MARK MILLER is the author of The Librarian at the End of the World (Montag Press, 2019). Adam Turl interviewed Mark Miller for Locust Review in early 2020.
Adam Turl: One of the things we’ve been discussing at Locust Review is what we have called a need to “intentionally jump the shark” -- that the world is far too ridiculous at this point to criticize, reflect in an irrealist manner, or satirize without an overdetermined absurdism of sorts. Our feeling has been that coy court jester type criticisms of the world do not work the way they used to. I kept returning to this thought while reading your book, especially the way it comes together toward the end. Can you say something about the sort of absurdist travelogue of Librarian at the End of the World?
Mark Miller: Once I read [about] The Yes Men and saw what they had done, the extent to which they had taken it, and the intelligence with which they confronted the problems of our globalized financial system, I kind of just gave up. All my life I had been waiting for someone to confront the powers that be with the hell they have created for the rest of us, and for it to be noticed. And then, they did, and nothing happened. You have this hope that when people are shown the error of their ways that they will be and do better. But the inertia of the world and the sort of mechanical resonance of the systems that have been put in place make it virtually impossible to resist. Consider that the CEO starts out lower in the company, and through the process of absorbing their propaganda and excelling at their system, rises to the top because he has become the embodiment of that system, part human-part corporate dogma. I mean, we can’t fight that. Assimilate or die. So I sort of threw my hands up while I was writing this and said, I can’t embrace it, I can’t fix it, I can’t change it… so I am just going to make fun of it. What I kept coming back to was that no matter how absurd I got, I wanted it to be plausible and familiar. Like, this is the world we live in, y’all. It is telling that after I wrote the book and was waiting for it to be published, there was an exhibit at some museum featuring cheese made of celebrity bacteria. Apparently you really can’t make this stuff up. So on one hand, it seems impossible to jump the shark, so to speak, because the world is so strange. Eventually we are going to have a B-list celebrity named Captain Pepperoni who juggles knives with his asscheeks be elected president, and there is not a goddamn thing we can do about it. But at the same time, I think we have to fight it. This is the only shot at life we get, and, you know, I don‘t want to spend my life accepting that system. So I do not know if it is possible to fight jumping a shark by jumping a shark... but, damnit, somebody has got to jump it. At least if I jump the shark before Captain Pepperoni gets elected, I get to wear the cool leather jacket.
AT: One of the contradictions of life with the Internet is a sort of cultural, information, image, and narrative overload. In the 1990s there was a lot of cyber-utopianism; that digitization and connection would create a new and better world. In some ways that has been true. It has allowed people from oppressed and exploited groups to network. It has allowed gender non-conforming folks to explore identity formation with some degree of freedom from oppressive parents or social situations. But, at the same time, we see the proliferation of the far right online, manipulating “Poe’s Law” to spread racism and sexism. There is the mainstream liberal hysteria about Russian “bots” and the claim that anyone who disagrees with the neoliberal political center is a Russian agent of some kind (whether it is Bernie Sanders or someone else). It is interesting that your main character is, at least by trade, a librarian; someone whose job it is to parse and organize information. Right now that “job,” for millions of people, is being done by computer algorithms meant to accumulate capital and information for giant corporations. As we discussed before, to some people, the profession of librarian seems anachronistic. But [in your book] it is sort of an argument for the totalizing quality of the librarian’s role vs. the fragmentary nature of contemporary life. Ramdas is almost like the personification of going down an information rabbit hole; but in your book this happens “IRL.” Then, in the end, there is sort of a reassertion of prioritizing information around a few key political and existential questions. Can you say something about the figure of the librarian in this context -- in your book and IRL?
MM: You’ve provided a lot of avenues into the discussion that deal with ideas of information overload and of the failure of authorities to govern that particular tidal wave. Librarians are useful for recognizing and navigating both problems. My first thoughts are of Pug the Pirate in Lem’s Cyberiad, the creature who steals and stores so much information that it overwhelms him and he can’t access the information he needs because it is buried under all the information he doesn’t. Another thing that springs to mind is the idea I had in the 90s that the internet was going to revolutionize the entire planet equally, and how disappointing it was to see it go from this scientist/academic/nerd phenomenon to just another commoditized, albeit wildly more nefarious and effective, marketing and tracking tool. The original idea floated in the 70s and 80s was that the internet in the US was going to be a public utility run by the Post Office. But AT&T lobbied Reagan to privatize it, cutting AT&T a super sweet deal in the meantime, and now we have ISP monopolies and duopolies in most cities that are expensive and slow. Modern nations that treat the internet as a public good see faster and cheaper service, and privatization in the US did the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do.
