If You Wanna Lie You Gotta Do It Yourself

April 1998
T H E RaVEN C H R O N I C L E S

`Pacific Northwest Urban Writing`

If You Wanna Lie You Gotta Do It Yourself:
Data Corruption As a Novelistic Strategy

Matt Briggs < lvpurdy@earthlink.net >

Hammers
a novel by Ron Dakron < dakron@mav.net >
Black Heron Press, 1997
ISBN 0-930773-48-9, $22.95

HAMMERS TAKES ADVANTAGE takes advantage of an embedded contradiction in language. Fiction highlights this contradiction with such workshop homilies as the "lie that tells the truth." I've heard Tobias Wolf utter this statement every time I've seen him standing in the basement of Elliott Bay. Fiction is under no obligation to be truthful. The truth is referred to as non-fiction, implying it lacks something native to fiction. Fiction, unlike non-fiction, must be convincing on its own terms. In setting up a self-contradicting style in Hammers, the romantic narrative of the high concept science fiction novel systematically demolished by a completely degraded, genetically deformed narrator, Ron Dakron builds an odd, energetic fairy-tale about data corruption. Data is a rich central metaphor for the immediate nano-epoch, with sheep cloning, multi-quintuplets, and the information autobahn. Before taking a scalpel to Hammers, I'd first like to look at the issue of fiction as 'the lie that tells the truth' because the central effect of Hammers, I think, takes place between the breakdown of the inarticulate narrator's ability to generate the romantic novel's suspension of disbelieve.

"Paul Valéry, who sometime ago, speaking of novels assured me that as far as he was concerned, he would continue to refrain from writing, 'The Marquise went out at five.' " (1) wrote André Breton, in The First Manifesto of Surrealism.

Hammers avoids such namby-pamby functionality. The barely coherent narrator cannot move characters into room, slide the chairs away from the tables, or even pour wine down the characters necks. A writing instructor of mine called a prose writer's jockeying around of characters and objects, furniture moving. These dead-wood subject verb object sentences make up the bulk of novelistic prose. These necessary, mundane statements merely get characters from point A to B. I suppose this phrase, furniture moving, implies that such literal and figuratively lazy phrases call as much attention to themselves as someone racketing a peg leg chair across a wooden floor during grace.

Aside from the social implications of Paul Valéry's Marquise leaving when all of the good working class folk clog the streets after having just finishing their day's labor, Valéry's furniture moving statement merely serves to push his character out the door; the words serve as a chunk of code instructing the reader in plot. These words are supposedly deaf to the internal working of information delivery, language. The words supposedly serve like good galley slaves to the authors constructed illusion. "By detail the writer achieves vividness; to make the scene continuous, he takes pains to avid anything that might distract the reader from the image of fighting snakes to, say, the manner in which the imagery is presented or the character of the writer." (2) But language clearly isn't that transparent; the words themselves exert an influence on the meaning of the statement. William Gass in explaining Gertrude Stein's obsession with the surface quality of the words, wrote, "Words have sound and shape. Even the written word wears a halo of unvoiced sound while the spoken word bears the image of its written shape." (3)

In this case all you have is the Marquise, which alters and distorts even what Paul Valéry assumed represented a typical prose sentence merely operating as code to project the fictional dream onto an idealized white screen in the frontal lobe of the reader's brain. The Marquise leaves at five riding in the back seat of his black carriage, over a bridge crossing the blue river covered with geese that bustle into flight. They squawk and the carriage-man snaps his whip back as he watches them arc over the maples. And so on.

