Ernest Hogan's CORTEZ ON JUPITER

I don't know about you guys, but if we have to have a Palmer Eldritch figure in our damnable future, I would much rather it be a Latinx visual artist than Elon Musk. Can we live in Ernest Hogan's World instead of Philip K. Dick's? Just as a treat?

Think before you answer. 

Allow me to elaborate. 

It's going to be very hard not to drift into the incredible bilingual slangy brilliance that is every word out of the mouth, pen or spray can of Pablo Cortez, the hero of Ernest Hogan's early cyberpunk should-be classic, Cortez on Jupiter, because I've been trying to improve my Spanish lately by reading the Oz books translated into that language, and the weirdness of that experience easily bleeds over into the demented delight of this tale of a graffiti artist in space!

Pablo is more than "just" a graffiti artist though; once he gets into space by a circuitous route involving the overworked criminal justice system and the jaded art world of a near-future greater Los Angeles, our man only goes and invents an entirely new art form! One that takes his already highly developed color sense and love of movement for its own sake and adds the novelty of zero gravity to what he does and to what the paint does -- and how it makes his "canvas" a truly three-dimensional sphere of influence, as it were, muchachitos.

"Working in freefall," he tells a news camera invading his studio at the center of a space station, "Has added a new dimension to my work."

If you can't tell, I kind of like this book. 

 

I had to feel -- and create -- ways of flinging paint and moving in freefall. It was like magic, flying and dancing with colorful matching creatures: the protomorphic beastery of a new mythology. This was a second ritual for outer space. I was a shaman for the new frontier. (Italics mine)

While Pablo makes his zero-gravity splatter paintings* in defiance of the arts foundation board who paid his way up the gravity well (they liked his sketched ideas for what amounted to ascemic writing, the beginnings of an imaginary alien alphabet that i can't help but imagining the Beltalowdas of the Expanse series using for secret communications sprayed in plain sight someday -- but aren't too keen on what he's chosen to do instead), another artist works on a "viral graffiti robot bomb" and other less probable contraptions, the kind of work that might someday inspire a new generation of industrial designers working on machines our species hasn't imagined a need for yet; another of the artists is a floating bombshell of a woman who occasionally remembers to sculpt something between press interviews and photo shoots and three-day drug binges because artists gotta artist.

The sculptor tries having a fling with Pablo to keep the paparazzi excited -- if they get bored, her career could sink her back down to the Mudball after all -- but Pablo is in the Zone, work-wise and anyway, doesn't do drugs. When he was a little boy in East L.A., his parents got a little too deeply absorbed in a neo-Aztec subculture** and got addicted to a new-old drug called ATL and overdosed, leaving little Pablito to discover their bodies. All part of the legend, but he stays true to it and doesn't even really drink alcohol. 

All of this by itself would make for a unique and intriguing novel (as far as my reading has gone, we won't really see much attention paid to the idea of art in zero-gravity until the very early 21st century, when Alastair Reynolds will consider the possibilities of vast and intricate glassblown confections that would only be possible in space stations), and there's more than enough character drama with these artists and patrons to have kept me happy,  but Hogan had more on his mind.  This isn't "just" about what if we sent a graffiti artist into low earth orbit to make art on a space station. For one thing, this is a future in which humanity has started spreading through the solar system -- and encountered another life form right in our backyard. The planet Jupiter, a vast gas giant that could contain 1300 Earths in its volume, and that doesn't have what we could regard as a solid surface except deep in its core where it's subjected to pressures that make the floors of Earth's oceans feel both easy and peasy, has something weird living in its famous Great Red Spot! But so far, we have utterly failed to make contact with it. Or have we.

Before you can say "volatile and mercurial artist beefs with his patrons," Pablo has manipulated (or been manipulated into; opinions differ, and this story is told from many divergent points of view) his way onto the weird team of volunteers who have agreed to be lowered via special modules into that giant atmospheric storm to try to talk to the beings known to us as the Sirens. Pablo won't be the first; several others have failed and come back as mind-wiped vegetables. He isn't the most qualified; the OG "Sirenaut" was a seasoned spacer with a system-wide reputation, after all. Until he came back with zero control over his bodily functions and whatnot...

