Scanning the Brain Box: Transverse and Axial Cross-Sections (An Anti-Manifesto)

by Richard Kadrey

A doctor told me about an incident in medical school where his teacher held up a model of a brain and said, "This is the human brain. We don't know shit about it." While that's a bit hyperbolic, you get the point. Compared to other organs of the body, we don't know much about the brain because the only time we can get really up close and personal with it is when its user is dead, and then the brain isn't doing anything very interesting.

On a related front, English Lit types at various unnamed west coast universities occasionally ask me to talk to their classes about what it is to be a science fiction writer, and could I please explain what cyberpunk is. I always refuse the latter, pointing both teacher and class to Bruce Sterling's introduction to the Mirrorshades Anthology and explaining that I have nothing to add. I do, however, talk about how I write. And for this I use the Brain Box.

The BB is a personal external manifestation of what that anatomy teacher wanted--a wide-screen, all color, all singing, 3D look inside a live person's skull. In this case, mine. It's really just a box of research of materials--books, magazines, catalogs-- but all of them are important to me. They represent a set of personal and professional obsessions, and as such are a pretty good indicator of my state of mind at any given moment. When I wrote my first book, Metrophage, the BB contained arcane medical texts, military hardware catalogs, anarchist tracts and collections of Buddhist Sutras.

As I've worked on my new novel, the Brain Box has pulled new texts and ideas into its orbit, like some chaotic attractor: the history of European exploration in the Amazon, psychoacoustics, South American Indian mythology, music and chaos theory. . .

What follows are a few highlights from the Brain Box, Release 2.0. These texts were not selected because they help me understand the world better, but because they confirm my belief that EVERYTHING is infinitely weirder than we give it credit for, all we have to do is see it properly. The Brain Box is my anti-manifesto-- a Surrealist Starter Kit. Just add your own obsessions and stir.

Have fun and remember the advice given by the trumpet Magus, Louie Armstrong : "You gotta forget about the wrong notes and the right notes and just play it the way it wants to be played. If I had a minute for every wrong note I've turned into a tune, I'd be around here until the great trumpet blows the last lick."

(For the sake of space, I'm not going to mention obvious stuff like New Scientist, RE/Search or Loompanics, since these are reviewed elsewhere.)

Technical Publications

Technical and trade magazines are great for learning how different people and professionals view themselves and others. Virtually every profession has a trade journal; check with the general reference desk of your local library. Ask your friends. Look in the Encyclopedia of Associations. Be on your toes. Doctors offices and industrial shops are great places to steal magazines. Some of my favorites are Diagnostic Imaging, a radiological journal, and Cardio, for heart specialists. Check the ads and return the Reader Reply cards. You will be inundated with ads from companies that make the kind of hardware doctors, fabrication firms, nuclear power plants, etc., use everyday. One company sent me a sample of their new gamma ray shielding, which now adorns a wall of my office.

The Merck Manual

Stratagene

Industrial Safety and Security Co.

Intelligence

Covert Action Information Bulletin

Weapons/Military Hardware

Military Hardware Catalogs

Shooter's Bible

Postmodernism

The Condition of Postmodernity

Body Invaders

Semiotext(e) Foreign Agent Series

In Pure War, architect- cum- military theorist Paul Virilio expounds on the cultural impact of technology, which has resulted in our current obsession with speed.Speed is, Virilio believes, the logical end of modern technology, and the thing which destroys us. By removing long-standing concepts of time and space, placing the world at our doorstep, Virilio believes we cheapen all experience.

Simulations is the infamous book in which Baudrillard details our current and future obsession with hyperreality -- counterfeit versions of experience, time, life and goods. Not an easy work, but probably his most important.

The essays in Looking Back on the End of the World take for granted that the world as we know it is going to destroy itself. Not the physical world, but the world that was "never more than an image, a regulative idea, a normative concept for planning..." These eight essays look back at the end of our world from somewhere beyond the cultural apocalypse. This isn't as depressing and hopeless as it might first sound. The authors' outrage at institutional abuses of power and the replacement of images for human interaction is genuine and profound.

America

Body Modification

Tattootime

Tattoo Advocate

PFIQ

body art

Tattooing is only one type of body modification. Two magazines, Britain's body art and the U.S.'s PFIQ, while featuring lots of beautiful tattoos, also cover other forms of body manipulations-- mostly piercing. The main differences between the piercing and tattoo scenes is that over the last decade tattooing has moved into a more above-ground, almost mainstream context, while the piercing arts, with their close ties to fetishism and the S&M world, remain more overtly sexual.

PFIQ (Piercing Fans International Quarterly) is devoted specifically to piercing, although many of their subjects also sport beautiful tattoos. body art takes a more general approach to body modification, covering tattoos, piercing, fetish clothing and make up. What makes these magazines compelling is that they prove that imagination is virtually the only limit to how you can redesign and enhance your body.

Body Play

Sex Zines

Frighten the Horses

On Our Backs

The Sandmutopia Guardian

Taste of Latex

Sexual Portraits

Sexuality Library

For an extra $2, you can get the catalog from their sister enterprise--Good Vibrations-- featuring high quality sex toys. The catalog even has a whole section of safe sex paraphernalia and information.

Surveillance/Countersurveillance/Law Enforcement

Elsevier Science Publishing

CCS Communication Control, Inc.

Miscellaneous

Amok

The Amok catalog is required reading for all information-junkies, mutants, lunatics, and anybody else interested in experiencing worlds and thoughts you've probably never seen before (and in Amok, there is always something you haven't seen before).

There is an obsessive quality about this 351 page catalog, an almost puritanical drive to present every subject imaginable. The catalog is a kind of hymn to obsessiveness, covering every topic from forensic medicine to fundamentalist Christian rants to death camp revisionism to modern lit to experimental psychology to pop culture criticism to porn to military theory to cyberpunk to drugs to UFOs. . . and on and on.

A side-effect of reading the Amok catalog is that it could just make you reconsider the very nature of imagination, freedom and possibility. In a world where works like Facial Rejuvenative Surgery, the CIA entrance examination, An Album of Mayan Architecture, Girls Who Do Stag Movies, and the complete works of Nabokov and Flannery O'Connor can exist side by side, anything is possible.

Afkar Inquiry

The Black Box

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