Tyler, Born Again Labor Museum digital collage and drawing from Locust #2
Still another facet of the discussion is between top-down information systems—where one authority decides the information that the peons will have—and bottom-up information systems, where it is more an information free-for-all and everyone has access to the tools to disseminate information. There are of course, benefits and drawbacks to both. As a librarian, I want a powerful entity to direct our attention to credible, current, objective evidence about global warming, I want a body of experts to set the parameters of discussion about vaccines, but I also want an equal platform for marginalized voices to broadcast issues in their communities. These are fundamentally problems of authority, access, and overload, and librarians are the experts at dealing with those issues. So, I thought it would be ironic to have a librarian surf this particular tidal wave, because 1) who better and 2) it plays so against type. People don’t seem to realize how the field has changed and the kind of badass tattooed people I get to work with in that community.
At the same time, going back to librarianship, in general, we have to recognize that some voices are marginal because they need to be marginal. There is a .gif of a very large black man walking up to a smaller white man and punching him in the face. The white guy is saying something, though we don’t know what... and he is wearing an SS armband. A commenter takes the stance that, well, the hate crime is punching a man in the face… we can’t know what he was saying and if he deserved to be punched. And I’m just, Jeez… you know, if you put on the armband of people who want to murder my friends, THAT is all the hate speech I need to know that your voice does not need to be heard, because unequivocally, fuck nazis and anyone who defends them. But there is one school of librarianship, which is probably MOST librarians, that maintains a strict information neutrality. And I agree with that to a point; I am not going to disallow access to books about nazis or Mein Kampf or anything like that, because information is just information, and it is what people do with it that makes it good or bad. But if I see someone on the street wearing an SS armband after I helped them find Mein Kampf, then that is certainly evidence that there was a breakdown in the entire information system: this guy thinks that genocide is OK, and that means he has failed to recognize context, meaning, ethics, morality, political science, history, biology, and just about every other authoritative or fundamentally decent understanding of information on earth, and therefore (see above), fuck that guy, and I wish all librarians felt that way.
Perhaps fundamentally, the end of human civilization owes itself to a breakdown in our information processes. We should be informed enough to trust experts instead of celebrities, journalists who follow the code of professional ethics instead of Breitbart, etc…. So people should be allowed to publish whatever garbage they want to, but society must be informed enough to call bullshit intellectually, morally, and/or ethically.
Where I draw the line with information though is if someone wants me to order a book that says vaccines cause autism or global warming is not happening…because those sources are wholesale un-credible, biased, conflicted, inaccurate, and/or outdated. And I believe those are compatible stances on information because all three scenarios have the public good at center. I think the future will bring more information activist librarians, more librarians elevating marginalized voices, and more librarians saying, screw neutrality, I am not wasting our ever-shrinking budget on pseudo-science and propaganda.
But this gets a little off track, I think, because we are also trying to talk about organizing information meaningfully. At its heart, I see librarianship as the struggle to connect people to the information they need to make the world better. And this is a difficult task sometimes because the systems of authority are fallible and corruptible. But it is an extremely important task. I look back on my own life and recognize times when I was lost, frightened, or alone… and finding the right book in those times meant a great deal to me… perhaps was even crucial to my own survival. So every day I think of this day as the chance to save someone’s life. The ending of the book tries to tackle a larger philosophical or existential question that is rooted in this idea of librarianship, which is what good is all this information if it does not save lives, provide peace, make life better, reduce suffering? What good are buzz, hype, and flash if they merely point to illusions and delusions? In some ways those have fed or at least covered up the failure of all systems (and of course, all information systems) in making the world sustainable and fundamentally decent.
