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brwncns · 8 years ago

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“An Invisible Cauldron Of Black Magick” - Jarett Kobek

Turkish-American writer Jarett Kobek’s novel I HATE THE INTERNET has been called a “relentless, cruel, hilariously inflamed satire” (by Greil Marcus), “entertaining” (by the New York Times) and “useful” (by the author). Kobek was compared to Michel Houellebecq as well as a “mad priest”. We asked him about the book and also his novella ATTA, a fictional biographic account of 9/11 attacker Mohamed Atta.

What’s the most common question you are asked about I HATE THE INTERNET?

The question almost every interview starts with is someone saying something like, “Well, we know that you hate the Internet, but is there anything good you can say about it?” This is often tied to the supposed success of the book via chatter on the Internet.

The book starts and ends with a curse, a death threat, and in-between someone prays to Google and other Internet giants. Is the Internet a spiritual place for you?

I guess it depends on whether or not you consider an invisible cauldron of black magick in services of Necromancers to be “spiritual.” In theory, the necromancy would be predicated on an engagement with spirits and their world, but is the mere presence of the dead “spiritual” in the colloquial sense? Your guess is as good as mine!

Do you have a favorite meme?

I like that Scumbag Steve.

Did you ever write a YouTube comment?

Never have. Never will.

There’s a clip of a man getting very agitated at a reading of yours because he can’t understand your position that free expression on Twitter is not possible but rather an illusion, because all the content generated on social media is part of the company making profit. Do you think real political discourse is not possible on these platforms?

Political discourse is possible, but from the Left, it’s the same kind of discourse that you used to be able to find in cafes in Berkeley and the East Village. Powerless people talking to themselves. What’s new is that whereas before the discourse had a sort of oppositional relationship to our corporate masters, now it serves their financial interest. That guy at the reading in City Lights was right, sort of—he was screaming about there being a Revolution on Twitter. The only problem was that he had the wrong revolution, as he was a Sanders supporter. I think it’s impossible to deny that these platforms are capable of hosting very powerful political dialogues—but only for the Right. After all, Twitter got a cryptofascist elected to the Presidency.

So we generate money, we basically work for Facebook and feed it when we write something there. How is that different to reading an article and the advertisement around it online, or walking through a street with billboards?

The difference, I think, is that the people who created the billboard or wrote the article were, in theory, paid for their efforts.

Was “Arab Spring” really exploited by companies like Facebook & Twitter in the way that they paid for marketing it as an event they made possible?

I don’t know if they actually paid for marketing relative to it, but I can assure you that the way the so-called Arab Spring was covered by the news media in the US was as an advertisement for Facebook and Twitter. Google even got in on the cycle when one of their employees was kidnapped. I went to Cairo a few weeks after Mubarak fell and no one mentioned any of these companies. All they talked about was money and how they had none. I did see a Facebook logo spraypainted on the side of a building near Tahrir Square—I assumed the company’s predilection for graffiti artists, they paid someone to put it up.

How is opposition possible?

It may not be. We may just have to wait until the people in control get so out of control that they break everything. But it doesn’t hurt to be in opposition—especially if it gets people out of their houses.

You write that a medium is inhabited by its intention at founding. How did you develop this thought?

I don’t remember! But I know what must have inspired it: the way that every new technology is presented as a received event, as a foreordained inevitability. Which is really crazy, when you think about it—it suggests that the technology is a fact floating around in the aether, waiting to be discovered, when actually it’s a thing shaped by the perceptions of its creators. It’s a little like a novel—no one receives a novel, everyone knows that someone wrote it.

Your book is written like it was aimed at a future where the things described have already vanished. Why?

Writing about the Internet, or technology in general, is a thankless task. Books about the Internet start to rot from the moment of publication. Imagine if I Hate the Internet had been written ten years ago—it’d be a book about MySpace. So there was a strategy cribbed from Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions—to treat every day objects and ideas as if they required definition and explanation. This ended up being both funny and, hopefully, hedges against the future.

There is also a timeless quality in your novel ATTA, a young man, lost, almost like a Bildungsroman. It’s also a story of psychosis, of madness, with a musical undertone, dark, brooding, funny. I was wondering about some elements, structure-wise, the countdown of chapters, the change of perspective. How did you come to these decisions?

