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A review by travis_d_johnson
Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by Clay McLeod Chapman
3.0
"What's with all the sex stuff in this book?" — some people
“—the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. [...] Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused." — Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
This is a much talked-about book right now, and folks say it's about political polarization in the USA and the painful divides it can cause in families. Yes, it's about that, but it's about a lot. It's a thematically rich book. I read it as, in large part, a critique of social media and memes as manifestations of the Spectacle, about life receding into mere representation. It isn't just Fox News brainwashing Republicans here; "detoxing" juice fasts, after all, are more a middle-class liberal phenomenon, I think. What all of the becoming-possessed in Wake Up and Open Your Eyes share is an alienation exacerbated by technology, and so the book can be read as, in a certain sense, conservative.
This is a thoughtful book, not a screed. It's a good book.
The reason that I went with a rating of "I liked it" rather than "I really liked it" is really just a matter of Chapman's technique and is mostly down to personal predilection. Despite the decades-long trend toward brevity in prose, I still hold Melville and the Brontës as ideals. I like it "florid", "verbose", perhaps even "grandiloquent." Give me gorgeously winding sentences that take up a whole page and have 50 semicolons each.
A paragraph in Wake Up... might consist of one short sentence.
Or a fragment.
Or.
One.
Word.
Chapman seems to really like onomatopoeia, perhaps too much. He also likes to elongate words with extra letters, so you might find yourself reading a sentence like "ffffuuuuckkk"" or "VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVRRRRRRRRRRRRRRMMMMMMMM". And you might love that, but I found it, occasionally, quite trying.
Now, I should say here that this not Clay's only mode. There is one absolutely stunning, phantasmagoric passage in which electronic notifications become flocking, following, attacking things. I'll never forget it. I picked up Ghost Eaters and I'm hoping that it has more like that. But Chapman will be Chapman and I'm glad he's doing his thing his way. I'll be reading it all.
“—the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. [...] Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused." — Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
This is a much talked-about book right now, and folks say it's about political polarization in the USA and the painful divides it can cause in families. Yes, it's about that, but it's about a lot. It's a thematically rich book. I read it as, in large part, a critique of social media and memes as manifestations of the Spectacle, about life receding into mere representation. It isn't just Fox News brainwashing Republicans here; "detoxing" juice fasts, after all, are more a middle-class liberal phenomenon, I think. What all of the becoming-possessed in Wake Up and Open Your Eyes share is an alienation exacerbated by technology, and so the book can be read as, in a certain sense, conservative.
This is a thoughtful book, not a screed. It's a good book.
The reason that I went with a rating of "I liked it" rather than "I really liked it" is really just a matter of Chapman's technique and is mostly down to personal predilection. Despite the decades-long trend toward brevity in prose, I still hold Melville and the Brontës as ideals. I like it "florid", "verbose", perhaps even "grandiloquent." Give me gorgeously winding sentences that take up a whole page and have 50 semicolons each.
A paragraph in Wake Up... might consist of one short sentence.
Or a fragment.
Or.
One.
Word.
Chapman seems to really like onomatopoeia, perhaps too much. He also likes to elongate words with extra letters, so you might find yourself reading a sentence like "ffffuuuuckkk"" or "VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVRRRRRRRRRRRRRRMMMMMMMM". And you might love that, but I found it, occasionally, quite trying.
Now, I should say here that this not Clay's only mode. There is one absolutely stunning, phantasmagoric passage in which electronic notifications become flocking, following, attacking things. I'll never forget it. I picked up Ghost Eaters and I'm hoping that it has more like that. But Chapman will be Chapman and I'm glad he's doing his thing his way. I'll be reading it all.