David Hoenigman – Every fear, joy, doubt, hatred, desire and elation manifests through a litany of interior monologues

David Hoenigman, Burn Your Belongings (Original images by Yasutoshi Yoshida), Jaded Ibis Press, 2010. [2008]


“David Hoenigman's First Book written over a period of Five years is an autobiographical text dealing with his experiences as an American Living in Japan and the difficulty of fitting in where one is out of place.”

“Burn Your Belongings slowly, relentlessly builds the emotional ebb and flow of a love triangle over a period of months, perhaps years. Every fear, joy, doubt, hatred, desire and elation manifests through a litany of interior monologues – from the mundane to the profound and always lyrical. The accretion of imagery and often frighteningly stark examination of Self and Other create a transformational emotional experience. Hoenigman's brilliance is his ability to transfer language to the reader so that by novel's end, the feelings and observations of the characters become not their memories but the reader's own. All 190 pages contain an original image created for the book by famed eletronic musician and producer Yasutoshi Yoshida”

“In a letter to Charles Olson on June 5, 1950, the late Robert Creeley wrote that "form is never more than an extension of content." In her "How To Write" published in 1931, Gertrude Stein claimed "Sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are." These two exclamations of style, made in the first half of the 20th century, make problematic any contemporary so-called "experimental" fiction.
David Hoenigman's book is manifestly "new," anti-narrative, and anti-dialogue (Robert Grenier's "I HATE SPEECH," 1971, springs to mind). "Burn Your Belongings" presses all the right buttons to be branded experimental or modern — and that is the key word: "modern."
The action of the "novel" takes place in a nameless city, peopled with nameless characters. However, the city is obviously Tokyo and the characters are the I, she, he of a postmodern menage a trois. This is an avant-garde autobiography, written in minimalist sentences, each page containing the space of a paragraph. If I take a passage at random, the style will become apparent:
'I can see the backs of their heads. I want to sneak up behind him. whisper in his ear. it never happened. it's never going to happen.'
I'll review this book. I'll do it in sentences without commas. without semi-colons. and if you notice I don't capitalize words. only "I." not "i." after a time it reads like a list. but you can't stop reading. it draws you in.
For all its troubled angst, its inclusivity and exclusivity, this is manifestly a throwback to late "Modernist" techniques. For a "novel" written in the 21st century, its closest antecedents are Samuel Beckett's "Molloy" (1955): "I am in my mother's room. It's I who live there now. I don't know how I got there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I'd never have got there alone. There's this man who comes every week." And Ron Silliman's "Sunset Debris" (1978) "Can you feel it? Does it hurt? Is this too soft? Do you like it? Do you like this? Is this how you like it?"
However present the book desires to be, it feels locked in a continual past. The form — single-clause sentences, minimal punctuation, one paragraph per page — does not adhere to the content. Rewritten with added commas, semicolons, question marks and full stops, the narrative becomes a variation of a "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, older man gets girl, boy writes about it" novel — a 21st-century version of Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther."
The narrative is minimalist, monotonous, but at times — like a ticking clock when you're trying to sleep — it moves from annoying to soothing, the monotony becomes metronomic, rhythmic, it pulls you into its beat until you find yourself moving from page to page, zombie-like, in thrall to the simplistic prose and the accretion of emotion.
Hoenigman has worked with the techno-noise-artist and hypermodern writer Kenji Siratori. In "Burn Your Belongings," the page creates a kind of static intensity, the words become white noise. Each word is equal in power to the next. The lack of real names, the replacement of proper nouns with common nouns and the absence of dialogue, creates a theoretical space of loss, of unhappiness, of nothingness, out of the simple memory of a relationship. Desire in the narrative is displaced by the object's disappearance. Emotions are alien and alienated. Where once was harmony now is noise. Where once was communication now is silence. Where once was subject now is other. The I, she, he of the narrative elide and merge. The he is sometimes the desiring I. She is always and forever other.
In his "Poetics of Space" (1958), Gaston Bachelard wrote: "Thus the house is not experienced from day to day only, on the thread of a narrative, or in the telling of our own story. Through dreams, the various dwelling places in our lives copenetrate and retain the treasures of former days." If this is so, and the house is the page and the novel, then Hoenigman's "Burn Your Belongings" uses and fuses contemporary Tokyo with autobiography to copenetrate earlier literary experiments.
"Burn Your Belongings" — however dependent on older experimental writing — re-enacts a poetics of space: the rooms with their paper-thin walls, the train stations, the busy streets, the offices, the objects of memory — umbrellas, staircases — pitch memory against the imagination and reality against fantasy. Whether it works as a piece of fiction or not is debatable but Hoenigman's "novel" is a brave exercise in anti-narrative, a reminder to us that there is more to writing and reading than best-sellers." – Steve Finbow