AT: The “Ramdas Bingamam is Coming For Your Guns” billboard (which shows a still from a pornographic pegging video) was hilarious... and I presume a send up alt-right “cuck” logic. Also, the idea that bullet proof glass is anti-second amendment... These seem like further elaborations on the present-day absurdism.
MM: Rightwing politics has become so vitriolic. As that scene came to mind and I realized I was going to write it, the thing that struck me most is how plausible it is. The discourse that happens on the backend of the so-called alt right (Pro tip, they’re not new and they’re not alt, they’re just fascist, white-nationalist, dicks who depend on disenfranchised-feeling white men with a sophomore’s grasp of history) is so vile and antithetical to the kind of pearl-clutching faux moralism that Republicans have been hanging their hats on for decades that I thought it would be funny to put it out in front. So instead of it being a discussion on a Breitbart page, it should be part of a mainstream advertising and marketing. Like, I want yard signs that say
Vote Trump, the Nazis your great grandpa killed
had some pretty good ideas!
Vote McConnell, Jesus is a Useful Tool for
Maintaining Social Order.
It’s pretty schizophrenic. The Democratic party has its own real problems, btw, so don’t think I am blind to them. But in my lifetime one party has definitely done more cognitive pretzeling than the other, and therein lies the humor. I remember Burroughs talking about the Naked Lunch, which he said signified the moment when everyone saw what was on the end of their forks. And in this same sense I just want to scream from the rooftops, “You believe in ruthless social Darwinism, cutthroat capitalism, guns in schools, caging asylum seekers, and Jesus Christ, the son of God and the perfect attainment of that divine love....and that’s uhm more than a little inconsistent.”
AT: The absurdities of both the far right and the mainstream Republicans, as well as the “weaknesses” of the mainstream Democrats, seem to flow from the underlying absurdity of everyday life. I mentioned to you before that I was pretty sure I had a conversation, while different in content, almost identical in form to the conversation between the shift manager and Ramdas (the sombreros conversation) at one of the many “shit” jobs I’ve had... Can you talk about the logic behind that exchange? And maybe the connection between the economic world and the overall dysfunctional culture?
from the Stateless Militia series, by Anupam Roy, from Locust #2.
MM: I think the real problem is that corporate power and industry have grown too powerful for any government to regulate. Naturally the political party that lets business do whatever it wants is going to have an advantage when it comes to funding, branding, and messaging. If your entire vision is subordinate to profit, the logic is simple and easy to grasp, as long as you can convince people that the profit will trickle down, the well won’t run dry, and arsenic in the water isn’t really a big deal, anyway. People are squishy and complicated, and money is hard and simple, so people who struggle with nuance will always choose the latter. In the same way, the businesses who employ us must value profits over people. There are ethical ways to profit and take care of people, but that isn’t what business school teaches. I think it is right to treat corporations as people politically, as long as you can also execute them for murder when they commit some negligent homicide like Union Carbide in Bhopal. Instead you have BP cutting corners, dicking around, and destroying the Gulf of Mexico, and we end up with shills like Rep Joe Barton falling all over himself to bend over for his campaign donors. So, there is not much recourse for shit jobs. We seem collectively unable to construct an economic model that is responsive to real human need, so we will eat hamburgers until the last tree is cut down. Though in my heart I kind of hope that the chickens will rise up and kill us first. There are a shitload of chickens on earth, and they are angry. They just need a powerful leader to forge them into a killing machine. We will be so screwed, but I will welcome our new chicken leaders. I think they’ll do better than we did. Especially if they evolve thumbs. Sorry. I just kind of wanted to see if anyone is still reading.
AT: I mentioned to you before the theory a middle eastern friend of mine has about “terraforming:” That US imperial policy is no longer concerned with taking over areas, putting “their guy” in, but is content with merely destroying anything not under their direct control – through economic sanctions, drone strikes, bombs, targeted strikes. I thought about this a lot in the depleted uranium thread of your book, particularly its resolution in the Uzbek chapters... depopulation, genocide, etc. This is what the journal Salvage describes as contemporary capitalism as death cult, musical chairs for the rich and powerful, death for others, and so on. I think this is also true in much contemporary US urban policy. They gentrify what they can. But they are fine with large swaths of south Chicago, or Rockford, or Detroit, simply falling apart. I believe your character Yves Duthe remarks that when he moved to the US he lived in Rockford trying to hide from the press, as nothing happens in Rockford but “terrible, boring things.” I was wondering if you could remark on the contradiction between an oversaturated spectacle of “information” and culture that is so much a part of your book, in contrast to the “terrible, boring things” that one sees and lives through in Rockford, southeast Chicago, much of Peoria, or Cleveland, or even Sadr City in Baghdad.
