D. Harlan Wilson

This is a scholarly analysis of Kubrick's work, and you may need to look a few things up or take some notes here and there, but don't let that scare you. It's not dry at all, highly entertaining all the way through. If you love these movies (particularly Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange, and AI), then you'll get a lot out of this book.

It's fascinating to see how consistent Kubrick actually was with his ideas across genres and decades. Much of this was by design, I'm sure, but a lot show more of it is just because that's how creators operate. Certain ideas fascinate them, and they use their work to develop and formalize their thoughts. Wilson here talks about the films collectively having a "mind," and that makes sense to me. You can't really know what Kubrick was thinking, but you can see how his films think.

Really interesting approach and and nice execution. Give it a read! show less

Natural Complexions, by D. Harlan Wilson

“Here on the chipped wall is the five-fingered shrapnel imprint made of bits of human brain.” – Vladimir Mayakovsky, “We, Too, Want Meat” (1914)

“Art is a pharmaceutical product for imbeciles.” – Francis Picabia, “Dada Manifesto” (1920)

Natural Complexions by D. Harlan Wilson is either a collection of microfictions or a fragmentary novel. A critique of media as fever dream, complete with boldface names a la People or other supermarket show more check-out schlock. First, some preliminaries, to contextualize this high-concept literary experiment: D. Harlan Wilson has written an academic analysis of John Carpenter’s cult classic They Live; D. Harlan Wilson is one of the co-founders of the bizarro literature movement; D. Harlan Wilson is the Professor of English and Unit Head for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Lake Campus of Wright State University. Wright State University is an institution of higher learning in Ohio. Also from Ohio: Devo, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Doris Day.

In one particularly meta microfiction, BRIAN GONKA has a dispute with his publisher Omar Sabat over the title of his trilogy of one-acts entitled Oneiricana. The dispute ends up with GONKA’s rampage and suicide. But even with this notoriety, “it boosted sales […] but not enough for the publisher to retrieve funds allocated to the book’s production and distribution, let alone generate a profit, despite considerable expenses for advertising that capitalized on the way in which BRIAN GONKA committed suicide and the ensuing spectacle of loathing and grief that swept across the nation.”

Natural Complexions is full of these miniature gems. Cynical, mostly violent, and rife with gallows humor for an age where a racist game show host can become president of the United States and mass shootings occur with a ghoulish regularity. The constant refrain of “thoughts and prayers” from legislators only proving, with unequivocal accuracy, the emptiness of the former and the uselessness of the latter. Besides, why pray when those phat NRA campaign checks keep rollin’ in? Mammon and Moloch are the real gods of the American republic. Or as A. Bauer says in the Disclaimer: “Most instances of gun violence have been omitted from the following document in an effort to approach something like diversity. Herein lies the fictional element of my project.”

In the spirit of full disclosure, I admit to reading Natural Complexions as a novel. Wikipedia classifies the book as a “Fiction Collection,” although Wilson’s own website doesn’t address the taxonomic ambiguity directly. The only hint is his comparing the book to JG Ballard’s Atrocity Exibition. In Natural Complexions, the only through-line is a the character BRIAN GONKA (written in all-caps but never boldfaced). He turns up in all sorts of places, like participating in sex tapes and appearing as a ghost. Like Elvis, he has been in “sightings” from beyond the grave.

Another vignette involves a woman taking selfies in front of a burning house, who herself becomes a burn victim. Many of these stories, recycled or refashioned media events, and “other scraps of disposable infotainment,” reveal the strange crevices in our perception of reality. As another Wilson, Robert Anton, said: “‘Reality’ is what you get away with.” Natural Complexions is a book that illuminates our addiction to social media, news cycles replete with violence and scandal (not to inform, but to accrue advertising dollars), and the farcical idiocies of modern celebrities.

A cult leader whose message is that everyone should own a pet, himself has no pets except worms and fleas.

A letter to Anthony involving B.G.’s “need to assassinate the emotional chromosomes that usurp the inequities of crazy GQ men. […] Now the monkeys glint in the Xanax twilight.”

“Dominus Bauer is rebooted as an IRS law enforcement investigator. Dominus Bauer is rebooted as an Assistant Professor of Art History. Dominus Bauer is rebooted as a reality show cook.” Reminiscent of The Good Place and its 800+ reboots. Even the ones where Jason (the fake Buddhist monk, DJ, and criminal) “got it.”

Like flipping through TV channels or scrolling through a social media feed, Natural Complexions is a collage of atrocities, hilarity, and satire. Tonal whiplash and surrealist visions collide with tabloid garishness and perception drift.

“Are we having fun yet?” – Zippy the Pinhead

https://driftlessareareview.com/2021/07/11/natural-complexions-by-d-harlan-wilso... show less

Nietzsche: The Unmanned Autohagiography by D Harlan Wilson is a difficult book to review, in part because it is both a success and a failure. As you can tell by my rating, I consider it more success than failure, but your results may vary.

Admittedly my opinion of how well the book "works" is based on my understanding of what it is doing. My opinion, to the degree I can ground it in the text(s), is neither right nor wrong, it is my understanding. Where I may be very wrong is in thinking show more Wilson intended any such thing. If he didn't, then I can wish it had done something better than it did but can't very well criticize the book for not being what it was never meant to be. So...

It seems that a lot of the seemingly absurdist elements embody aspects of Nietzsche's ideas on creating or being/becoming oneself taken to an almost surreal extreme. The lamenting of other people's conformity, the aphoristic comments scattered throughout, the almost constant conflict between drives/desires all point to ways of understanding some of Nietzsche's ideas. And a book purportedly about Nietzsche would do well to use his own ideas to describe him. But one of his ideas is also that everything we do always has at least some form of self-interest in it, so writing a biography of a revered figure would entail also being about the author, so we have gone from a biography to a hagiography to an autohagiography. Yes, this is all convoluted, well, my expression of it is, I understand myself pretty well. It is in making readers think beyond just liking the absurdist approach where I think Wilson both succeeds and fails.

It is easy for a reader to just enjoy reading the book as a meta-text that has absurdist features. Because it is enjoyable. I also think it might have gone on too long so that some readers may tire of looking at the bigger picture, the one that does, tangentially, express an analysis of Nietzsche, and simply enjoy it as absurdist literature.

Then again, maybe I'm reading it all wrong, in which case: Gee, what a fun read!

I would recommend this to readers who might either want to try to make a mountain out of a molehill (guilty!) or just enjoy the molehill.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. show less

D. Harlan Wilson’s second assault on the senses, “Battle Without Honor or Humanity: Volume 2,” is a collection of nightmarish vignettes draped in existential nausea with a side of critical theory and a dash of Kafkaesque absurdism. The poetry in these vignettes caresses the brain-space while the absurd holds you distant and prevents you from falling into the abyss.

Ultimately, Wilson’s work is a pleasure to read; it is a pleasure that is complicated by the uncomfortable gaze of that show more ever-threatening chthonic abyss. The confrontation with nauseatingly pointless humanity is measured by subtly intelligent humour in which “the trauma of the mummy” is “a Return of the Repressed” and then slapped in the face with the silliness of a retinue of detectives whose sole mission, it seems, is to baffle each other.

This collection opens with the strength of a Knossos bull but it requires the skill of a Thesean hero to navigate through the finale, which seems to stretch the point beyond its sweet spot. This collection is recommended to those with high-brow aspirations and a love of the slipperiness of language and meaning. I give it only 3.5 stars because it does get tiresome. The first half of the collection I give a solid 5 stars. show less