From a liar's stand point (and I think all writers are liars because in the act of writing they are selecting and constructing verbal structures that may be practically true but are never literally true) - the declarative sentence holds the most authority; it lies best. It doesn't claim to be literally true except as a language construction. You can say anything. The trick is to say it with conviction. The declarative sentence doesn't hold any obligation to capture observed reality. It is a bald faced lie. A reader doesn't question that the Marquise went out at five as long as the tale teller doesn't pause and keeps up the pace. A poet may never tell you that the Marquise has even left the building but a fiction writer will lie without blinking and not only tell you that he left at five, but that according to the clock on the wall of the apartment where the Marquise stays in the city during the spring, a clock that was incorrectly repaired by the Marquise's father a decade ago and perpetually creeps forward, he was mistaken in his time. Even though the Marquise constantly adjusts the minute hand, when he did it late that afternoon, he believed that he was leaving at 5:30. But really, the Marquise went out at five.

Outside the window of the coffee shop where I write this, a man carries a bundle of lilacs loosely wrapped in tissue. He walks across the crosswalk and up the yellow painted cement stars at the Butterworth Funeral Home. His hair lays in a damp mat down to his shoulders. His baggy plaid shirt and rumpled khaki pants haven't been pressed. He wears a woven leather belt with the long flap of extra leather folded over his crotch. Must I go one with this reportage? The sidewalk has been ripped up, and fresh cement poured and just hardened to the color of melting snow, vaguely translucent gray. A circle of eight barricades with the stenciled words, "Seattle Transportation Dept. Concrete Paving" hold up a limp yellow tape tied off at the outer most pegs of the easel barricades. The tape reads, "Construct. Area Do Not Enter."

Admittedly this is a poor method of capturing the exact reality of the construction area at Pine and Melrose. Go there yourself. Wait until 2:15 on a Tuesday morning and you'll get a better sense of what I'm telling you. It won't be the same because the guy with the flowers has already been to the funeral and he's gone back to his apartment where his girlfriend is sleeping because she said she didn't want to go and he's broken up with her, the cold wench. Reality is a moving target. Language has the benefit of being able to construct the illusion of a moving target. Subject. Verb. Direct Object. No thing is better at this lie and nothing is better at capturing the lie than Ack! the truth than a simple declarative sentence. The man crossed the sidewalk at 2:15. The Marquise went out at five.

The fiction writer, the liar, references something outside language in order to draw in some evidence, some detail, some vividness to make his lie hold water. Maybe he's hoping for a kind of triangulation effect between the writer, the written word and the reader. Regardless, he speaks so that you will listen.

"For the aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society, and without him a dinner party, even at the mansions of the great, is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society... Nor will he be welcomed by society alone. Art, breaking from the prison-house of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss his false, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great secret of all her manifestations, the secret that Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style; while Life--poor, probable, uninteresting human life--tired of repeating herself for the benefit of Mr. Herbert Spencer, scientific historians, and the compilers of statistics in general, will follow meekly after him, and try to produce, in her own simple and untutored way, some of the marvels of which he talks." (4)

H AMMERS WITH ITS UNRAVELING sentences and unthreaded DNA helix is purely a matter of style, or rather, a lack of style. It's an anti-novel in the tradition of Lawrence Stern, William Burroughs, and John Barth. According to Ron Dakron, language isn't a virus so much as bit rot. He tells a story in Hammers that reads like the inane conspiracy theories spun by my uncle Melville that hold my father and me in his battered streamline trailer, outside Cle Elum, way past dark, way past a sensible time to leave a man who subsists on cheesecake, cream cheese, and BBQ pork rinds. Hammers is a series of images generated by flipping the TV channel, a peanut brickel of cultural garbage, a parody of our current state of information disease; this is a black parable involving an incestuous threesome, mass consumption of fish burgers, and the corruption of DNA.

On the surface, Hammers follows the deranged first person account of a botched genetic experiment, after the fact, from the point of view of a human-hammer head shark hybrid. The victim's big shot scientist sister, eager to realize her research, shoots up hammer-head shark DNA. The narrator loses his girlfriend to his scientist sister and meanwhile a wacky subplot unfolds when three homeless junkies shoot up the serum, having mistook it for smack. They consequently mutate and go on a fish addled rampage along Aurora Avenue. Both plot lines climax on the beach under Magnolia bluff in a conflagration of cartilage, unraveling nucleotides, and shark lust.

