Over at The Signal Watch, Ryan recently posted arecommendation for Rucka and Williams’ collection of Batwoman’s adventures in DETECTIVE COMICS #854-860 called “Elegy.” His post had the following image whose richness and expressiveness had me over at Amazon lickety-split.

Thanks to Amazon Prime the book arrived today and, having read the first installment, I can say that the rave reviews were merited.

Most of my favorite comics have been plot driven. While the art of the Sandman series was always excellent, Neil Gaiman’s writing and rich structuring of inter-episode narrative is an exquisite puzzle-box of continuity and overlaps. As I said, the art grabbed my attention on this one and has remained mysterious and also very sharp and hard.

Williams’ art showing Batwoman is luscious with exacting, conscious detail paid to the light play on her glossy lips as well as the gauzy dream swirl of her red hair. Her face recalls an Italian Carnival masque and is sharp like the portraits of comic ur-artist Alex Ross. Yet Willliams wraps her and many backgrounds with a soft, impressionistic feel that reminds me of another favorite artist, Alphonse Mucha. Williams also shows a great deftness with color. Due to her costume Batwoman’s palette is decidedly red, but Williams’ aptitude for playing with the various hues of red keeps you from being visually overwhelmed with the color.

What I have been able to get at of the character and the plot I also like what we have. She’s recovering from a near-fatal attack, her emotional relationships are collapsed, and she’s recovering from the fact that her lesbianism cost her something important in the past. And let me add, she’s kicking much ass against the minions of an insane, vinderwhore sociopath called “Alice.” Much past that I can’t say. The mysteries of Batwoman’s visage and past is united with the mystery of the conflict between her and Alice.

I’m very excited to read more on this wintry San Francisco night.

Content seduces us (good, ill, pornographic) while the delivery mechanism re-patterns our thinking process. That is we can’t think about idea acquisition, as moderns, without “book.” We can’t think of “a day” without a notion of a measured, external reality that is divided into 246060 measured by the rattle of a cesium atom

Prologue

McLuhan: “The content of a medium is ‘the juice piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind’(Carr, 4).”

Consider: Maxim that “content is king” heard at SXSW and other conferences. We celebrate the content which has been “the same for every new informational medium going back at least to the books that came off Gutenberg’s press. Enthuniasts, with good reason, praise the torrent of new content…a ‘democratization’ of culture…[s]keptics, with equally good reason, condemn the crassness of the content…a ‘dumbing down’ of culture” (Carr,2).”

“The technology of the medium, however astonishing it may be, disappears behind whatever flows through it..”

This is as “The Matrix:” a world pulled over our eyes.

Confer: “Snow Crash:” by patterning our mind by exposure to certain content we immunize, or throw the gates open to the raiding Greeks, the defenses and structures of our mind. Seduced by Sinon’s story, we miss the function of the content (i.e. that he is a reuse designed to allow a mental re-patterning).

Thought: What if, by all this distractibility-inducing content, the famed “man verusus machine” war has already been fought and lost by my side: capitalism (Zynga/Pincus, FB/Zuckerberg, Twitter/…) and the espoused love of content have allowed the virus in, and now it can’t get back out.

Chapter 1

“the Net seems to be … chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation(Carr, 6).”

“‘I have lost the ability to read a longish article on the web or in print‘(Carr, 7).”

Philosophy degree holder Joe O’Shea, Rhodes Scholar: “I don’t read books…I go to Google and I can absorb relevant information quickly (Carr, 8).” Steven: This is absurd! College, esp. a philo. degree is not about getting the points ticked off in progression, it’s about learning to follow an intellectual thread. To know that Berkeley said X is worthless, to know that Berkley’s X was a reaction to Malabranche or Descartes and why is the point. What a waste of time, O’Shea. I suspect he’ll come to rue that being in print.

“I can’t get my [Literature!] students to read whole books anymore (Carr, 9)”

Chapter 2

Nietzsche acquired a Malling-Hansen typing ball, an early typewriter: “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts’ (Carr, 19).”

Pop-data: The brain has high neuroplasticity, through all life. Hope for stroke victims, keep practicing and your brain can learn to route around damage. Don’t stop.

