Nomad Codes

ERIK’S TRIP

    By Marcus Boon

    My first memory of Erik Davis is of playing the Japanese game of Go with him in an apartment in Brooklyn in the dark days of the early 1990s, while the plagues of AIDS, the New World Order, and our own young male testosterone-addled consciousnesses swirled around us. Dinosaur Jr. or the first Sun City Girls record was on the stereo as antidote, and there were stacks of comix, used pulp sci-fi novels and other pop arcana all around, glowing with totemic intensity. We played Go because we were both high on Deleuze and Guattari’s recently translated theory bible, A Thousand Plateaus , which approved of Go as a rhizomatic, non-hierarchical game. It all felt like something out of a back issue of Doctor Strange , the two of us seated cross-legged on some abstract gaming board, calling forth whatever powers we could. We were both interested in materialist magic, some kind of key that would unlock and transform the universe around us, and one of the places we sought it was in writing.
    Erik has been one of the chief chroniclers of some of the madness of our times, publishing his work in magazines that make up a catalogue of the US hipster avant-garde post-1980s: the Village Voice, Details, Mondo 2000, Wired, the Wire, Salon, Gnosis, Yeti, 21C, Feed, Strange Attractor, Reality Sandwich, Arthur . Sometimes one of these magazines morphs into the mainstream and an actual paycheck, sometimes one of them sinks without a trace. Either way, except for the web-based Feed and Reality Sandwich , these are some of the last vital gasps of the Gutenberg galaxy, the universe of the printed word whose outer limits Erik has explored, without any security or guarantees.
    Erik is known for his writing about gnosis, subject of his acclaimed first book, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information . But what is the gnostic situation? A basic definition: you are in a trap and you need to escape! Many of us have lived our whole lives in this strange trap that’s variously given the names of late capitalism, postmodernity, or simply Babylon. What happens to writing and writers in this situation? Greil Marcus wrote that to understand Lester Bangs, you’d have to recognize that the greatest American writer of the 1970s might write nothing but record reviews. To understand Erik and his fascination with weirdness and esoterica of many kinds, you’d have to recognize that just writing record reviews would be way too conservative an approach to actually describing our world today.
    Erik has been one of the most enthusiastic advocates of Philip K. Dick’s writing and vision of the future, and like that great master of late-twentieth-century fiction, Erik has made his way on his own, without academic backing, through the deserts of the real and all the strange encampments lurking there, whether in Nevada, New York, San Francisco, or London. Like Dick, Erik is a native Californian, and a passage from a letter from Dick to Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem illuminates something of the method and environment that they share. Lem had previously praised Dick as the only great sci-fi writer around (besides himself, presumably!), but sniffed that it was unfortunate that Dick appeared to be so obsessed with such tawdry, disreputable subject matter. Dick responded:
    But you see, Mr. Lem, there is no culture here in California, only trash. And we who grew up here and live here and write here have nothing else to include as elements in our work; you can see this in On the Road . I mean it. The West Coast has no tradition, no dignity, no ethics—this is where that monster Richard Nixon grew up. How can one create novels based on this reality which do not contain trash, because the alternative is to go into dreadful fantasies of what it ought to be like; one must work with the trash, pit it against itself, as you so aptly put it in your article. Hence the elements in such books of mine as Ubik . If God manifested Himself to us here He would do so in the form of a spray can advertised on TV.
    Dick died in 1982, but the trash has continued to pile up sky-high. Using the word “trash” sounds condescending—but the point is that in our society, anything of value is thrown out, devalued, abandoned and forgotten. Take Erik’s second book, a magisterial reading of Led Zeppelin’s fourth LP that appeared in the 33⅓ series of books (OK, I lied, Erik does write about records too). Zoso is a mass-cultural