The concept of Hammers is a straight forward regurgitation of one of the staples of science fiction, er rather, speculative fiction. The "Parable of Genetic Mutation," which I believe is a much exploited appendix in the First Big Book of Science is Evil. It brought us, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Brave New World, Planet of the Apes, Gary Gygax's role playing game Gamma Word, Thunder the Barbarian and Hammers. So, it would seem that Hammers is a high concept, plot driven novel. Here's the scientific hubris that drives the action packed frenzy of the book:

"...whoever perfects this one will definitely nab the Nobel. Cause this virus is way past all that zygote dinking and helix preening most lab serfs are up to. Nope--this shit means quantum mutation. Species change. Cause if Nico pops Serum H and it clicks--if her DNA drinks those hammer tags--if those RNA codons bind on without snuffing her own--then she's done it. Broken the lab taboo. Crossed the genus line. Made faux evolution. Evolution! Like that mesozoic moment some crazed protein massed and split and made heaven tremble, whelping strands from a null ocean, swarming the depths with dread cells, hah, till perch clambered from swamps, mutated into gila monsters, then morphed into apes with hair and tits and accordions until now. A woman poised on the tip of a needle. To push the demiurge further." (5)

However, the narrator has major problems. He's the result of a B-grade sci-fi plot stuttering under the influence of a corrupted DNA sequence. He's so inarticulate that he often breaks down in the middle of a sentence and ejaculates random sounds. He consistently thwarts the tired third generation, "Parable of Genetic Mutation," to build a closed system of contradicting impulses. As readers we can just watch the whole mess of language spin. The narrator is a very bad liar who holds sway over the internal reality of his lie because he can always pile on more detail, more vividness, and then cart in legal briefs and wall charts testifying to the preposterous tale at hand.

He's unable to maintain a focused narrative line. It jumps, like a twisted cassette tape, from food obsession to a sudden exclamation. Arrp! The narrative line never remains coalesced around any clear motive. The characters are driven by transforming genetic codes. The plot jumps from an ode to home delivery, to a rant about urban mini-malls, to a call from the narrator for the end of the book, and then to ellipses as the narrative runs off the end of the track and then lands on the other side.

These jumps break the novelist frame. Unlike the deliberate metafiction of John Barth, these breaks don't read like academic navel contemplation but rather like literal break downs, as if a pianist with Alzheimer's has completely forgotten she's in the middle of a recital. Hammer's narrator hollers, "a ghost writer! You wanna lie you gotta do it yourself!" He flips out and draws us down an imaginary box canyon,

"Now the sky heats Tina till her limbs smell like stone. And her tits shift with a marble hush. When she strides over steps and under bird shadows. That glide too big for crows or gulls there's way more until--yikes--they blot the sun! Every lit inch drowned with glinting wings. Where Tina gawks up and--yahhhh! Flying squid descend, massed in locust rows, fluttering all piping hot and yum, buttery, hovering like gold leaf near her waking mouth...nope. Not hardly! Wishful thinking. Back to the plot." (6)

He suddenly focuses on the reader uttering, "You chimps are bound to spot us." His diction suddenly falls apart under the effort of writing his peons to food, sex and video games. "So me type, type, type." He makes it very clear that he'd rather be eating fish sticks and screwing at the same time.

"When it hits her how Tina won't be her private fillet anymore...ahh, Tina...her tail dripping krill...her phosphor lips cupping my--oops. Down you vile woody!"

In offsetting the implausibility of the plot, by the implausibility that this book is being narrated at all by a mutated hammer-head shark, Ron Dakron infuses the novel with a warped energy. The language of the book doesn't feel like a deliberate construction but rather as a literal transcription of the narrator's hybrid brain. It's a novel as Terret's Syndrome. As a reader, I felt buffeted from the low-fi sci-fi of the plot to the often strangely affecting metaphors and asides that worked as absorbing lies but were framed in the burping, farting, mechanism of the narrator.