Chapter 3

As we go through…[the process of] intellectual maturation [in a topic], we are also acting out the entire history of [that topic]. Specifically, as a child moves from primitive mapmaking (“Square and Triangle house with me out front”) to abstracted designs, assuming technical competence, (blueprint of my house on a birds-eye-view map…) we trace the evolution of that concept’s “being needed” through history. Lascaux caves didn’t need abstracted maps to know where a kill zone was.

Tools come in 4 varieties: * Sense amplifying: binoculars * Body amplifying: forklift * Nature altering: reservoir * Mind amplifying: clock,books, Web

The clock and the map changed us to believe there was an a priori entity “time” or “geography” that nostris abitis exists without us. A clock teaches us that something else is marking out a reality external to us but that we participate in, but it is we ourselves who created the thing! Cf. A. Huxley Island who points out that the gods are our inventions that we move that who, in turn, move us.

Walter Ong: “Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word.”

Technology has an intellectual ethic that goes with it, rarely recognized by its creators (Carr, 45). Our intellectual ethic is defined by books (even now, although slipping). Starts with Plato in the Phaedrus extolling written over oral knowledge transmission. Unsurprising, he was rich and well-born.

Chapter 4

Books went from being the realm of the rich to the many. The intellectual ethic (Chapter 3) went “viral.”

“[we]…trained our brains to control and concentrate attention (Carr, 64)”

“The reader becomes the book” in “deep reading.”

Books, their mass production, re-patterned, or pre-patterned in the case of children, the assumption of books’ existence and the requisite ability to focus and hold a thread of argument or description across units of time. This patterning may not be happening anymore, a stronger pattern is coming.

Chapter 5

The internet is ubiquitous and more media (including print journals) are going ot it. Hunter S. Thompson is only possible in a “Rolling Stone” that needs more pages. TV is looking more like the net, only so that it doesn’t let itself go to obsolescence. Libraries are replacing books with laptop space.

Chapter 6

No, hypermedia / web is not an improvement to a book. The image of a book: imago libri.

Book reading may return to being the activity of the rich. Mass book reading was a blip thanks to cheap paper presses. Steven: Soon the plebs will be amused by twitter and other Idiocratic “ow my balls” amusements while the skill to read, the will so to do, will return to the wealth classes whence reading started pre-Gutenberg.

The plebs will not know that their addiction to blip-meia has marked them as lower-class more surely than an Eliza Doolittle faux pas.

Consider the irony of the “populist” movements. It’s not that the “Tea Party” members actually know the material better, instead they believe in blip-media icons who interpret the facts for them and give them signs to promulgate as if they had read the material. Cf. “The Onion: Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be”

“Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence (Carr 108).”

Chapter 7

Mezernich “[Internet tools’] HEAVY USE HAS NEUROLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES”

The brain /is not/ a hard drive. It requires gaps to process and take in information. You’re filling a bathtub with a thimble, in that gap to refill the thimble magic happens. Continued bombardment creates superficiality and fleetingness in what you’ve “learned.”

The promise of hypermedia / video everywhere viz. pedagogy has not been achieved. It’s not made schooling better / faster.

Multitasking is a lie.

Chapter 8

Google.

Search engines are not a replacement for learning. A linked up library of alexandria (google books) with convenient hyperlinks is not better than books or a library. All that noise and clicking, the medium of online display is not conducive to actual reflective, stored reasoning.

The old “it’s not the technology it’s who uses it” is false. This is the important note about mind-altering tools. They have strong neurological changes. Give a man a shovel, he will still become strong. Give a man a Web and he will only be able to learn and think with it on, all the time, with him.

Any wonder, then, that always on devices are becoming so…essential? London cabbies’ knowledge is fading, kids’ ability to read a map, thanks GPS.

Google as Taylorist utopia. Everything is measured, A/B validated. Everything is measured in efficacy to the point sought. They cannot provide the context for the integration of the idea.

Chapter 9

“As people grew accustomed to writing down their thoughts and reading the thoughts others had written down, they became less dependent on the contents of their own memory (Carr, 177).”

“Naomi Baron: …a gentleman’s commonplace book …served…vehicle for and chronicle of his intellectual development (Carr 180)”

Memorization, a side effect of reading, or an accelerated effect of work is important and should be taken seriously.