MM: A lot of my thinking on these things comes from sources like Chomsky’s Necessary Illusions, Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, and Perkins’s Confessions of an Economic Hitman, as well as reading on Mossadegh and Iran and United Fruit and Colombia. I think Chomsky was the first person who voiced the idea that we would never bomb another country that has a Wal Mart in it, but that idea has become pretty commonly stated over the years, and I could certainly be wrong about the origin, so apologies in advance. But where we have always waged wars to, you know, make the world safe for democracy, I believe we will eventually do away with the idea of democracy as the facade and just say, yeah, the corporations that support our elected officials need your people to buy their shit, so, sorry, but we need to bomb you for a while and… and I just had this great image come to mind of the soldiers planting the flag at Iwo Jima, but instead they are raising a Taco Bell sign. These things happen on a global economic scale far removed from the day to day lives of people. We used to be able to tell ourselves that this was about American exceptionalism and how we are just making the world better for these poor, godless, socialist heathens... and so, unfortunately, we had to kill some of them, but it will be so much better for them. I remember George W. Bush talking about all the amazing things that were going to happen in Iraq once Saddam was taken out... and it sounded like this liberal utopia of free healthcare, universal education, and abundant food for everyone. The cognitive dissonance there is head-spinning. Wait, wait, wait! That sounds like the kind of socialism that is too evil for America... but man, it sounds like it is going to be a sweet time to be an Iraqi. But, go figure, there is always a difference between what is promised and what is delivered, the propaganda and the actual truth. The important thing is that the pipelines got built and the shareholders could buy more coke. In Get Your War On, David Rees has an excellent riff about the utopia being promised in Iraq vs. the inner city schools in America facing funding cuts to pay for the war that was gonna bring about this amazing paradise on Earth. But now even the tribalism that binds us as a nation is breaking down. Used to be I only got telemarketing calls from third world countries. Now Americans are cheap enough in Mississippi. Foreign accents are being replaced by deep-south accents. I don’t know if that answers the whole question, so I will just re-assert now and forever that Rockford sucks, and hope that ties it up.
AT: I mentioned when we were arranging this interview that I probably haven’t laughed so much reading a novel since I first read John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces in high school. I was wondering if we could end with two things. 1) Your elevator pitch for the Librarian at the End of the World. Why should our readers go out and buy your book right now – which of course they should – aside from the fact it’s brilliant and funny? 2) What else do you recommend our readers put on their list of new fiction to read?
MM: First, thank you for such a compliment. I am truly honored that my book found its audience with you. The elevator pitch for LatEotW is pretty hard to get out in an elevator because you are always having to dodge the rotating knives, and I find the smell of aftershave lotion an olfactory distraction. That said, when I get the chance I say, Buy my book because it is about power ties, porn, drug mules, uranium-235, water wars, the NSA, CIA, FBI, good-cop, bad-cop, French social critic-cop, lost love, orgies, international intrigue, anthropogenic climate change, rogue insurance salesmen, Ragnarok, ambi-sexual country-western singers, librarianship, an international league of competitive speedbathing, and gourmet cheeses made from the bacteria of Helena Bonham Carter. It can also be used to learn Morse code. Also the sex scenes are educational, not prurient. Also cheese-making tips. I mean, there is a lot of useful information in this book.
Speaking of information overload, I am still working through my shelf of old books, so my list of new fiction is already out of date. But I love love love Pynchon, Marmon-Silko, Bartheleme, Lia-Block, Leyner, Danielewski, Heller, Moore, Nezhukumatathil, and Pratchett.
artwork by Sambaran Das from Locust #2.
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