Most of it was instinctual, just trying to figure out how to make the book as readable as I could. ATTA is a strange book—it’s the best thing I’ve written, but it’s also the one which felt the most like channeling, as if the normal decisions and thoughts in terms of writing were more received than consciously thought out.

I like how the father talks to his son, treating him like a child. How much of the story was invented, how much was research?

I think ATTA is about 95% factual, and that factuality is very heavily researched. The 5% that’s not factual is pretty clearly fictitious. In terms of the father/son relationship, that’s pretty much based on interviews with his father, where his father admitted that this was how he talked to his son.

How did you research? Where did you travel, what did you read? Did you actually go to Mecca and to Hamburg?

I didn’t travel for the book. I didn’t have the money! In terms of the reading, I read everything. Every news article, every book, all the FBI files that got released under an FOIA request that some Truthers put online. Just everything.

Are you interested in the perspective of Truthers as well?

No. It’s stupid. But they were useful in doing the book, because they’d put so much of the FBI’s information online.

How did it feel to write this? To be in his mind?

It was fine until the last chapter—when I had to start writing the actual hijacking, it was the only time my own writing made me sick.

Did you have problems with the idea of sympathizing too much with Atta, idolizing or setting a monument to him?

No. I don’t think the book is particularly sympathetic to him—unless you believe, which some people might, that even presenting the individual is inherently sympathetic.

What interested you more in him than someone who was more of a planner in the background, like let’s say Bin Laden?

The interesting thing about the historical figure of Mohamed Atta was his educational background—he did his bachelor’s in engineer/architecture, and his master’s in urban planning. His master’s thesis was on the city of Aleppo, and was specifically about what he viewed as the imposition of Western style architecture on an ancient “Islamic-Oriental” city. In effect, he wrote a document that critiqued modernist architecture and then suggested that it be pulled down and destroyed.

After 9/11, the event was viewed entirely through the prism of Islamic-themed terrorism. But the reality is that Atta wasn’t an imam—he hadn’t even really gone to a madrassa. His training was entirely in architecture, he’d presented this thesis about removing modernist architecture, and then he participated in the biggest attack on modernist architecture in world history. Surely this is a useful prism through which to write about the event? As a matter of architectural critique.

So that’s where the book came from.

It seemed Atta wanted to put Aleppo back in some kind of “primary”, more human state when he wrote his thesis – and Manhattan with its rectangular structure and buildings like the WTC is the antipode to this. You also mention Yamasaki’s failed housing project. And in both novels, there’s this theme of gentrification, of a changing city (Aleppo, San Francisco). What interests you about that?

By virtue of being overprivileged, I’ve spent pretty much my entire adult life in American cities that are either in the process of being gentrified or have been gentrified. When I moved to New York, I was 17 and it was still fairly grimy in the East Village, and I was young enough to believe that this was a permanent state, that the East Village would always be scummy and interesting. Reality disabused me of that notion and I’ve been dealing with the wound ever since.

Where do you live now?

I’m back in Los Angeles. My solution to gentrification was to move to a neighborhood originally built for the gentry.

How has the book been received?

It did well at first, was then ignored for a few years, and then got picked up by academics, who seem to like writing about it and teaching it. So it’s had a very nice life and sells reasonably well for a small press book. It’s gone into several printings.

ATTA was published by MIT, if I see that correctly, an institution that, as you describe it in your latest novel, develops arms for the military. How do you feel about that?

The book was published by Semiotext(e), who are distributed by MIT Press, so it’s a little more complicated than saying that they published it. In terms of my feeling, I think the act of being published by almost anyone but yourself is an act of moral compromise, but that one accepts the reality of the situation and goes forward.

Do you see yourself as an angry young man?

I’m past the age where I can comfortable call myself young. But I’m definitely angry.

I HATE THE INTERNET / ICH HASSE DIESES INTERNET:

http://weheardyoulikebooks.com/releases/i-hate-the-internet/

http://www.fischerverlage.de/buch/ich_hasse_dieses_internet_ein_nuetzlicher_roman/9783103972603

ATTA:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/atta

Questions: Nikias Chryssos. Picture: Courtesy of Jarett Kobek.

#interview #jarett kobek #literature #internet #truther #9/11 #scumbagsteve

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