The Net is not as the calculator. A calculator saves work of one type of memory, while you exercise the other. The Net mixes the two thus you hurt one at the expense of the other. The Web attacks working memory the calculator does not.

DF Wallace: “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think (Carr 194-5).”

Chapter 10

“Our ability to meld with all manner of tools is one of the qualities that most distinguishes us as a species (Carr, 208).”

Weizenbaum: “The computer was not a prerequisite to the survival of modern society in the post-war period and beyond, it’s enthusiastic, uncritical embrace by the most ‘progressive’ elements of american government, business and industry made it a resource essential to society’s survival in the form that the computer itself had been instrumental in shaping.” That is, what is the rule of the world that requires computers to function? It cannot function without computers. Computers’ existence creates a life where they cannot be rejected.

McLuhan: our tools end up ‘numbing’ whatever part of the body they ‘amplify’. the fingers became numb thanks to industrial weakving.

Even as our technologies become extenions of ourselves, we become extensions of our technologies

TS Eliot: The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.

Even knowing he talks to an ELIZA-bot, humans attribute minds where they are not.

Heidegger: “tide of technological revolution…so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that the calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.” The “frenziedness of technology threatens to entrench itself everywhere.” We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls (222)

Epilogue

Ironically, HAL, the AI’s meltdown and statement of fear, paranoia, is human. We are becoming the artificial. “as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence”

The conclusion that presents itself is unpleasant and simple. Our minds have changed to want more events of this type. “But how did I change my mind, I did no drug, I was not brainwashed.” Ah, but you were. You stood by, beguiled by the story of a lying Greek and didn’t realize that Troy was being sacked of its gold behind your back all the while you stood by, begging for more of the fabulist’s tale.

And humans, being gregarious normative creatures, are accepting that others are patterned this way, are patterning ourselves this way and are joining in the cabal to make the distracted society the norm. But I contend it’s neither making us better or more content.

The other day I was working at my my colleague S.’s desk and watched her face get twisted and contorted by phone calls, emails, IMs and desk visits. In fact watching her read her e-mail killed me because a pop-up popped up as she was in the email application to tell her that more email had arrived. Pair this with more and more IM update blinks and it was enough to make me angry at her for tolerating this. How do you ever feel caught up? How do you ever feel sane?

Where is there time for the quiet mind? And don’t you miss it?

Quo Vadimus?

Where are we going, where can we go? Are we caught in a recursive vice such that we’ll never be able to get out (like Postmodern discourse)?

Am I to delete my Twitter account, delete my Facebook account?

Am I to shut down my IM client and turn off my email program?

I don’t think the answer is an unequivocal “Yes,” but I believe the tools and the methods of interface need to be reevaluated, updated, and where necessary ignored. Certain metaphors (“email”, “feeds”, “push notification”) might need to be drowned so that we don’t drown. Just like “Metropolis’” Moloch Machine, we cannot make the survival of the system a higher good than our own healthy function.

I believe some innovators have adopted rules and heuristics for handling this situation. Consider how Richard Stallman (originator of emacs, one of the primary text editors of choice) “browses the web.”

For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.

“Slow in real-time…” this might be an important phrase.

Stallman is forcing the “social web” to map to his need of it, not vice versa. No doubt that since he engaged with the web through the portal of “e-mail” in his primitive mail reader (that he wrote) he reads web content not in the cursory ‘scan’ but in a thoughtful, considered fashion.

Also, Stallman clearly doesn’t “surf.” To get a link aggregator site (Facebook, Digg, Reddit), Stallman would have to send several email events to get the updates. As such, he simply can’t be as distracted as those of us who open up an aggregator page and explode out every length. Stallman is mastering a monkey-mind impulse to get more informational drug hits and is sipping a sherry unlike the majority of us who are guzzling dubious grade mental distraction like high schoolers at Señor Frog’s

Another data point is this image:

It strikes me that the difference between important and urgent is being defined and few people are working to do it. T

Conclusion

The net impression that I’m taking away from this book is that we’re a bunch of twitch-moded-next-flashing-light monkeys thanks to constant, ubiquitous, information teases. It’s the same thing that when tied to coins makes a slot machine a profit center. We must make ourselves (again) the masters of the tap. These thoughts were inspired by “The Shallows.” If you would like to explore these ideas further, you might find it a worthwhile read.

