We’ve heard a lot lately about “the death of the novel,” due mostly to how they can fall apart when they get wet, and also the high cost of parking near book stores. But a new development is here to tell us that the novel is alive and well, and that development goes by the name of Books On The Brain (LiberTech Tech, $590 + anesthesiologist)!
BOTB is a groundbreaking literary outpatient procedure, in which 1,470 volumes of beloved high-quality fiction are rammed into the prefrontal cortex and temporal lobe on the end of a surgically-adapted Heiss/Sappenheimer captive bolt pistol. Previously used for killing cattle and in a Cormac McCarthy story, the technology has been thoroughly cleaned, then modified by LiberTech Tech of Straubing, Germany (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon Inc.) to deliver beloved literary classics at 180 ft/sec to the parts of the brain that process memory, cognitive analysis and surprise endings.
It isn’t often that a product or a procedure like this comes along. In fact, it’s never, not counting the ancient Egyptian practice of honoring the god Thoth by shoving sacred papyrus scrolls into the ears of slow priests.
I had my “Surgi-Reading” done at ShermOaks GenHosp, not (but, for some reason, frequently) to be confused with Sherman Oaks General Hospital. GenHosp is a quiet 2nd-floor office above a business that apparently decides if people are able to re-enamel their sink or if they will need a whole new sink. Thus: a parking lot full of sinks.
In the small, tidy office itself, Craig was my surgeon/literary advisor. Before I went “under the gun,” Craig emphasized how important it is, vis-a-vis accessing the proper part of the brain, to have the head going in the correct direction. This is accomplished by making sure the nose is pointing straight ahead. I signed-in at noon on a Wednesday, did my “reading,” then was taken home on the bus by my sister with my face in a towel at 1:15.
If I was asked what it’s like having nearly fifteen hundred classic works of literature slammed by 700 psi of compressed air into my neocortex, I would have to say that, after the laundromat smell of the cautery gun fades, it’s a lot like the familiar “brain freeze” from drinking an Icee too fast, mixed with the multicolored agony and joy of being simultaneously fully, ecstatically alive/at war/a rabbit.
It also feels like looking at a large black horse smelling of Yardley’s English Lavender that is, too, a playing card and repeats the word “plastron.” I don’t know how to explain this better.
Not all the 1,468 novels (& 2 cookbooks; a nod to the ladies) “appear” at once in the memory. I found it difficult to access Gunter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959) until I had eaten a large slice of Schwarzwaldtorte and goose-stepped vigorously for half an hour. Readers with downstairs neighbors may find this problematic. Likewise, some passages from the later e e cummings “come out” (i.e., manifest themselves to consciousness) like the “computer code” of a corrupted MS Word file and when I try to recite them a sound comes from my mouth like Donald Sutherland at the end of Bodysnatchers, but screechier and with a deeply-felt sense of God having fled His creation.
Also I’ve found books with conflicting “messages” have a way of finding each other in the brain and doing a whole Sharks/Jets thing. For a while, The God Delusion (Dawkins, 2006) and The Bible (King James, 1611) fought for dominion at the implant site, making me swerve off the road saying “tattagggattagagaga” with blood coming from the corners of my eyes as I was driving to Gelson’s.
That side effect aside, these are both a fine three-tenths-of-a-millisecond read.
Some minor complaints/snafus I noted in my first week of reading/recovery:
* Several pages near the end of Anne of Green Gables seem to be missing. What happens to her? When I pick up a print copy and I get to the part I’m missing, my eyes cross and much urine is let go of.
* The 1963 children’s book Little Majorette and a 1955 Mark Harris novel were apparently interpolated into one volume, Bang The Drum Majorette Slowly.
* Likewise, and no less disturbing, The Joy of Sex (Comfort, 1972) is illustrated by the drawings from Brighty of the Grand Canyon (Henry, 1953).
* I seem now to be able to speak French (not a feature mentioned in the Books On The Brain pamphlet), but only in the poncy hand-on-hip manner of Louis Quatorze. This has got me banned from two auto body repair establishments.
* The novels of Jonathan Franzen still seem iffy.
A month after the procedure, I am better-read than ever and only out the equivalent of the price of two large dinners at a nice restaurant with relatives who drink.
Some will argue that Books On The Brain is a technological step too far, but every generation has its Cassandra Petersons. Aware of how, only a century ago, our great-grandparents would have scorned the idea of reading Lolita a) at all, and b) on electronic devices, we should be open-minded enough to foresee this becoming the dominant way that literature will be consumed, leading, I expect, to the acronym TL;DRIMB: Too Long; Didn’t Ram Into My Brain.
Meanwhile, the Author’s Guild has filed suit on behalf of 204 of its members over their works’ inclusion without royalties in LiberTech’s steel-bolt-ramming database. LiberTech attorney Richard Baline repudiates the Guild’s complaint, arguing, “This is no different than if you had one thousand, four hundred friends who were really jazzed about different books they just read and they all just yelled the stories at you really fast, in each author’s style, in a loud bar while you were under 5 mg/kg of IV Ketamine.”
One could see this case stretching on for a long time, much like the fictional case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Bleak House (Dickens, 1852), preceded by Black Beauty, followed by Blow, Homeless Trumpeter, For Street Meat (Philip K. Dick, 1957).
All of this invention’s flaws being considered, it is a wonderful thing, when others quote from great works of literature at parties and pet de-wormings, to be able to contribute to and ideally destroy the conversation, even if for some reason the work of authors with more than 3 vowels in their surname (Kerouac, Ondaatje, Ortega y Gasset) comes out like 1980s dial-up modem noise. Four stars!
