A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man by Pierce Day – PART THREE OF FOUR

Have you read PART ONE of this FOUR PART REVIEW?

Have you read PART TWO of this FOUR PART REVIEW?

If yes, read on! If no, click those links!

A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man (Screenshot Books, 2024) is available from Metalabel

PART THREE: CLOSER TO THE TEXT, THE FAULTS FALL AWAY

Everything that has come before is from feelings, innit… is from overall responses to the text, A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man. What follows in today’s post is more of a deep dive.

I’ve written so far about how I felt tied and yoked to this novel due to an overwhelming sense that it was the [kind of] novel I would have loved to have written when I was younger. (Which I didn’t do.)

I’ve also written about how the novel and its positioning of literary history seems to deny pretty much all significant and meaningful texts from the last 100 years. That causes problems, thematically and creatively, that impact on the overall success of the text, in my opinion.

However, that doesn’t mean that the book, and its writing, its sentences, are bad. Far fucking from it.

As I went through the book I highlighted a huge amount of passages, sentences and chapters to return to. What follows below is just a small sample of those. I’d’ve done more, but I have to, I have to, I have to move on…

–///–

On p. 9, Warhol (Pierce Day’s narrator-protagonist) describes his phone screen as “more familiar than dick veins”, which is a fun, punchy, statement and an evocative comment on the ways in which technology supersedes even the relationships we have with our own bodies.

Then again, though, one could argue that if the phone fulfils a needless function, so too would masturbation, the way in which a person is most likely to become increasingly intimate with their own dick veins.

This poses a question, already, (and possibly answers it, too): if all we’d be doing without our phones is wanking as the world burns, does it matter that many people are playing (and losing at) social media instead?

Or, I suppose, would the world not be burning without these distractions?

Because a dick is built to (eventually) be satiated. Social media is not. One cannot infinitely scroll their own body. Eventually, one falls asleep…

–///–

Between pages 228 and 230, Day presents us with two versions of online radicalisation – both start with the online-beloved quotation from Network, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” and both arrive at a rage-fueled understanding of mass data surveillance and intentionally created mass individualisation and societal atrophy, though one gets there via Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro and a crushing sense that their masculinity is being repressed, while the other gets there via NPR and Tumblr and a sense that inequality is a robust patriarchal regime… Everyone is unhappy, and everyone is angry, but no one quite knows who to be angry at, at least as depicted here.

For me, this felt like a very neat literary device that made an intriguing point: that where isolation and drift from shared truths leads only to increased suspicion, an increased sense that one is right while others are wrong, while setting an (at least in theory) target of that rage as something nebulous and unchangeable or (somehow) unhuman. (I do mean “un-” rather than “in-”.)

I thought it was a good device, but I fundamentally don’t agree with a key part of the statement/opinion being expressed here.

The idea that progressive social movements are inherently as dangerous/corrupt as regressive ones is not a notion that holds up to prolonged scrutiny (or scrutiny unbiased by a wish to maintain the status quo). That major capitalistic enterprises and institutions chose to embrace progressive causes and images is not a sign that these things (anti-racism, fights against oppression etc) are tied to capitalism, rather it was a sign of the cynicism of capitalism itself: see how quickly corporate America has switched its marketing and imaging since Trump took office…

These were not beliefs of principles of corporate America: they were marketing tools.

No one in power seems to care about anything other than power, except possibly money…

But getting people angry at other people, instead of the instruments of power, is something that only benefits the instruments of power…

–///–

In Chapter 7, which is (I think) the shortest chapter, Day describes a revolution, with one dark gag that struck me – an English enjoyer of, as the Americans say, “humor” – as an enjoyable bit of verbiage: “it’s very easy to hack a bluetooth car into accident. I think we got up to ten dianas a week.” (p. 138) …

The droll, witty, playfulness continues onto p. 140 with “Anyone who stopped at the crossing was denounced as a  VirtualVichy regime infromant. Any 1 start restaurant reviewer was hung asa Security System collaborator.”

This is pleasurable and evocative prose. It’s cheeky. It’s funny. It’s good! (A note on in-text alternative spellings to be found below.)