This really works, well, finally, to create a parody of the novelistic form, itself. Hammers is a corrupt piece of information, as sinister as a thirteen year old with a lighter and a keg of butane. It's an information parable about bad data. In a time when the DNA chain seems as knowable as the alphabet, this book struggles to show that like the alphabet, the DNA chain is not just a sequence, not just a learnable code, and really defies translation.

And how does this relate to my initial rambling about fiction, language, and realism? This books exploits the embedded contradiction in the lie of fiction. A lie is like the DNA chain, the alphabet, or a novel. It is a self-serving information code and doesn't exist in a pure, easily manipulated state. I think this book aspires to be a warning against the actual hubris of thinking that a decoded genetic map equals a decoded understanding of identity.

Hammers is available online.

Notes:

1. André Breton, in "The First Manifesto of Surrealism". Manifestoes of Surrealism, University of Michigan Press, 1972, 0-472-06182-8, page 7

2. John Gardner, Art of Fiction, Vintage Books, 1983, 0-679-73403-1, page 7

3.William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life, David R. Godine, 1979, 0-87923-254-4, page 92

4."The Decay of Living," ed. Richard Ellmann, The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, New York, Random House, 1968, page 305

5. Hammers page 13

6. Ibid, page 37

Pull Quote:

The ability to sequence DNA directly and quickly will revolutionize mutation research by allowing researchers to study directly the relationships between disease and exposure to various agents. Data from these studies could be coupled with medical information to diagnose disease onset and develop therapeutic strategies.

Technologies, databases, and biological resources developed in genome research will have an enormous impact on a wide variety of biotechnology-related industries in such fields as agriculture, energy production, waste control, and environmental cleanup. The potential for commercial development presents U.S. industry with a wealth of opportunity, and sales of biotechnology products are projected to exceed $20 billion by 2000.

