Customer Reviews

Blood Electric

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

i got 26 pages into this and realized i could basically page through this randomly and get the same effect - i got this because it got comparisons to burroughs and even finnegan's wake
not
a
chance
the over over over repetition combined with the lack of anything remotely cohesive gets tedious real fast
dog boyroid blood flesh slash slash equals colon i commit suicide she commits suicide i rape blah blah blah
boooooring
i wanted to have my mind blown
i can make my own cut ups
i know how to use excel and the word replace function
this amused me for about a page and a half
i spent the last 20+ pages reading only to justify my financial investment
cutting edge? get over it - pretense = pretense
buy yourself a hit of blotter and save 5 bucks

This book is AWFUL! I do NOT recommend it. [...]
This book is unequivocally unintelligible. I am not trying to say the writer's ability to convey a story is terrible, what I am trying to say, it is not in any comprehensible form that is able to keep the reader's attention. This book is written (purposely) in irregular English that has been

1) translated from the original Japanese by a computer (as a Japanese to English translator, I know when a document has been translated by a machine, and this book clearly has been), and

2) written with a mixture of the English language and HMTL markup language.

These elements are confusing, making it extremely hard to follow any kind of story that may be hidden in the text.

Yes, this may sound like an extremely interesting premise. I thought so too. But I cannot warn readers enough: YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO ENJOY THIS BOOK! AT THE VERY MOST YOU WILL STRUGGLE TO EVEN COMPREHEND THE MOST SIMPLEST OF MEANINGS!

[...]

My hope is that interested readers will get past the dismissive, first review. Obviously, if you want a more traditional narrative-based novel, then Siratori's work and others like it are not for you. Other like-minded work include Mellik's Satanburger, Thacker's Hard_Code anthology, any of the Black Ice books, Noon's Cobralingus, etc. As a 'reader' you should be unsure whether you're reading meaningful prose or just data, and indeed wondering what the difference is between them. Plus, Siratori's own context adds the layer of Japanese high-tech with the cultural stereotype of broken English. The great thing about books like this is that you're not sure how to even begin reading them. I love that. A book that forces you to decide how to read it.

Here is a quote from the book, taken at random:

"Ecstasy//the beast of the soul/gram that liquefied blood::the internal organ of a dog hyper-links::the psychosexual drone is exposed to the insanity of a chromosome//the hologram hormones of the cold-blooded disease animals that were encircled and slaughtered in the Cadaver City//The defleshed skeletal streaming=murder memory that the reproduction quantifies::evolved to the self ruin=serum of the drug embryo::<<sleep>>;;<< . . ."

The "<<" and "::" and "/" and "//" are not typos. The whole book is "written" in this vein. You can decide for yourself whether this is the work of a genius or the printout of a random-word-generating computer program thought up by some juvenile soul probably not smart enough to be a hacker.

I would say this book is like an ironic art piece, one big joke, tantamount to when a baboon paints something weird and critics attribute the work to Jackson Pollack. Only in this case the baboon is a computer program, which is kind of like a meta-joke on the whole sentient AI meme that is popular in cyberpunk novels.

Of course, the part that really makes me laugh, besides the sorrowful laughter I feel having wasted money on this book(money that could have been spent on five tacos, or half a lap dance), is the following blurb that is attached to some of his other novels.

"Blood Electric, was published in 2002. Blood Electric (Creation Books) was acclaimed by David Bowie."

First of all, name-dropping is sad and pathetic, especially when it's unattributed = citation needed = an obvious lie(see what I did there?). Second of all, what does that even mean, acclaimed by David Bowie? So what? Well gosh gee willikers, if David Bowie likes it, I must be a moron for not understanding this book! Well, I better pretend I like it. Don't want people to think I'm not as hip and with it as David Bowie. Seriously, this is truly an example of The Emperor's New Clothes, er, Book.

This review was acclaimed by David Lynch.