“Reading David Hoenigman's novel, Burn Your Belongings, one is struck almost instantly by its unusual, though not altogether unfamiliar, style; one is instantly made to recall the work of Samuel Beckett, and even Pierre Guyotat's anti-novel, Eden Eden Eden, sharing that book's relentlessness, its obsessiveness, its disregard for the niceties of orthodox storytelling. Burn Your Belongings is an ultra-minimalist work: each page is a paragraph and each paragraph is devoid of proper names, commas, colons, semi-colons, question marks, dialogue and standard capitalization – apart of course from the all important first-person pronoun.
The narrator's mnemonic journey, recounting a tale of love, jealousy and betrayal, is told in lean, declarative sentences. But perhaps the real journey is one of extrication, as we watch the narrator attempting to pull himself free from the reminiscences that consume him and from which he is barely distinguishable, such are the coils and bonds that have been forged.
He presents love as nothing less than complete consumption of the other, so that the narrator is doomed not so much by the reality of the situation he finds himself in, but by the very attempt to assimilate another person so completely. There is a battle being played out as we oscillate between the glories of such a union and the dangers faced should one need to survive alone. Hoenigman writes:
'I like saying goodbye to people I know I'll never see again. it reaffirms what I've come to believe. that I was a ghost. that I'll continue to dream and speak far beyond where there's nothing more to see. places only I could inhabit. my face blurred. my eyes a different color. my name forgotten.'
And later on the same page:
'I can piece the rest together. my life is the same as hers.'
At times it is like watching an operation to separate Siamese twins from the inside. A torching of possessions, or rather the very possibility of possession itself, is it seems the only way to facilitate such a split. The hope of a more complete coming together and the hazards that such a condition poses underscore every page, as the narrator remakes his lover and unmakes her at every turn, remaking and unmaking himself in the process.
The absence of names, proper nouns and dialogue not only serves to blur the distinction between mind and world, self and other, but also allows the reader an at times uneasy sense of access. For by stripping everything back to its introspective underpinnings, Hoenigman manages to construct a space that is both universal and perversely personal – the sad generalities of intimacy laid out for inspection – so that when the narrator states 'I don't belong here. I don't belong anywhere' the reader can at once understand and sympathise.
Reading this book I was reminded of the philosopher David Hume's bundle theory of self, and then rather more recent narrative accounts of the self (such as Daniel Dennett's) sprung to mind, as did Galen Strawson's comment on such notions in his paper, 'The Self', where he states that
'There is an important respect in which James Joyce's use of punctuation in his 'stream of consciousness' novel em>Ulysses makes his depiction of the character of the process of consciousness more accurate in the case of the heavily punctuated Stephen Daedalus than in the case of the unpunctuated Molly Bloom.'
Hoenigman's terse, staccato prose is the language of consciousness, and his book not so much anti-narrative as true to the realities of one's inner sense-making, true to the convoluted and seemingly disparate tales we tell ourselves. This is definitely one of those instances where a bare and experimental prose style is necessitated, being precisely what is needed to capture the inexorable meanderings of a person's mind as he confronts his past and the possibility of a future without it.
In short, Burn Your Belongings is a well-crafted and adventurous book from what is undoubtedly a writer of great promise.” - Gary J. Shipley