My friend Bruce Williams tweeted:

The phone had replaced the cigarette in terms of many gestures

While this quote is certainly pithy and seemingly spot on, it misses what is actually happening. Historically when smokers left the building it was to disconnect from the work environment. In the lounge, turned smoking lounge, turned back alley behind the dumpster, smokers could congregate and “disconnect:” talk about the weather, talk about the cigarette, offer the new girl from accounting a light, and sometimes when no one else was out, watch the world go by.

But a phone, and especially a smart-phone, does not offer this catharsis, it does not push the clutch in on the gears of the same monkey-work one does at his desk. It offers the chance to get away from the flurry of the mentes novae, but in fact encourages you to operate in this same mode, but for your personal life.

Perhaps because I walk down San Francisco’s 3rd street in the business district I’m keenly aware of this sight: clutches of smokers smoking and with nicotine delivery device-free hand, punching into their smart phones ignoring the people immediately to their left and right. It is the height of the narcissism of our times: dancing with ourselves, talking with ourselves.

No longer is “going for a smoke” an escape, it’s an excuse to got an informational+nicotine dose. While this population displays its effects clearly, it is reasonable to conclude that other tribes and social subsets are also being changed as the hyperconnected mens nova becomes their default mode of thought.

Previously I wrote about the mens nova, the new mind, and how, for some it is being programmed and encouraged by our peers and our workplace. It would seem that the mens nova should be localized among certain work disciplines or economically advantageous countries and age groups.

But it is not. As the elder generation dies away, the population will come to be dominated by those who understand and take as granted the mens nova. Further, the older and less digitally entrenched are not immune. Parents will be seduced by text messages, smaller, more frequent, offering status insights on a faster basis. Grandparents will embrace the iMac and a lighter digital bombardment as their teachers, the young, slowly show them how to scale emotional payoff (pictures, video, Skype) in real-time.

Furthermore, markets will demand growth as they always do. Capitalism demands that new consumers be found: the old, the young, the blind, the poor. To convert eyes and clicks into revenue, interfaces will be made more simple, arguments will be made more simple, and complexity will diminish even as social norms and distraction alerts increase their presence.

Again, it is not just the new that will conform to the mens nova. Old media will also put on new personae to fit into the expectations of the mens nova patterned readership. CNN’s news site is now a pale simulacrum of a news site. Fox news’ site blares and blasts with the subtlety of UK’s “The Sun).” But that’s not surprising, they’re owned by the same corporation. Short, contextless atoms of information float in a sea of pictures and sixty-four point headings. This is the world of Internet news and it is dumb, dumb, dumb.

The virus has us already. Barring shortage in materials or energy, we have no choice but await the new mind’s complete infiltration and dominance. What sort of animal is being created? What sort of political being is this? If we can’t make it through a paragraph of an intelligently-written newspaper, how can we be a people of critical thought?

Conspiracy

It’s not unreasonable here to let your mind wander freely and start to come to scary conspiracy-theory grade conclusions. I believe it’s worth getting them on the table:

• The Man™ designed the Web as a Huxleyan weapon of mass distraction. We won’t rebel not because we don’t care, but because there’s so much more noise everywhere else
• The Man™ / Space aliens are patterning our brains (Snow Crash or Macroscope style) to receive an imprinted thought virus
• The Man™ and other plutocratic institutions designed the Internet to amuse plebes whilst they plan a separate tier of actual knowledge and wealth creation information network (Internet 2, or “books,” which will fly under the radar as tmz.com and @justinbieber absorb larger slices of the attention pie)

None of these, formerly the realm of science fiction are inconceivable. Perhaps the greatest contribution of “The Matrix” cycle was to suggest that such a thing was possible and we should be wary of, wait, what just happened on Twitter? Does even the far-fetched nulltopia of “The Matrix” even seem impossible anymore? Or does it just seem to be a higher definition experience than what we currently mediate?

To Be Continued…

For me this was very telling because I’ve been afraid to admit to myself that my mind has been changing over these last few years and that I’m not entirely sure it has been for the better. Prior to college my mind, it seems to me, was more or less in the same state. It grew more mature, to be sure, as a function of time, but the process by which I thought seemed of a consistent form. Even my first two years in the work force didn’t seem to change my mind’s machinery much, but in the 2004-2007 range some changes took root. My mind started conforming to the mens nova. Not only did I obtain it, but I excelled at having it.

