It’s only been a week under Shawarma Law and already the snakes are turning on each other, both figuratively in the case of MAGA media grifters like “actively melting candle” Laura Loomer or legally heterosexual plagiarist Benny Johnson, and literally in the case of the “at least 25 snakes” this Kentucky couple found in their new house:
“‘One neighbor had said that, ‘I’m surprised that the previous owners didn’t tell you all that the snakes were free with purchase,’’ Jessica Perry said.
Jessica Perry also contacted a previous owner, who told her it was nicknamed the ‘snake house’ when he was a child.”
So far the post-election scoreboard stands as follows:
Weather reports are woke again, with twice daily balloon launches restored nationally.
The Tom of Finland erotic art archive will be put on a sound financial and conservatorial footing in advance of its incorporation as the Smithsonian Leather Daddy & Fetish Museum (elementary school class visits mandatory beginning in the first A.O.C. administration, 2029).
The kids are rejecting A.I. as both chopped and unc, paving the way for our glorious universal luxury handcrafted communist future.
Dragon sex is back on the menu.
Indie rock is back too, as is fighting over a Pitchfork list of the best indie rock albums. Personally I thought this list was excellent proof that I apparently have no idea what “indie rock” is.
The imaginary “multiracial MAGA coalition” is dead, and Reconstruction 3 is well underway with Scott Colom resuming Mississippi’s proud legacy of Black U.S. Senators, only briefly interrupted by white officeholders for a short 146 continuous years from 1881 to 2027.
HUANG FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST
But of course the election was immediately eclipsed by the news that Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO and the dork community’s Buzz Bissinger, got honeypotted by a Chinese spy and also had an affair with Nvidia’s vice president of health care, who reports directly to him along with every other Nvidia employee somehow. The leather jacket community was devastated, and this morning Nvidia announced that Huang has “resigned.”
HOW HUANG GONE (with Chris Black and Jason Stewart)
“[W]hen I asked on Monday ‘Who else is Jensen Huang fucking?’ I did not expect to get answers this fast,” writes Liz Lopatto in The Verge…
“…somebody, potentially somebody on the board (as we’ve seen in other incidents), wanted the story out there. Second, why throw Huang under the bus for getting his nuts drained? This is not an industry that cares about that kind of thing — just ask Eric Schmidt and Bill Gates. My guess is that the second affair is a pretext for action, and this all goes back to the original story from last week: that Huang was honeypotted by an alleged Chinese spy. Whatever was going on with neocloud Megaspeed might be much, much worse than we know, and what we know is pretty bad.”
Anyway I’m sure the whole A.I. bubble, financed with circular deals between Nvidia and a bunch of hyperscalers like Chinese purchasing front Megaspeed, will be fine.
NVIDIAS BASTERDS
I don’t have much else to add here, I just wanted to use “Nvidias Basterds” (™ ™ ™ Andrew Losowski in the Tabs discord, great work buddy). Here are some good posts:
Me, Myself & Mary
The funniest thread in Twitter history, Séamas O'Reilly’s 2018 tale of the time he “Got my days wrong and ended up alone in a room with my boss and the President of Ireland while I was on ketamine” has finally been animated. You should watch it whenever you have thirteen minutes free to laugh until you can’t breathe.
The Tabs Literary Supplement
Science fiction author M. John Harrison just won the Booker prize for his most recent novel, “The End of Everything,” thanks apparently to Tricia Lockwood. I happen to have just read it, because I thought it had already won the Booker Prize a couple weeks ago, which is appropriate given that the novel is about the modern inability to know anything. So here’s the Tabs Literary Supplement review of M. John Harrison’s “The End of Everything.”
What’s the two word summary?
Microdosing Dhalgren.
Is the book any good?
If you mean does it accomplish what it sets out to accomplish, yes very much so, and in impeccable style. The sentences are often lovely and almost always surprising, largely because the novel is so disjointed that everything that happens is kind of inherently surprising. Also it is quite short, which was a good choice. Any more would have been far too much.
Is the book enjoyable to read?
No.
But you said it was good?
It’s maybe the best book I ever disliked reading. For one thing, as Henry Farrell points out, Harrison is ideologically against “enjoying books.” Farrell quotes him from a 2003 Strange Horizons interview:
“I think it's undignified to read for the purposes of escape. After you grow up, you should start reading for other purposes. You should have a more complicated relationship with fiction than simple entrancement. If you read for escape you will never try to change your life, or anyone else's. It's a politically barren act, if nothing else.”
I’m not sure what “other purposes” this book might be for, but I can say it’s definitely not for simple entrancement. “The End of Everything” is about the experience of living in The Jackpot, which William Gibson never attempted to write about directly because he thought it would be as confusing and unpleasant to read as it would be to experience, and indeed it is. The novel’s “core event is an explanatory collapse, a cloud of unknowing,” wrote Harrison in his own blog. It’s about living in the miasma of an unknowable hyperobject which you can’t even perceive directly, let alone understand or explain. This magnificently evokes the worst aspects of current-day life, but at least Harrison’s characters have the mysterious alien iGhetti to blame.
It’s also amoral—almost anti-human—to an extent that I found off-putting. Several murders occur in the course of the story, but they serve to direct the shambling plot rather than carry any emotional weight. Here’s one:
“The tote was fuller than she would have preferred – pulled out of shape like herself, she thought, by its contents. All the walking in the rain and then the shopping trips. It had never really been a bag to carry your luggage in. She had bought it, who could remember when, because she liked the logo. She could see her hand, still moving aimlessly about inside it beneath the grimy cotton, selecting and rejecting. Phillip seemed cheerful enough, if a little insistent. ‘We can all go together!’ she heard him repeat, as if he had made an amazing discovery. She managed to look away before the gun went off. When she opened her eyes again, he was sitting against the wall with his legs spread out and the top half of his body leaning to one side. The smell in the atrium was indescribable. She felt as if every part of her life was separating, segment from segment pulling apart like something sticky that you ate and weren’t sure you liked. She held up the gun; turned it this way and that. Panic wouldn’t help.”
I had to read this three times before I understood that Marnie had taken the gun out of her bag and shot Phillip with it, because the book doesn’t preface this passage with “here’s a murder,” either literally or through any kind of heightening conflict. These are the two main (human) characters in the book, and this happens about three quarters of the way through. I would say “spoilers” but I don’t think it‘s possible to “spoil” a book that doesn’t really have a plot. Or, allegedly, has an “absolutely straightforward” plot that is easily perceived on the third reading, if you prefer.
Anyway I don’t need a book to have a moral lesson or clear heroes and villains, but this one presents its human characters as almost mechanical objects to an extent that made it difficult for me to find any way into it beyond the intellectual effort of following the plot and the aesthetic pleasure of admiring the sentences.
Does it deserve the prestigious Booker Prize?
Lol, sure, who cares. I mean what are literary prizes for? If this is meant to bring Harrison a lot of new readers, it will work, and he deserves it. If it’s meant to bring this specific book a lot of new readers, it will probably work and good luck to them! They won’t have fun, but they’re not supposed to. And who’s to say that isn’t what we need now?
Today’s Song: Brendon B, “My roommates are playing D&D”
Oh give me LAN, lots of LAN, under starry skies above,
Don’t Jense me in….
I thought about paywalling the Tabs Literary Supplement section above, but I decided not to. If you would have subscribed had I done so, please feel morally, but not punitively, obligated to subscribe now.