“David F. Hoenigman first novel Burn Your Belongings. has just been released by Six Gallery Press. Hoenigman is originally from Cleveland but has lived in Tokyo since 1998. Heavily involved in the experimental music scene in Japan, Hoenigman has worked on four albums with writer/musician Kenji Siratori, three of which have been released on Hyper Modern records.
What is the extension of your experimental writing? Incidentally my writing extension is "life=noise". It functions as the genetic sea of the deconstructive meaning.
- One aspect of my work is the idea that "lessening=nub". I want my writing to be as anti-prescriptive as possible. I find a lot of writing too heavy-handed, too manipulative; to me it's more interesting to read something that is limitless, something that doesn't strong-arm me into drawing a desired conclusion. That's why the people (I purposely don't use the word "characters") in my books don't have names, ages, physical attributes or any kind of status. They are stick figures rescuing each other, breaking each other's hearts. They are not tools I use to make a point, they are living and breathing. I believe that if we strip everything away then what remains is universal, something we all recognize; yet different for each of us.
Do you think the anti-prescriptive writing is the post-humanistic struggle to the selfish gene? I think your writing deconstructs Samuel Beckett's space on DNA.
- I've always loved Samuel Beckett. I probably think about him more than any other writer, but I think it's important to distance yourself from your influences. I went about 10 years without reading Beckett and have just started to get back into his work again recently. I tend to binge on things and then put them down. I'm most interested in the long-term, enduring effects of art on the psyche. I think it's interesting to think about a book you read 5 or 10 years ago and to reflect on what you've retained from it. Often it's just a few flashes, maybe things that wouldn't be significant to anyone else, but the feeling remains, the highly specific emotion that your soul has reserved for only this book. I'm intrigued by the idea that if all that's left after time and memory have internally deconstructed a book is a swirling mist of ash, dust and skin particles (but a mist that we treasure, a mist that we feel indebted to) — then why not begin with this mist? Why not throw all unnecessary clutter away when we write? - all adornment, all manipulation, all that will be easily forgotten. Why not attempt with each line, with each brush stroke to stamp oneself upon others' souls?
I consider about abandoning "all adornment, all manipulation" paradoxically. It's life as limen of chaos. How is your writing constructed inside this edge?
- I had this idea that I wanted to welcome chaos, write down everything that came into my head and just let it takes it's course. But I needed to impose a form and a structure, I needed to make it follow my rules without losing its identity. I liked the idea of framed bits of chaos, somehow preserve the little monsters and arrange them in rows like some rare beetle collection. If you pick up Burn Your Belongings and just flip through it, I think you'll notice right away that the layout of every page is identical. When you read it you'll see that there are strict rules of language and punctuation that the text must adhere to throughout. It's a display case really, something to take to show-and-tell.
Do you feel text itself controls you? And do you function as free gene that escaped from the word spiral on the text?
- I feel the text controls me in the sense that I can't always write when I want, that sometimes I simply feel empty. Other times things click and I'm able to get some work done. I like to pick up something that I don't remember writing and read it over - it's almost creepy sometimes, like there's been an intruder. Initially I don't try to escape the word spiral, I let it imprison me and then tunnel my way out with a spoon I stole from the cafeteria. I suppose I function as a free gene when I've completed the task, when I can put it down and move on to something else, some new prison.
Dose the apoptosis prison of our brain that was deconstructed by the mind physical task of your writing incubate the hyper abolition worm like the artificial sun?
- I imagine it will be different for everyone, I like to think that people can take something from my writing that will incubate within them, something meaningful; but it's really not for me to decide. The only way I could write Burn Your Belongings the way I envisioned it was to absolutely not care what anyone would think. I didn't talk to anyone about it, I didn't show anyone, I just wrote. It was more important to me that it was pure than that it was anything others could pronounce good or bad. Who cares what some sardine is scribbling in a notebook anyway? I was invigorated after moving to Tokyo, thousands of miles away from everything I'd ever known. I'd stay up all night writing sometimes, I didn't have to answer to anyone so why should my writing? I had no idea who or if anyone would ever read it and I don't think I really cared. Since I didn't even have a computer my first four years in Japan, it was just a big pile of notebooks and papers, it took a long time for me to get it into presentable condition - to display the beetles as I wanted. I still have a lot of material left over. So I guess what I'm saying is that it wasn't written to inspire a uniform impression in people, so I have no idea what the ideal heat of the worm incubator should be. I'll just be happy if it's a worm some feel is worth the trouble incubating, however they see fit.” - An interview by Kenji Siratori

Excerpt

Burning Behind the Unnamable: an interview with David F. Hoenigman by David Moscovich

A Genuine Enslavement of the Attention, David F. Hoenigman explains PAINT YOUR TEETH — an interview by Jason Kushnir.

David Hoenigman: My Tokyo Life

Kenji Siratori – Linguistic SF: Data trash in the brain universe--nerve violence and nerve sex—we scan reality with the HIV form

Kenji Siratori, Blood Electric (Creation Books, 2002)

«Blood Electric is a devastating loop of language from the Tokyo avant-garde, with stylistic experimentation akin to Artaud or Burroughs, but embracing the image mayhem of the internet / multimedia / digital age. Kenji Siratori comes from within the history of radical literature, but his youth, cultural context, and understanding of the futurity of digital technologies positions him as the herald of a new literary dawn.»

«Like technological spasm, a bio-electronical deflation. Like mind hallucinations caused by diasepam, but clear as a dew-drop on an urban balcony. Kenji Sirator's Blood Electric surfs on the edge of genetic memmory recorded 24 years ago.
Kenji Siratori is expressible on modern self science. The meeting of technological karma with genome replication in enviorment of self-transmitting clouds, the insemination of cyber reality into natural reality caused this semi-conductive latest-generation expose.
The books is written in a code-seuqence of feelings-productive scripts and informational griffs wrapped in sense. The cyberpunk mutation, the inner rebel of the one and the mass - a natural envenom caused by pollution, microwave and radio distortion. Electric pulsation, air dense - Kenji caught it all in a preserved caul readable by microscope.
Fast city running, people - cyborgs. Lonelyness, a fight against mass-optimisation, an inner flow on a pathway to salvation, an escape trough the gratings of electronical frontiers and artificial borders. The story line goes trough.» - http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/bloodelectric.html

«Your book came; it's absolutely brilliant! I really am amazed by it - the long looping sentences, the slow stuttering development, never sure what side the language is on, how it's generated, whether human or machine is speaking.
I don't see it as Burroughs, although I understand the reference. For me, Burroughs is oddly modernist; there are conspiracies and organizations and everything seems to fly apart but never really does; it goes back to literature. In your work, the flying apart is almost hysteric; it's global networking - it's the end of literature in a way and the beginning of nexus in another» - Alan Sondheim