No, what Pablo is, is the strangest, the most stubborn and the most egotistical of the candidates. So when he shows up in Jupiter's orbit, the scientific reasearch/entertainment conglomerate*** in charge is ready to launch him on the mission immediately! But first he has to meet the love of his life, telepath and fellow Sirenaut Willa Aboid, whose fate is weirdly bound up with his even though they're not very successful as a typical couple and their romance does not satisfy the audience back home. Once again, Hogan has much more interesting things in mind for this pairing, things that are impossible to discuss without spoiling the fun of discovering what all the weird little hints and foreshadowings sprinkled through the novel actually mean. And while Cortez on Jupiter largely does exist as a self-spoiling text, there's no point in robbing you of the fun of what discovery there still is. Though if I haven't convinced you to check this one out as yet, maybe you deserve it.

Hmm.

Anyway, I'm delighted to see that Hogan, who is a practicing visual artist as well as a Gonzo science fiction writer, is still at it after all of these years, even to having just recently published a short story collection that I'm going to rush to get just as soon as my current embargo (I'm trying to read down a huge accumulation of the evidence that when it comes to buying new books, I have no self-control at all, even if I'm down to my last head of lettuce in the fridge. You may not see my tsundoku room. The fact that I have a tsundoku room is bad enough) conditions are met, aka I have read at least 100 of the print, ebook and audio books that I already own. But then, yeah, Guerilla Mural of a Siren's Song will be mine. Oh yes, it will be mine.

*And yes, of course I'm thinking of that OK Go video. 

**Anticipating Hogan's next novel, the psychedelic cyberpunk splendor that is High Aztech.

***Why yes, Ernest Hogan anticipated reality TV just like D.G. Compton did. 

Jenny Hval's GIRLS AGAINST GOD (Tr Marjam Idriss; Narr Gabrielle Baker)

No one asks me why I hate, no one uses that word, they call me grumpy, not even angry, but grumpy, six letters, something inconsequential and self-inflicted, something powerless, insignificant, something small in a small person, not something that's about society, or about them, just something that means i'm ruining things for myself, something that's in the way of my potential as an object.

The unnamed narrator of Girls Against God, Norwegian Renaissance woman Jenny Hval's second novel to be translated into English, first takes us back to 1992, when she is a chronological latecomer to the heyday of the Norwegian black metal music scene. She invites us to look with, not compassion but comprehension, at her younger self standing apart in the back of the crowd at a show, dressed in black with dyed black hair, looking on from the vantage of "The gloomiest child queen."

We don't get to spend much time in this teenagers' court, though (yes, I mean to use the plural possessive here. You think there's only one child queen at this show? There are plenty. We're just called to observe the gloomiest one. And yes, I'm being extra fussy about language and usage here. As my queen demands), before we follow our heroine into high achieving yet frustrated adulthood, with a magisterial will, a titanic ambition, a talent to match, a haughty disdain for us lesser beings, and, yes, a hate, which she still feels powerless to enact and express, still trapped in a small and frail-looking and easily sexualized body.

But underestimate this fragile looking young woman at your peril. Her advanced degrees are in the 20th and 21st century art of film and video, but her soul and her desire and her power come from friendship and sisterhood and other older and deeper and wilder arts -- and maybe even the craft usually denigrated with a prefix of "witch-."

But instead of a coven, burning candles and calling down the moon and making stinky tisanes (though there's a fair amount of all of that, too), she forms a band with two friends, Venka and Terese, and here's the part where I link to any of Jenny Hval's stunning music videos for her unique and haunting and powerful songs and song-like compositions. Except I can't choose. Partly because I'm a neophyte (if a 55-year-old woman in her twelfth goddamned year of perimenopause can still be called a neophyte in any way) in terms of Jenny Hval's art. It's all hitting me at once. I'd only barely heard of her as a name from an episode in the back catalog of one of my favorite podcasts -- and those folks generally like way heavier music than I do so I hadn't gotten around to that one yet when I saw it was about a musician who, at the time, had written her first novel*. I'll get to it one of these days maybe, I said. But so my point is, you can probably pick a place to start with Hval's other art as well as or better than I can. Go. Explore. But not yet. Because I want to talk about this amazing fucking book about a goddamned metal music witch coven and their adventures with the poor, exploited, overexposed young girl depicted in Edvard Munch's Puberty -- and, via the expressionist surrealist whateverist magic of fictional time travel, the Scream painter himself.