–///–

There is a chapter near the centre of the novel from the perspective of Warhol’s ex, which does eviscerate the sexist/misogynistic tendencies and behaviours of the protagonist. 

These comments and descriptions veer between the dark and serious and the witty, for example commenting that in the Sylvia Plath on his bookshelf “dog ear curiously positioned very early on” (p. 195)

Warhol here is painted as the typical literary lad… One who holds no principles except for the ones he thinks are the right ones to hold in that moment… One who reads what he thinks he should but doesn’t necessarily enjoy very much at all… One who is self-important but also self-hating.

It’s all so familiar. It’s all so familiar.

–///–

On p.213 – 214, Day includes a character named as @cheese_ape free associating in the Notes app while smoking a vape.

This includes personal observations such as:

“I criticse everything to the point where I think I’m drainig for my friends […] I hate the way I think […] I have so much to do […] I don’t ghave many skills […] I listen to music constnalty to drown otut the silence” (p. 214, all spellings as per the novel)

Is the purpose of this passage to humanise? To mock?

It sits in a chapter that alternates between alphabetised lists of online buzzwords and stream of conscience passages describing various usernames acting online.

The passages I mentioned above about people being radicalised to the same antisocial conclusions is also from this chapter, which runs for just under 30 pages of mostly dense (if not always full width) prose.

There’s so much good stuff in here. It’s funny, it’s intelligent, it’s interesting.

But, while reading it, I did often feel strained, sometimes near-physically tired. It was not a novel I was able to focus on for hours at a time, because the demands (requests?) the text made on a reader were too strident for that.

However, going back through the book only re-connecting with the pages and passages that I highlighted as I read the novel linearly, makes me wonder if the fatigue I sometimes felt was justified…

Is this a book that could be read and analysed a page at a time and provide juicy, meaningful, engaging ideas and images to respond to?

Or have I just highlighted and picked out the most clear, the most pat, the most demonstrably criticisible parts of the novel?

Or have I only left myself notes and annotations leading back to those moments where the novel was at its peak?

–///–

… As you can also see from the quotations above, there are spelling errors or typos included in the text.

This is the case throughout, and not in a way that feels forced or bluntly achieved (i.e. the same words are not consistently misspelt in the same way, as if by a find & replace function).

This choice was one of the things that I found difficult to understand. Phones – and word processing programmes/apps on laptops – almost always automatically correct any perceived errors, as if trying to help. As A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man is not handwritten, this means that Pierce Day would have either had to backtrack while typing to ensure his preferred alternative spellings are preserved OR he would have had to intentionally set up his software and/or hardware in order for it to never try to tell him how his words should be spelt.

I’ve sent Pierce Day some questions to follow up on my reading of his novel, and my query about this is probably the one I’m keenest to get answered.

Because autocorrect is so ubiquitous in our communications technologies, and because we are conditioned/socialised to notice textual aberrations and inconsistencies, this is something that jumps out (especially as someone who has, from time to time, done proof-reading).

But this stylistic error doesn’t jump out as a mistake or an error or something that should be fixed, it instead feels more like a textural and a textual hint of flavour.

Does it add an immediacy? Perhaps. Is it fun/interesting? Possibly… it’s certainly not not those things.

Cynically, though, I wonder if instead its purpose is more ideological: is the purpose solelt to signify that the book wasn’t written by a generative LLM?

Hopefully I – and you – will get an answer soon!

–///–

Time passes (I have been working on this [series of] post[s] for about five weeks) and I am not done with it, I cannot put A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man away and forget about it, or (yet) finally tidy these thousands of words of notes into a concluded, complete, thing…

I just know, as I look through it and think about it more, that A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man is the novel my younger self would have written (set in London, obviously), had I the intellect and the ability and the talent.

But I couldn’t have done it then. And I wouldn’t want to do it now, and I don’t know how I would feel about it now if I had…

What is lost, then, in my reading, clouded as it is by this sense of of of of-

I don’t know if there’s a word for it.

There is something special here. There is something of meaningful literary interest. There is definitely something effortful.

But – I have to question – is it worth it?

Again, if you’re intrigued, the following link will help you find out for yourself:

A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man (Screenshot Books, 2024) is available from Metalabel

THIS FOUR PART REVIEW CONCLUDES TOMORROW