Muffy: Or A Transmigration Of Selves (Book Review)

Transgressive literature often tries to say something but the execution makes them say something else by accident. In the case of Muffy: or A Transmigration of Selves this is especially true since unlike other transgressive novels I’ve read like American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis or Michel Houellebecq’s The Map And The Territory where Patrick Bateman is a character intended for us to detest and The Map And The Territory feeling more like a fictionalised essay about the contemporary art market and capitalism’s confusing relationship with human labour, Muffy is a bit like American Psycho in that it also contains sexualised torture scenes but this time Patrick Bateman’s been swapped out for this left-leaning extremist woman whose commentary would be grating towards American readers who would find the beating of the Ronald Reagan dead horse juvenile via the author’s implying the man tripled the national debt buying a sculpture made from the corpses of an African American family… to an Australian man like me whose irreverence towards authority is considered a national trait shared by many other of my countrymen and women, this satire is a bit lost in translation much like I imagine my own work’s references to the OFLC would be lost on readers if I didn’t put footnotes in my novels out of mercy. Muffy is a novel that in all honesty, I can only explain via reference to obscure lesbian internet comedian reviewer Diamanda Hagan and her internet show on Blip.tv where she dresses up as a supervillain with minions and reviews Z-grade transgressive cinema as well as the occasional special episode about more mainstream stuff. If Diamanda Hagan reviewed books instead of messed up cinematic delights, this is the kind of book she would review on her show. It’s so eerily up her alley that the book explicitly mentions that the character Sarah who makes sculptures out of human corpses has a collection of depraved cinema at her disposal. Diamanda Hagan is the sort of person who’d find a book where a woman is masturbated with the severed arm of a still alive human baby compelling if not worthy of consideration for examining its core themes, so if you’re part of Hagan’s fandom and you’ve ever wanted a book that combines The Raspberry Reich’s political diatribes with Schizophreniac The Whore Mangler’s Z-grade cinema exploitation and sleaze, there is no other book I would sooner recommend to this very niche demographic. I’m only expending five hundred words on this thing because it’s less plot driven as much as a number of transgressive vignettes, but as far as independent self published projects it’s proof that books are getting just as weird as independent cinema has gotten in the opening parts of this decade, and that books are still rather relevant as a counter cultural artform that can be distributed cheaply now that eBooks are a thing. I bought this for about three bucks on my Kindle so it’s worth a look.

We Want Some Too, Counter Culture and Modern Bohemia

I like reading a lot of books on my Kindle, I take it everywhere I go if I can because you just never know if you're gonna need to read something while stuck on the train or a bus. And I read some pretty interesting stuff if I don't say so myself. One of these books was We Want Some Too by Hal Niedzviecki. It was written in the early 2000s, but it was pre-viral internet, there was not nearly as big a self publishing, indie DIY presence through the internet that there is now. No social media either. Also MTV was still relevant at the time of writing.

But to discount the message this book has because of how it's aged is to ignore certain basic truths about the nature of media, and "lifestyle culture" as the book puts it. Lifestyle culture as defined by this book is essentially the mutation of the real lives of young people yearning to be part of something bigger than themselves, to contribute to the culture, to be like the people on TV. Consumerism and a desire to buy into celebrity and mass culture was there even pre-internet, but I think that the ways mass culture works now has been so splintered by the internet that any attempt to heal the wounds of the mutilated mass culture, and young people now are far apart from each other in the different groups of what people are fans of. There's fandoms now, not subcultures, that people belong to.

There's Homestuck fans, The Most Popular Girls In School fans, Disney fans, Sherlock fans, Girls fans, ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com fans, Webcomic and Webseries fans, there's now a mixture of both corporate and web based counter cultural fandoms that meld together on Tumblr, posting GIF images featuring their favourite quotes from TV shows and movies they love, and share with others who also love these media bites of a larger whole. On Tumblr you can often find yourself alone if you're not part of the same fandoms that the cool kids are part of, which is not unlike the tale of the Tarzan obsessive collector from We Want Some Too who is isolated by his distinct fandom because so few others share that fandom because other fandoms are more popular.

