientific experimentation resulting in massive, catastrophic loss of life while American scientists were doing experimentation leading to the atomic bomb which resulted in massive, catastrophic loss of life. The narrator doesn't see the difference between the two. To him it is unfair that Germany was held responsible for its science while America wasn't. The only difference he can see is that Japanese people have different skin color, which excuses their deaths.

His preoccupation with materiality materializes through substance:

The melancholy or depression itself, is a substance--rotting, viscous, stinking matter mixed with blood, which one wades in up to one's knees. In the same way time is also a substance, viscous and heavy-flowing

It's clear that the depression isn't a force or a power within myself, but something which meets me from the outside: a substance or perhaps in reality a being, something which resembles a carnivore--it's like a strange, spectral being which is just on the brink of taking form in flesh and blood

I suffer from an excess of identity, from an ego which is as solid and massive as a boulder. How did all this prodigious identity arise, what substance is it made of, how did this existence get its massiveness?

Emotions and identity are a material reality manifested in substance. In Bjørneboe's understanding of the world there is a physical world and a metaphysical world, but the gap between them can be and is often bridged. He documents the gap between the inside and outside world as well as instances of inside and outside, physical and metaphysical crossing over. It results in substance.

Near the end the narrator visits Rome.

For me Rome is and will remain the nocturnal streets or a harsh Antiquity, power politics, the Colosseum, and the catacombs. It is empire and world domination, but it flowed right into the blood in my veins.

It gave me that ration of past which was necessary for my nourishment at that time, and which I couldn't do without. I don't know what it was, but it gave me a feeling of having a home and an origin. There was something which came together in me.

The problem of evil is civilization. Just looking at the streets of Rome, an origin of Western civilization, filled his blood with "empire and world domination." Again, an abstraction—conquest, imperialism, oppression, power—is made physical through architecture, art, culture, civilization. People are influenced by physicality, architecture, culture. It isn’t an idea that puts power in his veins, it is encountering the physical manifestation of the ideas, culture and civilization, that makes him want power. The power makes him feel at home, whole.

"Power, which is the sole existing principle, means only one thing: the opportunity to cause others pain." The phrase moment of truth comes from bullfighting. It is when the dance is over. The matador takes off his mask and is about to kill the bull. The moment of truth is the moment of freedom. The bull fighter is free because he has power. He has the opportunity to cause another creature pain. Right at the moment of truth there is still the possibility that the bull fighter won't kill the bull. But he always kills the bull.

Rome was a world dominating empire. Any culture built from it reproduces and spreads the empire and domination. What's worse for the narrator is it felt good. It made him feel complete. Moment of Freedom is the first in a trilogy known as "The History of Bestiality" and like the narrator's own project it is concerned with the problem of evil in the world. The problem of evil manifests in authoritarianism and authoritarian personalities. The problem with authoritarianism is that it manifests in every aspect of physical culture we encounter. Even more troubling is it feels good and provides a physical sense of home and belonging. If it didn't feel good it wouldn't be such a problem.