http://www.ornl.gov/TechResources/Human_Genome/faq/faqs1.html

© The Raven Chronicles 1998

	April 1998		T H E RaVEN C H R O N I C L E S

	`Pacific Northwest Urban Writing`		If You Wanna Lie You Gotta Do It Yourself: Data Corruption As a Novelistic Strategy Matt Briggs < lvpurdy@earthlink.net > Hammers a novel by Ron Dakron < dakron@mav.net > Black Heron Press, 1997 ISBN 0-930773-48-9, $22.95 HAMMERS TAKES ADVANTAGE takes advantage of an embedded contradiction in language. Fiction highlights this contradiction with such workshop homilies as the "lie that tells the truth." I've heard Tobias Wolf utter this statement every time I've seen him standing in the basement of Elliott Bay. Fiction is under no obligation to be truthful. The truth is referred to as non-fiction, implying it lacks something native to fiction. Fiction, unlike non-fiction, must be convincing on its own terms. In setting up a self-contradicting style in Hammers, the romantic narrative of the high concept science fiction novel systematically demolished by a completely degraded, genetically deformed narrator, Ron Dakron builds an odd, energetic fairy-tale about data corruption. Data is a rich central metaphor for the immediate nano-epoch, with sheep cloning, multi-quintuplets, and the information autobahn. Before taking a scalpel to Hammers, I'd first like to look at the issue of fiction as 'the lie that tells the truth' because the central effect of Hammers, I think, takes place between the breakdown of the inarticulate narrator's ability to generate the romantic novel's suspension of disbelieve. "Paul Valéry, who sometime ago, speaking of novels assured me that as far as he was concerned, he would continue to refrain from writing, 'The Marquise went out at five.' " (1) wrote André Breton, in The First Manifesto of Surrealism. Hammers avoids such namby-pamby functionality. The barely coherent narrator cannot move characters into room, slide the chairs away from the tables, or even pour wine down the characters necks. A writing instructor of mine called a prose writer's jockeying around of characters and objects, furniture moving. These dead-wood subject verb object sentences make up the bulk of novelistic prose. These necessary, mundane statements merely get characters from point A to B. I suppose this phrase, furniture moving, implies that such literal and figuratively lazy phrases call as much attention to themselves as someone racketing a peg leg chair across a wooden floor during grace. Aside from the social implications of Paul Valéry's Marquise leaving when all of the good working class folk clog the streets after having just finishing their day's labor, Valéry's furniture moving statement merely serves to push his character out the door; the words serve as a chunk of code instructing the reader in plot. These words are supposedly deaf to the internal working of information delivery, language. The words supposedly serve like good galley slaves to the authors constructed illusion. "By detail the writer achieves vividness; to make the scene continuous, he takes pains to avid anything that might distract the reader from the image of fighting snakes to, say, the manner in which the imagery is presented or the character of the writer." (2) But language clearly isn't that transparent; the words themselves exert an influence on the meaning of the statement. William Gass in explaining Gertrude Stein's obsession with the surface quality of the words, wrote, "Words have sound and shape. Even the written word wears a halo of unvoiced sound while the spoken word bears the image of its written shape." (3) In this case all you have is the Marquise, which alters and distorts even what Paul Valéry assumed represented a typical prose sentence merely operating as code to project the fictional dream onto an idealized white screen in the frontal lobe of the reader's brain. The Marquise leaves at five riding in the back seat of his black carriage, over a bridge crossing the blue river covered with geese that bustle into flight. They squawk and the carriage-man snaps his whip back as he watches them arc over the maples. And so on. From a liar's stand point (and I think all writers are liars because in the act of writing they are selecting and constructing verbal structures that may be practically true but are never literally true) - the declarative sentence holds the most authority; it lies best. It doesn't claim to be literally true except as a language construction. You can say anything. The trick is to say it with conviction. The declarative sentence doesn't hold any obligation to capture observed reality. It is a bald faced lie. A reader doesn't question that the Marquise went out at five as long as the tale teller doesn't pause and keeps up the pace. A poet may never tell you that the Marquise has even left the building but a fiction writer will lie without blinking and not only tell you that he left at five, but that according to the clock on the wall of the apartment where the Marquise stays in the city during the spring, a clock that was incorrectly repaired by the Marquise's father a decade ago and perpetually creeps forward, he was mistaken in his time. Even though the Marquise constantly adjusts the minute hand, when he did it late that afternoon, he believed that he was leaving at 5:30. But really, the Marquise went out at five. Outside the window of the coffee shop where I write this, a man carries a bundle of lilacs loosely wrapped in tissue. He walks across the crosswalk and up the yellow painted cement