«From the cover page: A fatal collusion of drag embryos and DNA angels in Cadaver City ignites the circuitry of the ADAM doll... dogs of zero waging gene war in Placenta World, chaos unleashed by the digital vampires of Sato Corporation, nano-junk virus pandemic. On the pink ash planet EVOL, DAM and ANTI=ADAM clash in terminal zodiac burn... enter robo-succubus Super-Cherry 666, hunting for the grotesque nova skulls of Sato Corporation napalm torture victims.
Vividly evoking the coming to consciousness of an artificial intelligence, Blood Electric is a devastating loop of language from the Japanese avant-garde which breaks with all writing traditions. With unparalleled stylistic terrorism fully embracing the image mayhem of the Internet/multimedia/ digital age, Kenji Siratori unleashes his first literary Sarin attack.
As will be clear from the above cover text, Blood Electric is a difficult and contentious book. This makes it especially difficult to review. On the one hand, its disconnected, loose, and fragmentary prose suggests comparisons with James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake or Ulysses, and especially with the delirious style of William Burroughs' Junk and Naked Lunch. Just as William Burroughs, Siratori seems to be experimenting with formulating the most horrible and ugly things he can think of; he may be involved in an exercise to experience and express the extremities of consciousness and meaning. On the other hand, this inflated rhetoric lends the book a cult status, with its typical advantages and disadvantages. On its best, Blood Electric is a compelling psychedelic trip in which the status of the writer and reader are frequently shifted. Different from for example Burroughs' work, we are not offered any breathing pause, but are forced to search or create an orientation of our own. On its worst, it is an example of cheap pornography. Indeed, as has been noted by one of its many reviewers, "[Blood Electric] is a proudly pornografic book, in terms of its cyborgasmic ethos as well as its language. In its pages, sex and death are joined in apocalyptic sexdeath" (Abraham Kawa). Siratori makes excessive use of hyperbolic language, more specificly language with strong (Freudian or violent) connotations. Typical: "The anus-protocol of the megabyte of the dog that encrypted the impulse of the assassin::the drug embryo stimulates chemical annihilation to the brain surge body that was abandoned::vision is cancelled:://coefficient of the cadaver-mechanism of the pleasure of cold-blooded disease animals//ADAM strand of retro-sperm abortion:synapse of control external abolition=caused the despair machine spasm::the synthetic scene of the reproduction nature of the masses of flesh//>>the eyeball of self injects the soul/gram of the mutant/cobalt rock death in Sarcophagus City/". The latter, rather problematic, aspect is furthermore enhanced by a host of tendentious comments by Siratori's fans or aficionados. In a typical example of flawed contemporary Japonism, Stephen Barber and Jack Hunter describe Blood Electric as respectively a "blood- and semen-encrusted debris with the finesse of a berserk Issey Miyake" and "the black reverb of soft machine seppuku".
Yet, its cult-status notwithstanding, I experienced Blood Electric as a rewarding read. As said above, its psychedelic style, mixed with its idiosyncratic (and definedly Japanese!) use of the English language, recommends a reading in which the reader is rendered the real author of this book (cf. supra). The theme of the awaking artificial intelligence demands us to be replaced in the mind of what is awakened, including the noise of growing, learning, forgetting and remembering, in short, acquiring a self-referentially evolving self. In Siratori's own words: "In my writing, the language cell is distorted by the infinite hyperlink of the synapse - a new language is the conceptual pain - all the data act as the hardweb character as if I dissect subjective writing, I'm striking the nude brain to a screen. This is the practice that hardweb creatures were disclosed". In order to read it, one furthermore has to do away with everything that qualifies as fiction, science or otherwise. Siratori presents us the art of the 21 st century word, with its typical references to the multimedia embedding of (post?)modern communication.
So what is there to be said about the place of this language in the literary field? In my judgment, Blood Electric must be seen as a product and symbol of the medial interconnections the very digital revolution. Word, sound and image have become one. I therefore doubt that it can be discussed as literature in its pure sense. It is as much a work of visual art, or, if one takes into account Siratori's abrasive, commercial-like style, even sound. I was frequently reminded of e.g. John Cage's tape works in which music, sound, and word cannot anymore be distinguished. At other moments, Blood Electric is strikingly close to pop-art and fluxus, as it shares the latters' concern with mass-production, abundance, and shock-effect. Yet, put against the wider background of Japanese (visual and musical) cultural development (especially the field of Japanese new music), Siratori is not so much of an iconoclast. Actually, when reading to the sheer endless stream of Freudian and aggressive words, I had an experience of sensory overload as I had when listening to the noise music of Japanese artists as Merzbow, Masonna, and others. As Siratori himself states, ' my writing was born with the horizon of techno - I'm advocating nerve physics here - I process violence and sex as the reality of data - I take a view of my conceptual web with nerve experiences. The writing is linked to how I game this expanded hardweb for me - such a method that touches to my brain more cruelly. Blood Electric is an experiment with noise and complexity, and the necessity of its reduction. The reader should therefore be especially attentive to what he remembers of the text, what he perceives to be the text's meaningful (although I doubt that word is in place here) qualities. More than anything else, this implies a sensitivity for the transformative aspects of the new media. What is the meaning of this book, what is its truth? If one asks Siratori: 'TRUTH--data trash in the brain universe--nerve violence and nerve sex—we scan reality with the HIV form.' Apparently, he has accepted the epistemological consequences of his writing. This digital narrative is no more than a synapse of an endlessly evolving web of communications, the meaning of which is ever harder to discern... Read if you dare.» - Michael Schiltz

