| Hot Rocks: Ciphers Review by Lance Olsen | |||||||||||||||||||||
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From the pages of American Book Review [Volume 19, Number 2, January-February 1998, published by the Unit for Contemporary Literature, English Dept of Illinois State University]. At Unspeakable Practices III in Providence last October, I asked Paul Di Filippo, founder and from what I can tell sole member of the ribofunk movement (relative of cyberpunk, ribofunk = ribosome + funk, or science fiction concerned with the nexus of advances in cellular biology — especially gene splicing and dicing — and a rock 'n' roll aesthetic) to sign my copy of his flashy first collection of stories called, well, Ribofunk (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996), which followed on the bytes of The Steampunk Trilogy (4W8W, 1995), which, along with his gig-full of bright reviews in Asimov's, established his crease in the speculative neocortex as One To Watch. Are we smarter than our mitochondria? he inscribed. Yours in bemusement. That's Paul Di Filippo in nine words. His mind and his fiction are sharp, culturally and scientifically savvy, often self-ironic, always funny, strikingly imaginative, and, most of all, good-spiritedly bemused and amused by the late — very late — twentieth century, a period which is nothing if not enough to cause anyone a bad case of AIDS . . . not Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, mind you, but Ambient Information Distress Syndrome, a malady several of the characters in his new novel, Ciphers, suffer from. Distant viral kin of Ted Mooney's Information Sickness in Easy Travel to Other Planets, Di Filippo's AIDS is all about too much data cascading through the synaptic network, which was, it now seems, evolutionarily engineered to accommodate a much less frenetic and surreal flux of stimuli than the one our current pluriverse provides. Mooney's characters, if you remember, got nosebleeds, dropped in place on the street, and curled fetally into themselves, simply overwhelmed by our culture of excess's noise, movement, and emotion. Di Filippo's rent out bare rooms in seedy hotels, dress in multiple layers of clothing, plug up their bodily orifices, and lie very still to make sure no more stuff gets in. They become, in other words, living ciphers . . . because their reality (and Di Filippo uses the term loosely) makes Mooney's characters' in Easy Travel, even with its talking dolphins, geopolitical crisis in Antarctica, and trans-species sexuality, look like an under-imagined stroll on the narratological mild side. After a strange disembodied prologue whose meaning only falls into focus through the lens of the last chapter, Ciphers begins with one Cyril Prothero, a fragile-minded but really lovable schlemiel and (despite ten years of higher education) clerk at Planet Records in Boston, who one afternoon in the early nineteen nineties comes across a zincless-middled penny minted in, of all places, Arizona, and then a barcode on a CD that invades his body with a flood of unwanted information when he touches it . . . which is the beginning of some High Weirdness, no doubt, but not as much as when poor Cyril returns home to find his lady love, a black woman named Ruby Tuesday, suddenly gone MIA (at the same moment, it appears, as does his friend Polly's sweetie) after leaving a message she's in some kind of major trouble with some kind of They . . . o-only then in the next chapter we're in Cambodia in the nineteen fifties, watching one minor Foreign Service Officer by the name of Phillipe deClosets try to escape his reassignment in war-torn Algeria by losing himself in the jungle, where he soon discovers these crumbling ruins of a Lost Empire . . . w-which is to say nothing of Claude Lollolo, Information Minister of the newly socialist republic of Benin in 1977, who pops up a little farther on, double agent for this WAY mysterious lab . . . These narratives, plus a plethora of even face-slackeningly stranger ones (assault butterflies, bugger-happy holy men, fiendish garden hoses . . . ), slowly begin to web into each other by means of various quests and spoofy-if-nebulous conspiracies involving snake goddesses, secret gnostic sects, genome mapping, miscellaneous cosmic synchronies, the realization the universe is really just a huge binary computer, government control and manipulation of mind-expanding drugs, a virus that leads those infected to spiritual enlightenment, and that mysterious international conglomerate called Wu Labs run by a mysterious three-thousand-year-plus-old guy in hot pursuit of immortality and omniscience. Back to a name like Ruby Tuesday, for a sec, and AIDS (the other AIDS), and those ideas of cabals and multinationals. Behind the motley micronarratives that form Ciphers exists a metacommentary on the history of rock 'n' roll; the novel is rich with facts and fictions about its development, analyses of its lyrics, nod-nod-wink-wink allusions to and even rhythms of its great songs, and, above all, the old transgressive spirit of drugs, sex, and narratival Bad Attitude — as well as forty-one pages of double-columned footnotes on the musical-and-myriad-other references in the text . . . from James Brown and Beck to Melshisidek