This book was written at a time where young people's popular culture barely made reference to the internet, whereas now you can't escape it, the very people this book is telling who yearned for a way to get their voice out there, and possibly become viral, got what they wanted, at least I think so. Maybe not. I certainly don't know what it takes for something to become a viral hit, and most of the stuff that does become viral doesn't appeal to me all that much. Psy's Gangnam Style is a notable exception because the success of that song awakened the awesome market forces of the K-Pop industry, with this breakout hit that struck a chord with people around the world without anybody even understanding the lyrics, it was the shock of the new, the sound of now, Asia seems to be having a renaissance of cultural content breaking out in the West even as Japan's output like anime is sagging in popularity due to a tendency for the animation industry there to pander to local otaku instead of casual and foreign fans who might find the cultural tendencies towards otaku fetishism of little girls to be uncomfortable and not what they're looking for in their entertainment. Rather than one Asian country dominating the visual and musical culture of the now, the stranglehold Japan had in the minds of the young seems to be fading and spreading out to the rest of Asia where their own voices, once feared to be trampled by monolithic Japanese culture elements, may get a chance to be heard once again.

Meanwhile in the West, long after this book was published, I heard on Twitter a little drabble where a notable webcomic artist was saying that the electric guitar is an extinct instrument, and heavy metal is the only genre of music where the instrument is still relevant. It's not an instrument of the young, whose music is now made by DJs and computers. Occasionally you get a middle class white college educated band whining about how their city needs a guitar based band to represent them, but the ship has sailed, the damage is done. Clinging to the guitar as a cultural mode of expression is about as useful to stemming the tide of new culture as only watching MTV Classic, which in Australia where I live is a channel that's still around and plays old music videos aiming for the nostalgia and hipster markets I imagine. The overwhelming whiteness of guitar based music in both indie pop and rock, rock and roll and heavy metal has been struggling under the burden of rap and hip hop, as well as K-Pop recently becoming far more relevant to young people raised in a much more ethnically and culturally diverse world. White people are in no danger of going away, that's just stupid, only the most hardened of Stormfront members would be bold enough to suggest that white people are going extinct.

What I'm saying is that European influences, such as France, Norway, Sweden, Britain, Ireland, Scotland, to a lesser extent Australia, are fading into the background for a while because right now is the time when hip hop, rap, R&B and electronic music have gained legitimacy, they've got cultural capital that's long overdue, and the idea of what counts as legitimate music is changing. The Grammy Awards have always had a hard snub of rap as a genre, but the people, white, black or anyone else have been exposed to it long enough that it's part of life, it's just there and to ignore it would be as foolhardy as ignoring the reality that a lot of people of multiple races play video games, or that Hollywood cinema isn't speaking to the common people due to a combination of remaking classic films rather than funding new, more racially diverse content as well as more roles for women in mainstream Hollywood pictures.

Which brings me to Lena Dunham's project with HBO, Girls, a show that I can't agree with on an ideological level, I used to have my problems with Brian Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim and the movie adapted from it due to a number of reasons including that I couldn't relate to characters who so easily throw away romantic relationships where I've struggled all my life to begin my first romance that wasn't one sided, but Girls makes Scott Pilgrim look like Menace II Society. None of the houses depicted in Girls look remotely like homes that regular blokes like me or regular women I know could afford, nor do they look particularly lived in, they look like aspirational show homes rather than abodes that people live, work, play and sweat in every day of their lives. For a supposedly Bohemian show, it's very slick, polished and manufactured to appeal to the fantasy of what its fanbase wants to live as their lives rather than what I could on any level deem reality. Lena Dunham clearly wants to be the voice of a generation but when she spends a lot of episodes as do other characters romancing wealthy and culturally powerful older men with much more clout and influence than they do, I'm forced to wonder whether Dunham is being honest that she's portraying the reality of what twenty something women are these days versus what they wish they could be. Say what you will about Twilight, it's garbage, but it's very honest in what it's trying to achieve.

Mass culture, although splintered, is still around, and the internet has not completely replaced it. It does however, provide some form of escape from what society showers with mainstream and financial success, for sometimes it is undeserving.