«This may be, finally, the review that gets my license revoked. Because in offering my thoughts on Kenji Siratori’s new book, Blood Electric, I’m going to be compelled to say a few things that literary critics (particularly literary critics working for avant-garde online publications) just aren’t supposed to admit.
Billed as “the new Japanese cyberpunk classic,” Blood Electric is a story about the first awakening of an artificial intelligence. Or at least, this is what the back cover of the book tells me and I’ll have to take their word for it: because the first uncomfortable admission that I need to make here is that I didn’t understand this book. At all. Reading through the pages of Blood Electric is an exercise in endurance comparable to tackling Naked Lunch except without the flashes of insight that make Mr. Burroughs’s work worthwhile. Just to make the point clear, opening Mr. Siratori’s book to a random passage we find:
I feed it drugs of masses of flesh and external fear=cell: the techno-junkie device that controls//The internal organ consciousness of self was downloaded::the mimic of cadaver-feti that the logic circuit of self rapes::the hologram of memory lack to the head of amoeba DNA-channel in the virgin form::cut cable of the city that caused it excretes the nightmare of android nature// Reading page after page of this, I find myself at a loss.
Clearly Mr. Siratori is doing something very cutting-edge with language here; he is evolving a new kind of syntax and grammar in order to capture the grotesque futurescape and thoughts of an infant “artificial intelligence” that he envisions. And perhaps from his perspective – or from the perspective of other connoisseurs of this type of post-coherence cyberpunk – nothing could be more right or appropriate. Unfortunately, that doesn’t much help the rest of us.
Initially, I supposed that Mr. Siratori might be drawing upon computer programming languages for his new grammar (after all, this is a book about an artificial intelligence being born) but as a former software engineer who spent nearly a decade working in more languages than I have fingers, I can honestly report that this doesn’t seem to be the case. Initially, I supposed that the language of Mr. Siratori’s book might become more “human” as the novel progressed and his AI protagonist learned how to speak, but again no dice. And in the end, I came away from this book as baffled as I began.
Blood Electric presents itself as a map without a key, a puzzle that the reader is asked to decipher. Unlike other such puzzles however (I think, for example, of Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange) no clues to cracking the code of the book are presented to the reader, and no insight into what we might gain by going to all the effort of working our way into Mr. Siratori’s tortured prose. And without some inducement to do so – some glimpse of human emotion beneath the surface of the words or promise of revelation – it simply seems like a waste of time to trudge through these chapters of convoluted gibberish.
This is not to say, of course, that experiments in pushing the boundaries of language are not worthwhile in general. To make the effort to do something new with words, to find new means of expression, are without a doubt among the loftiest goals that an author can strive for. The crucial point however is that to be worthwhile, these attempts at new forms of expression must communicate something. Writing an incomprehensible book is like painting a canvas pure black: a formal gesture that needs to be carried out once, but that hardly bears repetition. Similarly, it’s worth keeping in mind that the great experimentalists of the past are recognizable by the fact that from the distance of years they no longer seem very experimental at all: they found something that worked, and that became absorbed into our consciousness of language to the point where their stylistic innovations are now commonplaces. What people who point out the greatness of Joyce’s Ulysses forget is that Proust made virtually all the same “breakthroughs” more than a dozen years earlier in Swann’s Way with greater comprehensibility and eloquence than Joyce ever managed.
It’s possible, of course, that I am simply missing the point of Blood Electric entirely. Perhaps in another decade, writing of this type will seem as natural as Kerouac’s rhythms or Proust’s nonlinear internal monologues seem today. But I very much doubt it. For readers who enjoyed the above passage of Blood Electric, whoever you may be, perhaps this book is for you; for the rest of us, I can only recommend Mr. Siratori’s latest novel as an example of how to alienate an audience completely.» - Matthew Flaming