stars at the Butterworth Funeral Home. His hair lays in a damp mat down to his shoulders. His baggy plaid shirt and rumpled khaki pants haven't been pressed. He wears a woven leather belt with the long flap of extra leather folded over his crotch. Must I go one with this reportage? The sidewalk has been ripped up, and fresh cement poured and just hardened to the color of melting snow, vaguely translucent gray. A circle of eight barricades with the stenciled words, "Seattle Transportation Dept. Concrete Paving" hold up a limp yellow tape tied off at the outer most pegs of the easel barricades. The tape reads, "Construct. Area Do Not Enter." Admittedly this is a poor method of capturing the exact reality of the construction area at Pine and Melrose. Go there yourself. Wait until 2:15 on a Tuesday morning and you'll get a better sense of what I'm telling you. It won't be the same because the guy with the flowers has already been to the funeral and he's gone back to his apartment where his girlfriend is sleeping because she said she didn't want to go and he's broken up with her, the cold wench. Reality is a moving target. Language has the benefit of being able to construct the illusion of a moving target. Subject. Verb. Direct Object. No thing is better at this lie and nothing is better at capturing the lie than Ack! the truth than a simple declarative sentence. The man crossed the sidewalk at 2:15. The Marquise went out at five. The fiction writer, the liar, references something outside language in order to draw in some evidence, some detail, some vividness to make his lie hold water. Maybe he's hoping for a kind of triangulation effect between the writer, the written word and the reader. Regardless, he speaks so that you will listen. "For the aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society, and without him a dinner party, even at the mansions of the great, is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society... Nor will he be welcomed by society alone. Art, breaking from the prison-house of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss his false, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great secret of all her manifestations, the secret that Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style; while Life--poor, probable, uninteresting human life--tired of repeating herself for the benefit of Mr. Herbert Spencer, scientific historians, and the compilers of statistics in general, will follow meekly after him, and try to produce, in her own simple and untutored way, some of the marvels of which he talks." (4) H AMMERS WITH ITS UNRAVELING sentences and unthreaded DNA helix is purely a matter of style, or rather, a lack of style. It's an anti-novel in the tradition of Lawrence Stern, William Burroughs, and John Barth. According to Ron Dakron, language isn't a virus so much as bit rot. He tells a story in Hammers that reads like the inane conspiracy theories spun by my uncle Melville that hold my father and me in his battered streamline trailer, outside Cle Elum, way past dark, way past a sensible time to leave a man who subsists on cheesecake, cream cheese, and BBQ pork rinds. Hammers is a series of images generated by flipping the TV channel, a peanut brickel of cultural garbage, a parody of our current state of information disease; this is a black parable involving an incestuous threesome, mass consumption of fish burgers, and the corruption of DNA. On the surface, Hammers follows the deranged first person account of a botched genetic experiment, after the fact, from the point of view of a human-hammer head shark hybrid. The victim's big shot scientist sister, eager to realize her research, shoots up hammer-head shark DNA. The narrator loses his girlfriend to his scientist sister and meanwhile a wacky subplot unfolds when three homeless junkies shoot up the serum, having mistook it for smack. They consequently mutate and go on a fish addled rampage along Aurora Avenue. Both plot lines climax on the beach under Magnolia bluff in a conflagration of cartilage, unraveling nucleotides, and shark lust. The concept of Hammers is a straight forward regurgitation of one of the staples of science fiction, er rather, speculative fiction. The "Parable of Genetic Mutation," which I believe is a much exploited appendix in the First Big Book of Science is Evil. It brought us, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Brave New World, Planet of the Apes, Gary Gygax's role playing game Gamma Word, Thunder the Barbarian and Hammers. So, it would seem that Hammers is a high concept, plot driven novel. Here's the scientific hubris that drives the action packed frenzy of the book: "...whoever perfects this one will definitely nab the Nobel. Cause this virus is way past all that zygote dinking and helix preening most lab serfs are up to. Nope--this shit means quantum mutation. Species change. Cause if Nico pops Serum H and it clicks--if her DNA drinks those hammer tags--if those RNA codons bind on without snuffing her own--then she's done it. Broken the lab taboo. Crossed the genus line. Made faux evolution. Evolution! Like that mesozoic moment some crazed protein massed and split and made heaven tremble, whelping strands from a null ocean, swarming the depths with dread cells, hah, till perch clambered from swamps, mutated into gila monsters, then morphed into apes with hair and tits and accordions until now. A woman poised on the tip of a needle. To push the demiurge further." (5) However, the narrator has major problems. He's the