The 21st century. Super mass-consumption society, mega highly-networked information society, society of human genom analysis, society of organ transplants. Who is the icon of this era? Christ of AD.2002, new "person who performs a miracle"?
In the 19th century Nietzsche who "killed the God" is the pop=cult icon.
The 20th century especially have many charismas. 60s' Burroughs, 80s' Gibson, and 90s' Kurt Cobain....
Well then, who is the image of the present age, the idol of the mega capitalism era, and the charisma that makes the present hallucinate the edge of the future?
If asked so, we cannot help answering like this:It is Kenji Siratori.
By "merging alchemically" cyberspace and apocalypse, Kenji Siratori exposes the unconsciousness and the desire of super mass-consumption society and mega highly-networked information society, making us overcome the present that is waiting the forthcoming change=catastrophe.
It is a digital-voodoo incantation=cutup=remix, causes cyber trance, and brings techno=death revolution to the society.
In his poetry the images like nightmare are intermingled:body alteration, genome, cyberspace, and drug. Those gadgets are suitable for the 21st outsider literature and rather it can be said that they were inevitable. Right, he is an outsider. So huge that he can make the consciousness of the whole society transmutate....
Our fate is decided by determining the attitude against this book.
Eden or Sodom. The blessd or those who were banished from a paradise. Cyborg or the prison of flesh.
Whether or no, it is infallible that this book "Blood Electric" will be carved to the memory of the whole human beings without wheathering.
We can't stay in the past. Whether we can arrive further than the future or not is up to us. Come on, let's ask for the edge. It is in this book....

Siratori is a startling, indelible writer. It is useless to come to Blood Electric with anything but shock, and awe, as expected responses. The text displays a futuristic nihilism and abject strategy similar to the work of the Japanese "cyber-flesh" school of cinema. This is hardwired, hardcore linguistic experiment gone wild: a Doctor Octopus of tentacled text, refering to the infinite nothing that is the everything digital. For readers who want to know what one version (perhaps the least utopian) of the future will be like, this is your machine to get there. Forget the bland sweetness of "Lost In Translation" - Japanese culture is far less accessible than you might think. Siratori is the Time Out guide to depleted sanity in a world gone amok.

The author obviously can't even correctly spell English words. How did anyone ever publish a piece of junk like this? Pitiful, just pitiful.

The cyberpunk Japanese writer Kenji Siratori perhaps pioneered a movement among all non-English speaking writers. For his neuro/cyber-punk projects, this transition from Japanese - as a radically different language - to English is without exaggeration similar to translating a violent and fully Japanese videogame (including its machine codes, bugs, and repetitive architectures) to literature, the English literature. His techno-vortical texts similar to the most cryptogenic progressive writings exhume utterly original processes of text-composing but unlike other engineers of such texts whose economy of their writings is secured within the organic body of spectacular interwoven plots or critico-manic's verbigerations about the Text itself, his writings deliberately, encipher (hollows out) a new artificial wiremesh on and through which the text is non-wovenly rendered, convoluted and recomposed continuously. One can regard Kenji Siratori as a mech-warrior, a neuro-programmer.

Like technological spasm, a bio-electronical deflation. Like mind hallucinations caused by diasepam, but clear as a dew-drop on an urban balcony. Kenji Sirator's Blood Electric surfs on the edge of genetic memmory recorded 24 years ago.

Kenji (Siratori) is expressible on modern self science. The meeting of technological karma with genome replication in enviorment of self-transmitting clouds, the insemination of cyber reality into natural reality caused this semi-conductive latest-generation expose.

The books is written in a code-seuqence of feelings-productive scripts and informational griffs wrapped in sense. The cyberpunk mutation, the inner rebel of the one and the mass - a natural envenom caused by pollution, microwave and radio distortion. Electric pulsation, air dense - Kenji caught it all in a preserved caul readable by microscope.

Fast city running, people - cyborgs. Lonelyness, a fight against mass-optimisation, an inner flow on a pathway to salvation, an escape trough the gratings of electronical frontiers and artificial borders.