«3AM: Give the readers some biographical details - maybe including your involvement or non involvement with World Cup excitement.
My vital icon functions to hypermodern space -- the gene dub that was turned the strategy. I'm beating as a hardweb - like the streaming machine of World Cup -- my nerve cells that turned nomads are the data=mutant of the violence screen. I'm writing this in the silence of an unnationality now.
Your writing is extreme - there's violence, sex in plenty. Where does this come from: is it influenced by film experiences, reading experiences or personal experiences? It reminds me of 'Tetsuo'.
So my writing was born with the horizon of techno - I'm advocating nerve physics here -- I process violence and sex as the reality of data - I take a view of my conceptual web with nerve experiences. The writing is linked to how I game this expanded hardweb for me -- such a method that touches to my brain more cruelly.
The form of the writing is extreme too -- it seems to break the language into something else, almost a new language. What are you trying to achieve here?
In my writing the language cell is able to be distorted by the infinite hyperlink of the synapse - 'a new language' is the conceptual pain -- all the data act as the hardweb character as if I dissect subjective writing, I'm striking the nude brain to a screen. This is the practice that hardweb creatures were disclosed.
Are there writers you feel have been important to you? Writers from the past and writers writing now? If so, who are they, and what makes them important?
Certainly Antonin Artaud exerted an important influence on my hardweb - Artaud produced PDA of a nerve cell - there is different vital possibility that was hypercontrolled by the language here because the creature intensity of hardweb is increased to our atrocious gene dub.
How far is Japan an influence on you and your writing?
Japan is the cultural discharge zone where was alienated for me - is the dark arrangement of my writing for literary defection.
Tell us about your novel Blood Electric -- about how you came to write it, what is it about and what are its themes? Why might we want to read it?
So my novel is presenting the aspect of a genetic hardweb clearly - the nerve cells that run through our gene dub - is the strategic object that our body codes erodes the world.
We live at a time when the novel is under attack -- film and music are more advanced we're told. Do you think this is true or do you think the novel can still be a modern, advanced place?
I believe that the novel becomes a cultural trigger - but this requires the digital narrative of nerve cells that had the creature intensity - simultaneously we must perceive the instant when the novel is networking as a part of the human body emulator.
The world is a place where violence seems to be everywhere - and is taking on new meanings - from September 11th type stuff to the Sarin gas attacks in Tokyo to Israel: is your book a response to this? Are you trying to find out what language can do with this new world? Are you positive about the world or is there something too negative about everything now? Do you think as a novelist you should try and answer such questions such as 'How should we live', like Tolstoy thought novelists had to?
We must control a different vital language cell in the world, so the world is exposed to more physical gene dub. I practice hardweb of the creature intensity as the data mutant of the world - the new world is resisting our evil gene dub with the era respiration byte. The echo archive. As all the data of the human body flow backward to our global hardweb.
Do you think there's a new readership out there who are wanting to break out of the old forms because they're no longer relevant?
Yes - I call this a different vital plug-in of the global hardweb - but it's important to incubate purer nerve cells - to produce our creature intensity into the cursed gene dub. You are the interactive data mutant.
What are you going to do next?
I am advancing simultaneous a plural project at present -- I disclosed the prototype of codework biocapture v1.0 recently, and the exhibition biocapture_archive based on the practice of hardweb will be opened in CCA Glasgow in August: 'literature is networking to our gene dub'.» - Interview with Richard Marshall


«Talk about a full-on headfuck. Blood Electric is a hybrid of Burroughsian cut-up, ultra-modern stream-of-consciousness and – I swear – what looks like HTML coding... Let’s just say, it’s not the easiest book in the world. Jack Hunter says that it is “a cyborg crash nightmare of the new flesh, a final despatch from the mutant Hell where the embryo hunts in secret.” Stephen Barber finds in Blood Electric “a virulently warped amalgam of Tetsuo and cut-up era William Burroughs . . .” We say: yeah fine okay but who is man, woman, machine enough to get through the damn thing from one side to the other . . . Figuring that the only way to get answers to these questions was to ask the man himself, Peter Wild confronted Blood Electric author Kenji Siratori . . .