Two specific problems with this mind emerged that I see now. When I was living in SF, single, I realize I must have engaged many of my dates with this mind. When a lady might have been speaking to me, I could see where the thought was going and, I suspect, I betrayed that I knew the direction the discussion was going and tuned out until the end of the statement.

You see, I had taken to being content-oriented versus communications-oriented. Think about it, isn’t this the mode of your mind after a day at a business or role dominated by the mens nova?

To her great credit, my lovely girlfriend Lauren, has spent many, many hours trying to help me de-pattern this mind viz. interpersonal communication. Even as she worked to de-program these patterns I became and attained several times in 06-07 a modality of this mens nova called Twitch Mode that I wrote about in this very blog years ago.

Around the time I reached my peak efficacy at being a Twitchy machine, I started implementing changes in my work behavior. I was lucky I was able to do this. I started shutting down IM, I started queueing mail. However, even as I did that new mens nova- friendly sites entered my life: Facebook and Twitter gave swift informational reward for repeated visits. I got an iPhone, a beautiful device to make sure that your favorite distractor sites are never further than a swipe away.

Like most modern people I am more twitchy than I ought be, but I am less twitchy than your average 14 year-old. How I hope to retain a reserve of peace will be a topic for a future post.

However, I knew, and Lauren insisted that there was a calmer, more human, more intimate place whither to return. What if you never knew a world where the mens nova was, nova? This is precisely the situation of the youth of today. What some of us knew from the experience of “getting lost in a book,” or that the swamis knew as “relaxed contemplation,” or that yoga teachers know when executing uttitha trikonasana perfectly they will have never experienced and will not know to miss it!

For me, a day where I left in Twitch Mode with my heart pounding could be mollified with alcohol, a long weekend, or a trip kayaking. Like a weekend pill popper or a college freshman at the end of a bender I could sleep it off and get back to normal. Yet for for many of us it is getting harder and harder to get back to normal; for some of us normal has been razed and its fields salted by the armies of the new mind.

To be continued…

I recently read The Shallows and found it greatly enlightening. I plan on doing a series of posts on the topic of this book. My first post will be a basic synopsis.

Synopsis

Nicholas Carr’s argument in “The Shallows” is beautiful in its simplicity.

1. The human brain exhibits a property called neuroplasticity that endures through all stages of life. Therefore the mind’s physical structures are always mutable
2. What we do, which tools we use to express thought, and how we think fosters or inhibits focus in our minds and alters the quality of the thoughts themselves.¹ This is not merely a style of thinking change, but an actual change in the neural structures, per 1.
3. This patterning occurs, largely, without our knowing it.² While “distracted” the re-wiring occurs. Chief distractors are:
   1. content
      1. “Content is King” ethos seen in design community at large
      2. Content is chiefly lurid, gossipy, or pornographic.
      3. Repeated draws to primally-stimulating content distracts from the new patterning occurring
   2. social reënforcement:
      
      1. “What you’re not on BookFace?”
      2. “Can you sign on to IM so I can ‘ping’ you the servername?”
   3. other cues that satisfy reptilian brain pleasure / warning centers (legacy routines designed for predator evasion)
      1. “ding” sound
      2. flashing lights
4. With the mind having been changed, this mens nova, it now “esteems” content that works well with the newly formatted apparatus and has a harder time working with content that doesn’t. A quine-like statement emerges: The distracted mind favors that which works well within the framework of a distracted mind. Optimization for distraction occurs at the expense of focus and concentration
5. The mens nova is ill-optimized for depth, consideration, argumentation of length or scientific research, per previous point. This is precisely the mind to which the Internet distractors and design optimize as ideal
6. Popular culture maintains a Whig history style praise of this new mind. It avers myths that current research calls to question:
   1. “The mens nova is optimized for multi-tasking.” When we multi-task we are lying to ourselves. We are drowning and not admitting it to ourselves. We are reading 19-26 words and believing we have read an entire article
   2. “The mens nova will find richness in content that will give students more depth / (Postmodern tenet) will allow students to see around the Anglo-Western-male hegemony:” The purported benefits of the “multi-tasked mind” or the “media-enhanced schoolroom” have not surfaced
7. Market forces encourage the continued production of distracted mind applications and mind-distracting endeavors.
   