result of a B-grade sci-fi plot stuttering under the influence of a corrupted DNA sequence. He's so inarticulate that he often breaks down in the middle of a sentence and ejaculates random sounds. He consistently thwarts the tired third generation, "Parable of Genetic Mutation," to build a closed system of contradicting impulses. As readers we can just watch the whole mess of language spin. The narrator is a very bad liar who holds sway over the internal reality of his lie because he can always pile on more detail, more vividness, and then cart in legal briefs and wall charts testifying to the preposterous tale at hand. He's unable to maintain a focused narrative line. It jumps, like a twisted cassette tape, from food obsession to a sudden exclamation. Arrp! The narrative line never remains coalesced around any clear motive. The characters are driven by transforming genetic codes. The plot jumps from an ode to home delivery, to a rant about urban mini-malls, to a call from the narrator for the end of the book, and then to ellipses as the narrative runs off the end of the track and then lands on the other side. These jumps break the novelist frame. Unlike the deliberate metafiction of John Barth, these breaks don't read like academic navel contemplation but rather like literal break downs, as if a pianist with Alzheimer's has completely forgotten she's in the middle of a recital. Hammer's narrator hollers, "a ghost writer! You wanna lie you gotta do it yourself!" He flips out and draws us down an imaginary box canyon, "Now the sky heats Tina till her limbs smell like stone. And her tits shift with a marble hush. When she strides over steps and under bird shadows. That glide too big for crows or gulls there's way more until--yikes--they blot the sun! Every lit inch drowned with glinting wings. Where Tina gawks up and--yahhhh! Flying squid descend, massed in locust rows, fluttering all piping hot and yum, buttery, hovering like gold leaf near her waking mouth...nope. Not hardly! Wishful thinking. Back to the plot." (6) He suddenly focuses on the reader uttering, "You chimps are bound to spot us." His diction suddenly falls apart under the effort of writing his peons to food, sex and video games. "So me type, type, type." He makes it very clear that he'd rather be eating fish sticks and screwing at the same time. "When it hits her how Tina won't be her private fillet anymore...ahh, Tina...her tail dripping krill...her phosphor lips cupping my--oops. Down you vile woody!" In offsetting the implausibility of the plot, by the implausibility that this book is being narrated at all by a mutated hammer-head shark, Ron Dakron infuses the novel with a warped energy. The language of the book doesn't feel like a deliberate construction but rather as a literal transcription of the narrator's hybrid brain. It's a novel as Terret's Syndrome. As a reader, I felt buffeted from the low-fi sci-fi of the plot to the often strangely affecting metaphors and asides that worked as absorbing lies but were framed in the burping, farting, mechanism of the narrator. This really works, well, finally, to create a parody of the novelistic form, itself. Hammers is a corrupt piece of information, as sinister as a thirteen year old with a lighter and a keg of butane. It's an information parable about bad data. In a time when the DNA chain seems as knowable as the alphabet, this book struggles to show that like the alphabet, the DNA chain is not just a sequence, not just a learnable code, and really defies translation. And how does this relate to my initial rambling about fiction, language, and realism? This books exploits the embedded contradiction in the lie of fiction. A lie is like the DNA chain, the alphabet, or a novel. It is a self-serving information code and doesn't exist in a pure, easily manipulated state. I think this book aspires to be a warning against the actual hubris of thinking that a decoded genetic map equals a decoded understanding of identity. Hammers is available online. Notes: 1. André Breton, in "The First Manifesto of Surrealism". Manifestoes of Surrealism, University of Michigan Press, 1972, 0-472-06182-8, page 7 2. John Gardner, Art of Fiction, Vintage Books, 1983, 0-679-73403-1, page 7 3.William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life, David R. Godine, 1979, 0-87923-254-4, page 92 4."The Decay of Living," ed. Richard Ellmann, The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, New York, Random House, 1968, page 305 5. Hammers page 13 6. Ibid, page 37 Pull Quote: The ability to sequence DNA directly and quickly will revolutionize mutation research by allowing researchers to study directly the relationships between disease and exposure to various agents. Data from these studies could be coupled with medical information to diagnose disease onset and develop therapeutic strategies. Technologies, databases, and biological resources developed in genome research will have an enormous impact on a wide variety of biotechnology-related industries in such fields as agriculture, energy production, waste control, and environmental cleanup. The potential for commercial development presents U.S. industry with a wealth of opportunity, and sales of biotechnology products are projected to exceed $20 billion by 2000. http://www.ornl.gov/TechResources/Human_Genome/faq/faqs1.html
			© The Raven Chronicles 1998

If You Wanna Lie You Gotta Do It Yourself: Data Corruption As a Novelistic Strategy

If You Wanna Lie You Gotta Do It Yourself:
Data Corruption As a Novelistic Strategy