Peter Wild: Let’s start the only way I know how. Can you talk me through Blood Electric – describe the book to me in your own words.
Kenji Siratori: My writing was born with the horizon of techno — I’m advocating nerve physics here — I process violence and sex as the reality of data – I take a view of my conceptual web with nerve experiences. The writing is linked to how I game this expanded hardweb for me — such a method that touches to my brain more cruelly. In my writing the language cell is able to be distorted by the infinite hyperlink of the synapse — ‘a new language’ is the conceptual pain – all the data act as the hardweb character as if I dissect subjective writing, I’m striking the nude brain to a screen. This is the practice that hardweb creatures were disclosed. Blood Electric is presenting the aspect of a genetic hardweb clearly — the nerve cells that run through our gene dub — is the strategic object that our body codes erodes the world – ‘literature is networking to our gene dub’
You say “Writing born with the horizon of techno” – Are you saying that dance music and dance culture is an influence on your writing?
Yes–my writing is an industrial human body emulator–virus for the Genomics strategy. Rave that was turned hypertext is body-encoded.
Furthermore, would you say your writing was narcotic (in the way that, say, Coleridge or de Quincey or Burroughs or countless others wrote while “under the influence”)? Vital browser of nerve system is opened–language cell spins to genomewarable–nomads of the spiral form occur from my writing.
You talk about “new writing” – aren’t you just dressing up what the modernists did at the start of the twentieth century, a method Burroughs did something to update but which is in essence “stream of consciousness”, albeit stream of consciousness infiltrated by technology and html code etc?
I advocate a hypermodern literature to pop culture–it means the invasion to the gene code–and to update our abolition world code–because the characteristic of 20th century style ‘hardweb’ is a struggle. However my language cell is streaming the genomewarable struggle as 21st century style ‘hardweb’.
Who are you writing for? Who do you imagine your reader to be? Would you admit there was an element of impenetrability to “Blood Electric”?
I upload the focus of the nerve system–everything is to contact our language cells that were exposed to gene terrorism–I manufacture the literary plug-in of a vital browser.
Like a lot of experimental fiction, you expect your readers to work pretty hard – should reading be this difficult?
I expect my readers to scan the language cell – to cause the cracking of the gene corroded – to stream the change to the human body emulator.

(At this point, with blood spewing from his eyes, Peter Wild collapsed in a heap. Nothing seemed to make sense anymore. He contemplated suicide. He contemplated the idea of grafting machine parts into his brain somehow, wondering if a fusion of man and machine was maybe the way forward. Peter Wild was beaten. Beaten, I tell you. We took him in, we shored him up, we got Oscar Goldman to rebuild him. It cost us six million dollars (there goes the marketing budget) but it was worth it. Peter Wild was a bigger man. I won’t let him beat me, Peter Wild said. I’m going back in. Watch out Kenji Siratori, here I come.)
I think we need to define terms more clearly: what do you mean by “industrial human body emulator”? What do you mean by the term “genomewarable”? What do you mean by the phrase “the invasion to the gene code....”?
“industrial human body emulator”–it functions as a literary hacker in our genetic network. . . “genomewarable”–the hyperlinking genetic information–the genetic engineering liquidity of hardweb. . . “the invasion to the gene code”–so language cells in gene dub are produced by the genetic ’struggle=hardweb’.
There is a sense, I think, that you hide behind coded responses – you don’t clearly articulate answers – do you sublimate the intimacy of your SELF behind cyber doublespeak?
So I cause to escape SELF of the spiral mechanism to positive–it is the language cell sequence that was approximated to nerve transmission.
What is the TRUTH – for you – of what you say – yes, you have to work to uncover the meaning of your book (and the answers to these questions) but, having worked, what is there? Is it worthwhile, this “streaming of the genomewarable struggle . . .”?
TRUTH–data trash in the brain universe–nerve violence and nerve sex—we scan reality with the HIV form.
On the one hand, you’ve got STYLE – your style, this “new” style – but on the other you’ve got storytelling – the importance of telling a story in a way that can be understood (maybe not right away, but eventually) – are you telling a story in Blood Electric, or is telling a story outmoded?
I go across the digital narrative in the human body–Blood Electric is such software that captures “the digital narrative in the human body” and is archive that connects my digital narrative to your digital narrative.
Who is Kenji Siratori – man or machine?!?!
He is one hardweb that hyperlinked to our genetic information...
Figuring that the impenetrability of Blood Electric reflects the impenetrability (or lunacy – we can’t decide) of the man, Peter Wild decided to call it a day at this point. Blood Electric is published by Creation Books. Read it if you dare.» - Interview with Peter Wild