   1. Making interfaces that don’t pander to the mens nova will be deemed “un-intuitive” or “poorly designed”
   2. Other media are suborning themselves into the Net format:
      1. books via Google Book
      2. FoxNews and the “crawl bar”
   3. All facts are coming to be taken as atoms, not as components of opera.
8. We must choose to be aware of these changes and not pretend that homo cassium³ is inherently superior to homo sapiens
9. In a world of homo cassium what will his weaknesses be? Has the dazzling light of “progress” actually been a regress?

My next post will be a reaction to the book and a response to the distilled argument presented here.

Footnotes

1. I love this notion of our tools being part of what forms how we see and that our tools cannot be other than the way such that they are usable to us. I think there’s an interesting symmetry between the anthropic principle and neuroplasticity
2. Re-patterning is not bad per se. While a young we were seduced by “story time” and “book reports” into patterning our brain to be book-friendly, or not
3. Man of the nets. There’s a fun ambiguity implying that he might be trapped by said nets not just be of the Nets.

For these reasons, I decided to check out her second book without having read the first Are you there Vodka, it’s me, Chelsea. I was expecting something along the lines of David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day) meets Stephanie Klein (Moose).

Almost predictably enough, the opening vignette was about female masturbation. Le Sigh. Why is it that every comedienne since Rita Rudner feels the unstoppable compulsion to write about their gear? I get it, you’re post-feminism, you can sleep around, and feel good whenever you want too, just like men, right men, you get that, just like you! A story about menstruation or masturbation serves to titillate (just enough) but also gives enough plausible deniability such that if any backward-looking Neanderthal says “Did you really have to open with that?” the questioner is either a repressive, oppressive, or a pleasure-hating troglodyte.

This vignette, it’s subject matter aside, covered what’s best in Handler’s writing. Her voice is not much different than Paul Feig’s or Stephanie Klein’s: being a young, kinda nerdy kid in America isn’t easy (especially when your family is insert identity class here) and leads to humiliation, often, especially where parents, sex, or worse parents and sex are concerned. Handler’s career in Hollywood seems to have its antecedents in her youth, for as she narrates the occurrences she never fails to mention the pop culture milestones around her: Growing Pains or a Three’s Company lunchbox. It’s a style that we often see in Tom Friedman (who never leaves a brand name out) or, visually, in Quentin Tarantino or Wes Anderson.

The opening story about getting “the feeling” and on the matter of the Cabbage Patch Doll are the strongest stories.

As I said, where her family or her history is the topic, her voice is the strongest. But this book was written after she achieved some level of fame with her first book and her show, “Chelesa Lately.” The second theme is life post-fame, stunts she pulls in Santa Monica on her CEO boyfriend (from whom she is now estranged, as the press has it), jaunts to Turks and Caicos, etc.

It is here that the substance is so thin that it has a hard time being spun into a narrative substantial enough for humor to bounce back off of it. It’s a bit like reading someone’s blog post or email dispatch about their spring break. “Oh man, our taxi driver was so crazy, he roped this iguana…”

Now, to be fair, I didn’t think I was picking up Catch-22 (one of the few books that can make me laugh out loud), but I did want some diversion from the oodles of boxes stuffed in my home and the hours of technical reading I’m doing at work. I guess I just expected this divertissement to be more…diverting.

Men are men, dames are dames, bartenders sling murky off-brand whiskey when they deign to look up from the LA Times crossword where they’ve been stuck on 46 across all day, the corrupt win, and with any luck the good scrape by to see another day, sometimes.

This genre’s icons bear hard names like Chandler, Hammett, Leonard. The form dictates roughing-ups, sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, lonely codas of reflection and loss, and sticking it to Mr. Big, when you can, and the general chill that comes from the inescapable realization that it’s still all law of the jungle out there and that sometimes when you win, you lose. In short, one line from one of the greatest noirs ever covers it all:

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

If Jake Gittes could feel like he was in Chinatown even as he was in LA, what happens if you take a Jewish kid from the midwest with a crusading heart, plunk him down in Tokyo’s seediest, yakuza-hosting districts as the Yomiuri’s newspaper’s vice beat reporter? The book Tokyo Vice tells that tale. Here’s the kicker, it’s all true¹.