and David Bohm, plus sixty-two more in the first chapter alone . . . a-and a series of very sexy photos throughout by a real Prague artist named Rostislav Kostal and a San Jose one named Andy Watson (who also happens to've co-published Ciphers with Permeable Press) of, among other things, a naked blond woman and her, um, pet python. Behind these run another river of literary and filmic allusions to and parodies of everything and everybody from Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz to Joyce (Boston is Di Filippo's Dublin), Borges to porno films, Gurney Norman's almost forgotten countercultural classic Divine Right's Trip to Sterling and Gibson's Difference Engine, Dixie Flatline's personality program in Neuromancer, Lewis Shiner's sadly overlooked rock 'n' roll slipstream gem Glimpses, mock autobiography, multicultural mythologies, cartoons, and screenplays. Look at the first four lines for a hint at how Di Filippo's textual logic functions: "Am I live or am I Memorex? Soup or spark? Patient Zero, or just a patient zero? Or maybe a Nowhere Man." The first announces the novel's dominant thematics: how our televisual and digi-popular culture of distraction has moved from outside to inside, colonizing our cellular complex. The second alludes to the nascent years of molecular biology when scientists still questioned whether a nerve impulse crossed from synapse to synapse chemically (soup) or electrically (spark), thereby raising the problematics of consciousness which the rest of the novel addresses. The third flags the author as a linguistic funster, punster, and master-blaster, while introducing the critique of language and meaning which Cyril (and, behind him, Di Filippo) will obsess on for the next 541 densely packed but immensely readable pages. The fourth ignites the metacommentary on rock 'n' roll, citing in particular the Beatles, whose lesson to a whole generation was to BE MORE EXTREME, and raising the investigation of selfhood-as-cipher that will carry on till the last chapter where we meet . . . but enuff said. The text, in other words, becomes a tissue of quotations, a ribofunkal metafiction, that delights in the act of multilayered telling. No wonder, then, that it's subtitled "A Post-Shannon —" (as in Claude E., the mathematician whose 1938 paper on the isomorphism of Boolean algebra and certain types of switching circuits inspired research into the Electrical Logic Machine, these days called The Computer, and whose 1948 paper, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," informs much of Di Filippo's novel) "— Rock 'n' Roll Mystery, Composed Partially by Sampling, Splicing, Channeling and Reverse Transcription" . . . or, put simply, messing with the narrative genome. No wonder, either, the epigraph by Calvino: "If a straight line is the shortest distance between two fated and inevitable points, digressions will lengthen it; and if these digressions become so complex, so tangled and tortuous, so rapid as to hide their own tracks, who knows — perhaps death may not find us, perhaps time will lose its way, and perhaps we ourselves can remain concealed in our shifting hiding places." Because Ciphers is an exuberant meganarrative tour de force, in the tradition of The Thousand and One Nights or, more recently, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, designed to hold off the Ultimate Ending by dazzling displays of narrative magic, digressive spunk, recyclings of the past(s), envisionings of the future(s), and polymorphous clownings-around on the page. It's a book that delights in its own only-apparent disorder. Nothing works in a straight line, or, to employ one of the shaping Shannonesque metaphors from the thing: continual noise has been pumped into this informational system. Paradoxically, transmission of information through language here results in massive redundancy, irrelevance, ambiguity, waste . . . and, ultimately, an immense complication, confusion, and destruction of information. So, as Cyril comes to realize: "It's not a conspiracy of silence, it's a conspiracy of noise!" To this extent, reading Ciphers is more like reading the humongous, hyper, freewheeling, encyclopedic-minded and hep-voiced first-and-favorite-phase Pynchon of V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow than any other writer I know. Its cartoonishly delightful characters (Cyril Prothero is clearly cousin of Tyrone Slothrop), silly lyrics ("Fattening Frogs for Snakes," "Ooby Dooby," "Wu, Wu, Wu"), cockamamie names (Vivian Vervain, Polly Peptide, Hyman Numinoso), hilarious situations, ribald imagination, and breakneck speed puts to shame that guy masquerading as T.P. who wrote Vineland and those pieces collected in Slow Learner. But, more, they add up to a tremendous act of literary affirmation, a story-generating machine that expresses nothing if not the joy Di Filippo had assembling it. Lance Olsen, who once played keyboards in a really bad band in high school in New Jersey, is author of the cult-bestseller rock 'n' roll novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist (finalist for the 1995 Philip K. Dick Award), and a dozen other books, including Tonguing's 1996 "anti-sequel," Time Famine. His electronic incarnation inhabits Café Zeitgeist. |