Kenji Siratori: TATTOO

:the BDSM_brain cell of chemical=anthropoids to the tragedy-ROM made of her retro-ADAM that does a different vital=plug-in to the ultra=machinary violence zone that was input the techno-junkies' that hyperlinks accelerates virus with the era respiration-byte. >>the mass of flesh-modules of the acid screams of hydromania....I turn on the murder-protocol of the cold-blooded disease of the artificial sun of chromosomal aberration....the soul/gram that the terror fear=cells rave of the drug embryo that digital=vamped so cadaver feti=PLAY turned acidHUMANIX of the data=mutant is infectious the FUCKNAM_gene=TV systems of dogs. :the human body pill of dogs the hallucination molecule of hydromania that fixed the murder-gimmicks of the chloroform larvas made of retro-ADAM that accelerates the gene=TV system of her era respiration-byte the nightmare that turned a plug clone-dive. --I invade the internal organ medium of the artificial sun with the cadaver feti=mode of the spiral mechanism of the data=mutant soul/gram that cancels the murder-protocol of her acidHUMANIX_storage. The chemical tragedy-ROM of a parasite guy I am disillusioned with the hyperreal existence-code of acid suck.... :hydromania of the cadaver feti guy of the chloroform body joint who is parasitic on the brain universe that got deranged does the soul/gram of the cadaver city of the boy roid nature that does the modem=heart of her era respiration-byte hunting for the grotesque in the BDSM state script....the mass of flesh-modules of Level 0 of lonely chemical=anthropoids is omitted the battle! :the DNA=channels of dogs the insanity medium that was done is attacked....the genomics screen-saver of her cadaver that streams to LEVEL of the scream of hydromania in the ultra=machinary violence area of the parasite guy where captures the soul/gram that was infected HIV made of retro-ADAM with the surrender gimmick of her era respiration-byte different vital=plug-in. Chemical=anthropoids inoculate the BDSM_nightmare-script of boy roid nature--the FUCKNAM_gene=TV system of the cadaver city that the cruel=emulators of the cyber quality of the human body pill dash so--. :the blue of the sky to I ill-treat the chloroform larvas made of retro-ADAM of the artificial sun in the parasite infection area of the soul/gram where sucks the murder-protocol of acidHUMAN that accelerated virus acid--the murderous intention of the era respiration-byte the human body pill of density 0 of the cadaver city the terror fear=cell the techno-junkies' guerrilla who different vital=plug-in fuck PLAY. :her data=mutant soul/gram cadaver feti guy of the era respiration-byte exterminated the thinking impossible brain system of hydromania hunting for the grotesque----the cadaver feti screen-saver of gene=TV that crashed the dogs that captures the modem=heart of her skizophysical escape the eyeball device of the BDSM_cold-blooded disease of the artificial sun to the spiral mechanism rave with the mass of flesh-module that was infected HIV made of retro-ADAM junk!! :the murder-gimmick of our soul/gram the chloroform larvas of the cyber quality of the chemical=anthropoids that the desire-protocol creatures the mass of flesh-module of the scream of hydromania that be infected with her acidHUMANIX_gene=TV system LOAD hunting for the grotesque capture her cadaver feti eyeball device. Rave the genomics BDSM circuit made of retro-ADAM is flip on with the acid existence-code of her era respiration-byte that emulates the murder region of the reptilian form of the DNA=channel so----.»

[Read more: http://www.3ammagazine.com/short_stories/fiction/tattoo/page_1.html]

«I’m all for experimentation in your work and when someone hits on a way of telling a story that’s unlike any I’ve read before, I love it, I eat that stuff right up. Like Mark Danielewski’s awesome House of Leaves. I’d hoped Blood Electric would be another case like that, where the author was so into the work, so intent on creating something totally unique and brilliant that I’d come away from it feeling like I’d just been staring into the face of a greatness I’d never achieve. Nope. Hell, I can string together a bunch of repetitive sentences and throw in a few colons and slashes and stuff.
I pressed on, read the first few chapters. But it soon became apparent that, not only did I not understand a word of what I was reading, I wasn’t even sure HOW I was supposed to be reading it. Do the slashes serve as some kind of punctuation? The dog ran/The dog jumped/The dog bit at fleas/? Or are the slashes part of the text? The dog ran slash the dog jumped slash? And the two plus symbols, is that read as “plus plus” or what? You can’t really read a book when you’re not sure HOW to read it, you know?
I think the reason I’m so disappointed in this book is because, of all the books I’ve received to review recently, I was most looking forward to this one. The back cover really intrigued me and made me want to dive into this and, hopefully, be blown away. “Vividly evoking the coming to consciousness of an artificial intelligence, Blood Electric is a devastating loop of language from the Japanese avant-garde which breaks with all existing writing traditions.”
Now THAT sounds pretty interesting. It’s weird and will probably take some concentration when reading it, but it sounds awesome. If only the actual BOOK had read more like that. This stream of consciousness stuff I could have worked out in the reading, but all that //::= stuff? I tried to piece together what I could from the text to try to find anything that resembled this back cover copy and I read the words “Cadaver City” and “dog” over and over, but in all those pages I read not one bit of anything that seemed like a STORY.
Blood Electric is not a novel, it’s a string of nonsense that wants to make you think it’s smarter than it is and you’ll be smarter because you read it, because it’s avant-garde and strange and it’s not for everybody, so if you read it, you’ll be one of the cool ones who doesn’t really get it but doesn’t want to say so because you think everyone else gets it and you don’t want to be the dumb one. The title should have been THE EMPEROR’S NEW NOVEL.
If you like your stories to make even a hint of sense, steer clear of this book. You’ve read the excerpts. You’ve been warned. It doesn’t get any better, believe me. You know, you can learn something from anything. Even the crap teaches you what NOT to write. Not so in this case. There are no lessons to be learned because I would never sink to utter gibberish and then try to convince readers it’s a novel. Avoid this one.» - C. Dennis Moore

Other books by Kenji Siratori: