AOL Addict Tells All
Slowly, slowly, without thinking, I’ve become addicted to America Online. There is only a difference of degree between AOL and all the other faceless corporations I’m addicted to, like AT&T, BellSouth, or Entergy. The difference is important, though: I submit blindly to those corporations because they provide what I think are “essential services.” Things like AOL are luxuries on their way to becoming “essential services.” When you are fully addicted to e-mail, you can bet it’s an essential service. There was a time when electricity and telephone service were luxuries too, but they quickly became indispensible. In fact, there is very little that now presses down ubiquitously on our fin-de-millennium heads that is truly and completely indispensible. It’s only that we are junkies, we can’t do without them.
For the most part, our providers of “essential services” function invisibly, like the gods, as long as they get their monthly sacrifices, but now and then one of these gods malfunctions or it freaks and then you find yourself in hell. In Voice Mail Hell. Trying to reach a human being on the telephone you have to wander for years in the electronic desert, and when you do you might as well speak to a machine. People in Voice Mail Hell have only first names and no fixed location. They could be next door or they could be in Alaska. In addition to having no idea who or where this person is, you cannot even be sure what corporation this person works for. The name of a company tells you nothing about who owns it, what it does, what nation it considers home. The modern corp is a multi-tentacled organism, a rhizomatous creature without a center, or in English, an infinite potato. You can cut off one branch and the organism feels nothing. It sprouts another branch somewhere else. BancOne has recently sprouted hundreds of branch offices all over Louisiana, some of them located in buildings owned by banks that were swallowed overnight by BancOne. All of these branches are equal, they are commanded from some remote space reachable only by years of wandering in Cyber or Voice Mail Hell.
AOL is a gateway to cyberspace, they bill the gates, so to speak, and, after you become used to it, you go through those gates fearlessly, as if they were the gates to your own house. Of course, you don’t have to pay when you pass through the gates of your own house, or I hope you don’t. Over the gates of your own house there is no inscription, or if there is, it’s usually your name or something friendly like Villa Maris. The gates of AOL are more like the gates of hell, over which it says, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” And you do, abandon hope, that is, because you just wanna have cyber-fun.
I have accepted all of this with weary resignation. So when my address book disintegrated in AOL, I wanted to believe that it was an accident. I got a brand-new AOL program and I started all over again, calling all my friends and re-creating my address book. No sooner was I done than the address book self-destroyed again. This time, I suspected something structurally wrong in the very gut of the giant. The address book is vital: It is where you keep all your friends’ cyber-addresses and where you go when you write someone. Losing your address book is tragic, it makes you feel alone in the world, just a flesh critter with no cyber-friends. It’s an emergency.
I called AOL and wandered through Voice Mail Hell until Karl answered. He admitted that there had been a lot of calls about destroyed address books.
“What happened?” I cried out in despair.
“It corrupted,” said Karl sternly, as if that “it” had somehow been my fault.
“What do you mean ‘it’? It must be some flaw in AOL!”
Karl’s voice really hardened now: “There is no flaw in AOL!” he answered officially, “It just corrupted, that’s all. You have to destroy it and start over.”
I was sure now that Karl had something to hide. “What’s your full name, Karl?”
“I don’t have to give you my full name,” said AOL Karl.
“Where are you, Karl?”
“I cannot tell you this.”
“How does the AOL address book become corrupted?”
Karl hung up. The awful silence of Voice Mail Hell closed in on all sides.
I anxiously opened my program. It functioned. AOL had not (yet) avenged itself by cutting off my supply. I could live without my address book. I will make one on paper. And when they decide to destroy all my saved mail, I won’t complain. Nor will I make much noise when they tell me how to vote. Or what to buy. Or when to eat. I can’t. I need access. It’s sad, but it’s a done deal. I just wish they would all merge into a single entity, BellSouth, BancOne, AOL, Entergy, the whole evil overlord pantheon. That way, at least, we would all know that we are subjects of the Generic Company of America and would feel a lot less anxious. Bill the gates, but make it all one bill. That kind of merger is how the last monotheism got its start.
The Mouse with Glowing Ears
Now that the mouse with glowing ears has arrived, the fashion body will become reality. Forget all those piercings and tattoos—they only skimmed the surface. Now we can put firefly genes to work to make us glow-in-the dark fingers and belly buttons. We can put wolf genes to work to give us a bristle of wolf-hair down our backs. We can grow splendid lemur tails and, best of all, we can fulfill humanity’s age-old dream: wings. Yes, a pair of sturdy owl wings planted firmly in our shoulder blades could lift us at long last from the skin of the earth and into the blue. Genetics has opened a way both into the past and into the future: We can now mix again with animals just like the Greek gods mixed with humans, but we won’t have to do it the old-fashioned way by grabbing the beasts by their necks and subduing them. The minotaur and the demigod will line up for anesthesia not rumbling. Romulus and Remus can once more suckle their wolf-mother while shepherd boys can again regale their favorite sheep with their stories, because while their favorite sheep will look for all purposes like sheep, they will in fact be humans in sheep’s bodies. Movie stars will grow their own fur coats with the help of mink genes, making the killing of minks unnecessary, and the fury of antifur activists moot. Of course, these movie stars will have to wear their furs all the time because gene mixes are permanent; they will have to live in Alaska where a permanent fur coat is good. While Hollywood will surely move to Alaska, other parts of the U.S. will serve different gene mixes: Winged people will all live along the Continental Divide in order to better swoop down from peaks over valleys. Glowing people will live in New York and other tunneled, wormy metropolises. Wolf geners will dwell in the pack zones of the North. Insect-featured clickers will hang in Seattle and multiply in cyberspace. Thanks to the mouse with the glowing ears we now have a chance to reinvent our bodies, just as it seemed that we might have to leave them behind in order to gain cyberspace. But our flesh can now compete with the virtual flesh. Our reality can stand up to virtuality, clicking its feelers, flapping its wings, baring its fangs, rippling its fur, and glowing. Just when it seemed that Borg was the way to go, the genetic playground opened up. Cyberspace, look out, the Geners are here!
Tech-Withdrawal Anxiety
You’re in a foreign country, one of those little foreign countries just recently released from the damp basement of a dank and primitive past. Your hotel room with the soggy carpet and the tilting floor looks out onto an airshaft. Garbage flies regularly down and rats scurry at the bottom for indescribable scraps. The rotary phone doesn’t work, and speaking into the lightbulb, which used to be the way to communicate in the damp old days, no longer pertains. The men who once sat patiently in a cement cubicle below your room listening breathlessly to your every breath have emigrated to a more technologically advanced country, yours let’s say, in order to employ their gift for patient snooping in more rewarding ways. You are alone in your small room in this miserable damp small country at the far edge of nowhere, and there is no place to plug in your computer. There will be no phone calls, no e-mails, and certainly no snail mail for the duration of your stay, which, originally slated for one month, now looks more like an eternity.
After the first wave of tech-withdrawal anxiety has subsided
, you ask yourself: And why should I, of all people, be so connected to other people that I must suffer withdrawal anxiety? The obvious answer is that you are neither important nor irreplaceable. If you disconnect from all the plugged-in people you used to be connected to, the network will make only an infinitesimal adjustment. No one will miss you. Your former plug-in mates will go on connecting with each other, barely noticing your absence. You realize then that the network is the most important thing. Anyone outside of it ceases to exist. You remember now, with some remorse, losing all your old epistolary friends for the simple reason that they wrote snail-mail letters, not e-mail. You dropped them into nonexistence, even though they were your oldest and best friends, because they were not plugged in. You pursued instead your newer, plugged-in acquintances, feeling as much at home as any chameleon. You are a technical parvenu.
When you realize this, you stick your head down the dark airshaft and, dodging rancid cabbage, shout down: “Anybody home?” and suddenly hundreds of heads appear in the shaft windows looking at you and jabbering in some nonelectronic language. The whole Third World is at home, which is quite reassuring and, while they start throwing spoiled foodstuffs at you, you are comforted by their physical proximity. Your plug doesn’t love you enough to hit you with something smelly and squishy.
BOOKS BY ANDREI CODRESCU
MEMOIRS
Ay, Cuba! A Socio-Erotic Journey
Road Scholar
The Hole in the Flag: An Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution
In America’s Shoes
The Life and Times of an Involuntary Genius
ESSAYS
Hail Babylon!
The Dog with the Chip in his Neck
Zombification
The Muse is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans
The Disappearance of the Outside
Raised by Puppets Only to be Killed by Research
A Craving for Swan
POETRY
Alien Candor
Belligerence
Comrade Past and Mister Present
Selected Poems: 1970–1980
Diapers on the Snow
Necrocorrida
For the Love of a Coat
The Lady Painter
The Marriage of Insult and Injury
A Mote Suite for Jan and Anselm
Grammar and Money
A Serious Morning
Secret Training the, here, what, where
The History of the Growth of Heaven
License to Carry a Gun
FICTION
A Bar in Brooklyn
Messiah
The Blood Countess
Monsieur Teste in America and Other Instances of Realism
The Repentance of Lorraine
Why I Can’t Talk on the Telephone
Notes
1 In December 1995 National Public Radio broadcast my commentary gently deriding the Christian fundamentalist belief known as the Rapture, an event prior to the Apocalypse, during which all true believers would be suctioned off to heaven in a single whoosh, leaving behind their cars, their work desks, and their interlocutors.
The Rapture was so imminent that many believers sported bumper stickers that said IN CASE OF RAPTURE THIS CAR WILL BE UNMANNED. I pointed out the Raptured’s considerable amount of crude disregard for their fellow beings. My radio commentary engendered a vast protest organized by Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition. Forty thousand letters of protest reached NPR and Congress, accusing me of anti-Christian bias. The protest took issue with the very existence of public broadcasting, as exemplified by demons like myself. In the end, NPR apologized for my remarks, and every one of those forty thousand letters was answered. In the wake of this unusual outpouring of sentiment, I was warned anonymously by either well-meaning or ill-wishing parties to “stay away from eschatology.” Alas.
2 Marianne Faithfull and David Dalton, Faithful: An Autobiography (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1994).
3 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, unpublished translation by A. Codrescu.
4 NB: American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century, edited by Andrei Codrescu and Laura Rosenthal, was published in 1996. It contains Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Calm Panic Campaign Promise,” which he sent us from New York, and William Burroughs’s “Lack.”
5 William Cope Moyers, quoted in “Bill Moyers’ Son: Good Connections and Bad Addictions,” New York Times, 20 March 1998.
6 Villa Toscano, 3447 N. Halstead. Tel: 773/404-2643. Gay-friendly.
7 Lip, edited by Brian Basel and Danny Postel and distributed by Left Bank Distribution, 1404 18th Ave., Seattle, WA 98122.
8 Blackstone Ave. Bicycle Works, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave., Chicago, IL 60637. Tel. 773/241-5458.
9 For more information on the Superflex, find them online at www.superflex.dk or e-mail them [email protected].
10 The Baffler, edited by Thomas Frank and Greg Lane, P.O. Box 378293, Chicago, IL 60637.
11 Republic Steel and Uncommemorated Site of the Steel Massacre of 1937, Ave. O and 115th St.
12 Pullman Historic District, northeast corner of 112th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. Hotel Florence Restaurant & Museum claims to be open Monday through Sunday for lunch, but it wasn’t when we visited.
13 Randolph and Desplaines Streets.
14 You can see some of Marcos Raya’s murals in the vicinity of West 19th Street.
15 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1986), 126.
16 Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, trans., Cavafy.
THE DEVIL NEVER SLEEPS AND OTHER ESSAYS. Copyright © 2000 by Andrei Codrescu. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Design by Maureen Troy
eISBN 9780312273811
First eBook Edition : April 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Codrescu, Andrei.
The Devil never sleeps : and other essays / Andrei Codrescu.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-20294-6
I. Title.
PS3553.O3 D4 2000 814’.54—dc21
99-055765
First Edition: March 2000
The Devil Never Sleeps Page 23
