[lolsen at uidaho.edu: REVIEW-LONG]

[Paul DiFilippo]

    ================= Begin forwarded message =================

    From: lolsen at uidaho.edu (Lance Olsen)
    To: bcclark at igc.apc.org (Brian Clark)
    Cc: AC038 at OSFN.RHILINET.GOV (Paul Di Filippo)
    Subject: REVIEW-LONG
    Date: Sat, 24 May

    
    HOT ROCKS
    
    Lance Olsen
    
    Paul Di Filippo.  Ciphers.  San Francisco: Cambrian Publications and
    Permeable Press, 1997.  Paper.  $16.95
     
    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 Steam Punk Trilogy (Four Walls Eight Windows, 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 Rotislav Kostal and a San Fran 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, 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 rock'n'roll novel Tonguing the
    Zeitgeist, finalist for the 1995 Philip K. Dick Award, and eleven other
    books. His electronic incarnation inhabits Café Zeitgeist at
    www.uidaho.edu/~lolsen.
    -- 
    ***********************************
    L*A*N*C*E***O*L*S*E*N           
    http://www.uidaho.edu/~lolsen 
    C*A*F*E***Z*E*I*T*G*E*I*S*T        
    ***********************************
    
    

--
Paul Di Filippo & Deborah Newton/2 Poplar St./Prov., RI 02906
"So far as the interests of the capitalist go it does not matter
whether he invests his money at home or abroad; it does not matter
whether his goods are manufactured in London or Timbuctoo." HG Wells