----- Original Message -----
From: solipsis
To: Kenji Siratori
Subject: Some notes on Blood Electric..


Some notes on Blood Electric..

I got an e-mail from Kenji Siratori asking me to review his book. Well
actually it said this: Could you read my book Blood Electric?
Please let me know. Kenji. And the answer was to be yes. Yes, I can read it.
In fact I like it very much. The only problem was that 10 or so
days after I got the book, my truck was broken into and the book was taken
with all the other books in my backpack. So luckily they had it at
powells, so i picked it up again, and since i was in the Sci-fi Section,
which is where they keep blood electric i went ahead and picked up China
Mieville's (sic) Perdido Street Station.. Nice Contrast I thought.. So i
guess where i'm going with this is i don't review books. i live with books
and find places and
moments to enjoy them. I had a hard time at first with Blood Electric
because i was trying to read it at work. this book cannot be read properly
under
bright fluorescent tubes in an office cube, not for me anyway. it worked
much better on the couch of my living room after work, and this is where i
get to
the really high-brow art-historical reading. This book needs a bong-hit! By
that I mean, I need a bong-hit to enter this book. So that being said, I
also decided
to play some various Japanese noise related musics while reading it.. some
boredoms, melt banana, some ruins.. tetso inoue, and some other traditional
japanese modernist
compositions.. why japanese music? because its my book, my music, my
bong-hit and that's what i want to listen to.. that being said, this was
definitely the right combination for me to contemplate this work. The Title
"Blood Electric" is sort of striking, but not overly spectacular if you are
accustomed to english juxtapositional physics.
But what I tried to do while reading blood electric was to try to think in
terms of japanese translation, and really ideographic translations, and the
nature of eastern thought structures as opposed to the western ones. (but be
careful here, think bong-hit and the boredoms..) At any rate I began to try
and think about blood electric as a concept, as an entity.. Electrified
Blood, no not really.. A clever adjective combination meaning a shocking
sense of vermillion, hmm maybe, seems sort of japanese. But finally I
latched onto the idea that it was a technical reference, and also a
reference to a subconscious matrix of ideas which go back to antiquity and
especially back to mayan antiquitiy, but this would be a hypermodern
update.. Blood is a magical substance, a living fluid, whose chemical
make-up is as much a language as it is a key element to the biological
make-up.. Noothing ground-shattering there i suppose. At any rate, I
happened upon the idea of blood turbines, and then the image bifurcated and
became simultaneously two images, that of electricity being produced on the
macro-scale, as in rivers of blood, a hooverdam of blood electricity and
then perhaps a smaller version something like a microturbine placed in situ
in a vein and operating like a fin-flow meter, but instead of measuring
flow, it would generate milliwatts or microwatts.(and measure flow too, I
suppose). This little digression hopes to underscore the fact that this is a
work which involves a high degree of plasticity, or semiosis as i am fond of
using. The characters in the book are really the signs themselves, and the
setting is like a constantly reinvented flashcard painting diagram.. In a
sense you might think of the book as a way of visualizing consciousness as a
struggling very object limited log, a machine consciousness.. so the
"literary" models are somewhat different. I got the phrase genetic
algorhythm as i started reading, which made me think also of the kinds of
iterative "consciousnesses" one might find expressed in cellular automata
but also say in cut-ups which are really most interesting as redistribution
mappings or topologies of potentials. And so, as a machinic linguistic
artifact, I began to read blood electric as a kind of topology of
potentials.. a genetic mindrug pumped needle pages in topos potentia word
gland erupted chemical pleonasm od self-effacing reality structures,
elaborate "DOG" you see reversed disciple of machinic priest warp occlude
data channels find insertion ports erupt hallucination herm, liquid language
forms of organizational mutation blocks. There's also a sense of a machine
intelligence mimicking (mem meme icing) human literature or sentence
formation, or perhaps there is another level,
a machine consciousness mocking human language structures..So that being SAY
ID.. i think i wouldve liked if the book had started the way it ended, as a
kind of log scrolling onto the page and really playing off that log as
artifact idea, which i like or which i invented, no you see this in Alan
Sondheim's work alot.. machine logs are a reality, software machines leave
traces of their activities and these are essentially in the same domain of
expression as the rest of literature. Most of the time they arent judged as
literary or creative artifacts but they are highly symbolic of and as
carriers of information and information processes. Blood Electric seems to
be a record of all kinds of processes, and the process of identifying the
process in turn sets of new processes of image-making in your own mind. I
suppose I could sit here and tell you what i see as i read it, but there
really isnt any need, this is a book which can be read over and over or a
little at a time, or back to front.. Perhaps Kenji would disagree, but I
find it terribly attractive in this sense, its truly a paratactical software
artifact, something which might have clunked out written in deuterium scabs
on a roll of caustic frogskin from Burrough's "Soft Machine".. At any rate I
am enjoying living with this book and I will definitely continue to read it
when the mood is right. I haven't read the whole thing, (only about 100
pages) and by that i mean i havent scanned every single page. I don't want
to read this book that way, I like reading it in chunks and seeing what
happens this time.. so it really is a kind of drug experience. I will
probably keep thinking about this book for awhile so these would just be
some notes.. I still need to try and find references to the japanese words
in the text, and perhaps I may throw in some images which pop into my mind
as i read the book, here in the blog...


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