But so, think for a moment what it must have been like to grow up as a tiny blonde girl in 1990s Norway (specifically southern Norway, a distinction that is lost on me but that I feel after reading this book like it might not be utterly dissimilar to the United States' own South vis-a-vis the rest of Norway, in a way?), surrounded, as our Hval stand-in complains bitterly (and narrator Gabrielle Baker lets us feel every vibration of the eyerolls that accompany Hval's speeches from her character's gloomiest child queen's perspective, as well as the adult's slowly growing anger, chilling patience, and diabolical creativity as she unleashes the art of her spells, or the spells of her art, on the dominant and still very narrowly Christian culture that keeps trying to trap her and her bandmate-sisters within its narrow limits on femininity) the same pious yet aggressive, destructive and vicious attitudes that the young males among her contemporaries attacked with unreadable band logos, corpse paint, body odor, sick guitar riffs and, oh yeah, church burnings.

All that looks like childish tantrum-throwing to her. She wants to do something that matters, not to the teen boys screaming from her mix tapes of yesteryear or the prison inmates they became, nor to the greater culture that made the boys and the girls feel so trapped, but to herself and her girls. Who hate God.

"For a brief moment, the Norns have surfaced," she says, as her band and their fans turn the decaying former site of the Munch Museum in Oslo into their own installation, replete with water damage, faded spots on the wall in place of faded paintings, blood-red graffiti and badly 3D-printed plastic babies. Or at least parts of them. Does that sound a bit lame? Well, it's just the sound check.

Women’s work becomes a crucial problem within capitalism because reproduction is seen as nonwork. Reproduction as mystery isn’t new, but in capitalist rhetoric the mystery surrounding reproduction is redefined in economic terms, so that childbearing becomes not necessary but personal, a private rather than public concern, something that ‘belongs behind closed doors’, not labour performed but a ‘natural resource’ (making women generally ‘natural resources,’ too).

GaG is also a bit of a cyberpunk story, and not just because the band-coven could very easily have accomplished one of their highly effective rituals with a Flipper Zero. Though they totally could have. Except Flipper Zeros weren't really a thing yet when this novel was written. So, more than a bit cyberpunk, as the band members fuse deep web searches with chaos-magical something-or-others and joke about just using "witch ritual" as a search term and hitting "I feel lucky" and imagine "information streaming through the arteries" of their wrists. Pretending to use something like the internet back when computers were still exotic but unconnected was, our heroine realizes, her first ritual, an exercise in sending forth her will through "the cosmic internet.

I'm tempted to go on quoting from this novel, to go on enjoying the sometimes sweeping, sometimes transfixing, power of Hval's and translator Marjam Idriss' language, which so often sounds more like a Jimi Hendrix lyric than a narrative, as you've perhaps already noticed. Jimi was pretty in touch with his feminine side, I think. 

But so, that's one of the miracles of this book: even while the intense and implacable longing for feminine power and agency engulfs the text completely, it's never at the expense of men or boys. Even the humorless, pretentious black metal boys of yesteryear, and their more conventionally loutish counterparts who drive big junky cars through quiet Norwegian villages at top speed and volume, just to be disruptive, earn Hval's admiration, never her scorn. Even Edvard Munch, he of the Puberty painting that the band-members work passionately to separate from its subject so she can be free, gets off pretty lightly, to say nothing of the anonymous creator of a certain infamous and pornographic Japanese woodcut you'll have to read the book to find and identify. Hval engages in a fair amount of trenchant but never weaponized art criticism in these pages, too, but always with a positive goal even as she emphasizes that her greatest power is her hatred. But what she hates is never an individual or even a category of people. She hates forces, especially those that threaten her cherished values of freedom, agency, strength, expression -- these are none of them zero sum games, is the takeaway from this novel. And fuck anybody who insists otherwise.

Unless you're playing the aforementioned games against God.

The gloomiest child queen is my queen, too. She's a pretty good one. I stan.

*Girls Against God is, I think, Hval's third, though only her second to be translated into English? Or something like that? According to Wikipedia the other day? Which, do we still trust Wikipedia? My instinct says yes, but consider the demographic I copped to above.