The story is tri-partite. First our narrator Jake comes to Japan and against all odds winds up getting accepted to write for the Yomiuri Shinbun, something like the New York Times. It narrates a cub reporter’s early and naive steps. Jake gives us a picture of the politics of the newspaper and the politics of the police department. If the structure that is overt and explained is complicated and designed to protect the honor of all involved, the secret structures that form how the work really gets done is even more interesting.

In the second act Jake describes his continued growth of a network of whores, pimps, yakuza, and cops. The stories generally fall into the form of where a cultural precept is discussed and stories from the beat clarify the issue or the story about the pursuit of a meaty topic is given. In the first class we have the explanation of a woman’s place at the paper (“Evening Flowers”) or a case about a serial killer (“Whatever Happened to Lucie Blackman”). These two parts set up the conflict that opens and closes the book: Jake getting on Yamaguchi-gumi gang leader Tadasama Goto’s hit list and calling in all the favors and players we’ve come to know through the first two acts.

Amazingly enough, the thing that ties all those pieces together is honor. The cops’ honor to the favors paid, the yakuza soldiers loyalty to each other, and the businesslike honor of the criminal empire known as yakuza (“Goldman Sachs with guns,” Jake quips). The stories are independent vignettes that, in sum paint a confusing picture of the turmoil around doing what’s right. Doing right by some sacrifices other good people, to win you have to be willing to lose it all, left and right.

If “Chinatown” could make that world complex with only one financial scheme and relatively few power gangsters, Tokyo, with its density and wealth, escalates that by a whole order of magnitude.

Jake gets his larynx squeezed by silent, nine-fingered enforcers. Jake plies secrets out of cops and criminals in hostess bars in Roppongi with sake and blackmail. He takes lonely walks into the suburbs to visit a cop mentor and he gets very, very little sleep.

I really enjoyed the story, for all its grit. You can easily imagine the wrinkled, dirty suit at the end of the day. You can imagine the reek of cigarettes and perfume and you can understand the paranoia of knowing that one of the most powerful gangland leaders has dozens of punks who know they can make a big splash by doing the boss a favor and getting rid of you.

I really enjoyed the descriptions of the inter-factional yakuza system of obligations. It’s amazing to consider that there’s a board of directors and that rival sub-factions have no compunction about getting into the board’s good graces by shutting down non-performing franchisees. It’s a very, very different way of looking at organized crime.

For me the payoff for the two gritty opening parts is the mournful, elegaic third act. Good friends die, evil prospers, a true innocent is destroyed with Jake as the one who brings it about, and Jake scores a last, final, desperate victory. He manages to put a scratch in the paint of the organized crime juggernaut that is the yakuza’s enterprise. This sadness is so critical to noir, where the hero re-connects to human emotion in the quiet spaces. For this reason I think the part’s title “Dusk” is perfect.

I think that this sadness aspect was caught in this great hard-boiled text from “Evening Flowers:”

Setsunai is usually translated as ‘sad,’ but it is better described as a feeling of sadness and loneliness so powerful that it feels as if your chest is constricted, as if you can’t breathe; a sadness that is physical and tangible. There is another word, too — yarusenai, which is grief or loneliness so strong that you can’t get rid of it, you can’t clear it away.
There are some things like that. You get older and you forget about them, but every time you rememeber, you feel that yanusenai. It never goes away; it just gets tucked away and forgotten for a while.
…
What’s yarusenai?
It’s that one email you never replied to and will never open. It’s the bad advice you gave and the phone call you should have made and everything that came out of it. It’s thinking about the friends you suspect you might have been able to save.

The language is terse and crisp, like McCarthy or Hemingway, the economy and unadorned nature of the language prompts a clarity and a nakedness that helps advance the story.

It’s a good read, and a lot of fun.

Updated: April 2 evening for typographical errors.

1. We don’t actually know how much is “true.” Jake may well have bent the story to protect the innocent, to hide secrets, etc. This text assumes the truth is told.