On Michael J. Seidlinger's The Sky Conducting

I was sitting at a bar with a friend and when I went out to smoke he looked at my copy of The Sky Conducting.

After I came back in he said, “There are a lot of good lines in this.”

I agreed. The book is formed from one-sentence paragraphs that pile on top of each other, much like you might see in Nietszche, Wittgenstein, Markson, Noah Cicero, or Sam Pink.

It begins with instructions regarding how to read the book, like you would get for a piece of modern technology. Seidlinger seems to be saying that that novel can be “modern” too — it can be complex and advanced enough to require instructions. After reading this book, I couldn’t agree more.

The instructions discuss breathing while reading the text. This reminded me of the art piece “Body Pressure” by Bruce Nauman. Are the instructions to be followed, or broken, or both?

At first, I found some of the messages to be not very subtle. The premise of this book is that America “dies” . . . literally, like its collective heart stops beating. But then I realized there was a lot of playing around with the semantics of the abstract, ideological words that pervade our culture.

Similarly, I initially wondered about the “good” aspects of American culture that were being overlooked in the text, but this passed as well, because as the book progresses we get less abstraction and more humanity from the main characters, who are mostly all American (no pun intended).

The novel allowed me to reflect on how we are part of a stationary mimesis. The post-apocalyptic premise serves as a sort of metaphor for the nihilism/pessimism/stasis of the recession. Our dreams are equally hope and fiction, inspiration and irreality.

One of my favorite lines: “After all the talk about the end of the world the grand irony was that it actually happened.”

There is a lot of confronting the reader. Everything about this novel is confrontational.

A lot of times post-apocalyptic shit can be bleak as fuck, but Seidlinger balances both humor and humanity.

Sometimes technology has agency in this novel, and that gave me headaches. Of course, another one of my favorite lines was, “Headaches are good because they mean the mind is still working.”

There is a lot of black market trade in this book, and yet somehow it all seemed calmer and more humane the everyday American market we know. It seemed people related to people as people more, and that they were more direct in their relationships, in this book, whereas in the “real-life” marketplace people relate to cashiers and salesman and producers and consumers and customers and managers and middlemen. In today’s legal, and increasingly digital, markets we seem to relate more to abstractions than to humans.

By the end of the book the past tense takes over, there is no more present tense. This is how America is becoming. We can’t talk about the future, because we don’t know if we can believe in it.

The Empire That Once Was America

I’m a huge fan of dystopian/apocalyptic novels, mainly because — if crafted by good authors — they unravel an elegantly-weaved prescience into a gloomy and fast-approaching future we’ve recklessly created ourselves for ourselves. Think of Bradbury, Atwood, Gibson, Orwell, and of course Huxley’s Brave New World. In short, I am a fan of the Folly of Man, and all in favor of technology flipping the tables on us served in the form of a well-organized, worldwide revolution (helmed by the HAL 9000, naturally). I’m perfectly at peace knowing we’ll get what we deserve.

Michael Seidlinger’s new novel The Sky Conducting presents us with an America not too far destined; a country on the down slope of an empirical, majestic, and dirty decline, where all systems (political, social, familial, and otherwise) have failed. The America we find in The Sky Conducting has passed judgement on and eviscerated its own organic vital functions; the ultimate act of cutting the nose off to spite its face. All that remains is a whisper of an arrogant empire, which comforts itself with melancholia and the fossils of domestic symmetry.

People have fled the country in gargantuan migrations, having ruthlessly and obtusely consumed all the land’s resources, leaving behind a ravaged, nutrient-deficient land (figuratively, as well as literally). Those we once called our neighbors, our friends, our family have become precious commodities, scarcely found on the continent. But despite the vastness, the horrible depletion and deforestation of America, one family has stayed behind in their home, unable to move on. By rebelliously inhabiting this skeleton of a country, they must forge themselves a second chance. Ahh, America, where everyone gets to tap dance themselves to the top again in a second act. Maybe.

Seidlinger’s prose is an exercise in brevity, with sentences, phrases, and dialogue coming at you like short jabs to the ribs, to the kidneys, to the jaw . . . advancing the story seamlessly. I liked the construction of the language, as well; building blocks stacked upon building blocks in short passages, making up the chapters.

Given my pessimistic outlook on the empire that once was America, this novel resonated and almost served as a mirror to all of those still waving flags and proclaiming that we are living in the world’s greatest country. I see them as noisemakers rattling sabers, banging on drums, yelling indoctrinated slogans into megaphones, all trapped on a bus that has quickly begun to slip into a deep ravine.

I read this book concurrently with one of literature’s heavyweight dystopian allegories: Jose Saramago’s Seeing. It made a great one-two punch and set me in a beautiful, savage landscape not too far from where we are today.