TAO TE JINX
Reviewing Steve Aylett's idiosyncratic book of aphorisms and quotes
This is the first of what I’m hoping will be a semi-regular review feature here and at We the Hallowed. I’m not being paid to write it but I was kindly sent a copy of Tao Te Jinx by Anti-Oedipus Press and feel like it is something worth spreading the word about. I promise that you’ll never see me pushing things I don’t honestly love.
I was twenty-one years old when I was first introduced to the work of Steve Aylett. Like D. Harlan Wilson, who edited this edition of Tao Te Jinx and penned its introduction, my first exposure was Aylett's Philip K. Dick Award winning novel Slaughtermatic. The pure shockwaves of novelty radiating from every page felt like a religious experience and I immediately began drafting an homage to the novel that included malformed analogues of its protagonists, Dante Cubit and The Entropy Kid, and had a backdrop that was eerily familiar to Aylett's cyber-noir city of Beerlight.
I wanted so badly to craft fiction just like Steve Aylett but it didn't take me long to realize that there is only one person who can write like him and his name is Steve Aylett. His work is vital, bitingly satirical, and crafted with a truly singular vision. On top of that the man is PROLIFIC with over twenty books to his credit over the span of thirty years.
That vast body of work is why it is vitally important that an idiomatic appetizer sampler like Tao Te Jinx finally sees print again, with Anti-Oedipus Press taking over for Aylett's own Scar Garden Media. Spanning the entirety of Aylett's oeuvre, this slim volume includes quotes, aphorisms, and cover art that ranges from his early books to his short stories and all the way to his recent comics and tarot deck.
Tao Te Jinx is a literary cluster bomb. Nothing else could possibly describe such a concentration of volatile components untethered by the necessities of narrative. Aylett's prose is particularly well-suited for this kind of rapid fire delivery. The phrases and aphorisms presented in Tao Te Jinx hold even more ecstatic energy when they are unmoored from their contextual landscape and create this finely tuned cut-up slideshow that holds your gaze with the forced stamina of the Ludovico Technique.
What's difficult about reviewing Tao Te Jinx is that it is unlike most other examples in this genre that I have seen. There is no categorization or organizing methods in Tao Te Jinx. If there was any attempt to divide the text into distinctive themes or eras of Aylett's career it is not apparent in the slightest. All you are provided is the title of the book each piece is selected from and the rest is left for you to decode on your own. Lines like America, an empire with its heart in its jaws collide with In the face of moral teachings many people offset their murders by paying a potential murderer to keep his urges in check and Insanity happens when all your adjustments to the world meet up by accident like tectonic plates conspiring to sculpt a new frontier that threatens to swallow prospective explorers at every turn.
I would argue that the book is all that much better for its omitted clichés of format and style. It is likely that any attempt to imprison Aylett's words in the more mundane conventions of the quote book format would have proved futile, causing the words to melt and ooze between the confining bars and malform the pure creative flow that this book presents with relentless abandon.
My one and only gripe is with the book's spartan design aesthetic. It lacks the bombast of the content being presented and causes the text to look monotonous if read for longer durations, stifling the potency of some of the individual quotes and aphorisms as they are lost in the seemingly endless stream of text. This is the only grievance I have against this otherwise combustible collection and it is so minor that it will probably only be truly noticeable to the design-heads out there like myself.
With the recent releases of Tao Te Jinx, the collected edition of his comic Hyperthick, his tarot deck, and The Trickster Brick deck of creativity cards there is plenty of evidence that Tao Te Jinx will serve as a gateway to the breadth of Aylett's work and an epigraph for what is yet to come instead of an epitaph to punctuate the career encapsulated between it's covers.
Steve Aylett's Tao Te Jinx is a book for those looking to take a heroic dose of absurdist verbiage and thoroughly intoxicate themselves with kaleidoscopic visions of the mutated poetics our language is truly capable of. As Aylett said in Heart of the Original:
Some writing is less intent on what it says than on where your mind has to maneuver itself to understand it. Once in that place forget the text and look around.
Tao Te Jinx is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold, from Anti-Oedipus Press.