James Reich Dreamily Reviews Dodie Bellamy's When the Sick Rule the World
Hello: At The Rumpus, an amazing review of Dodie Bellamy's newest book, When The Sick Rule The World, a "moving meld of essay, memoir, and story," as it is told at Semiotext(e). James Reich places it alongside comparable cultural heavyweights: "'When The Sick Rule The World' is a satirical SCUM Manifesto for the sick, and A Modest Proposal for the environmentally hypersensitive," he writes. More:
Within, of course, lies a critique of that culture of the ‘well’ that mocks the invisible sickness of others, yet romances its own visible symptoms. The invisibly sick, the suspected hypochondriacs, avenge themselves by leaving undeniable wounds upon the well. “The sick will travel in packs commandeering porcelain-lined fragrance-free buses… All existing new cars will be remaindered and shipped to Cuba… Gas masks will be sexy…” The sick are the most self-conscious victims of capitalism and its products, and the airwave- and microwave-borne pablum of its communications. “When The Sick Rule The World” informs us that yes, perhaps gas masks will be sexy, because necessary; an environmental Marxism of the flesh.
When the sick rule the world mortality will be sexy. When the sick rule the world, all writing will be short and succinct, no paragraphs will be longer than two sentences so we can comprehend them through the brain fog the well bring to us daily.
We have always found mortality sexy; we’re still (Edgar Allan) Poe-faced about it, because we’ve never escaped the cocoon of romanticism. The well are complicit in sickness and each defines the other’s permeable borders. One of the ironies of Dodie Bellamy’s work is that the ineffable glamor of pop culture, of simulacra, is a consolatory presence within the toxicity of the capitalism and its costumes. During the filming of Spielberg’s E.T., Bellamy reports, the rubber body of alien was worn by a series of actors under three feet tall, the burden of the extraterrestrial’s skin something like a CIA torture. In “Phone Home” she writes: “E.T.’s death is my mother’s death… E.T. calls us back to the pre-symbolic, the burden of otherness we’ve carried since we left the primal ooze of our mother’s body.” E.T. the film as a shared experience between Bellamy and her mother is a psychic conduit. E.T. is also “the angel of death.” But, E.T.’s ‘death’ in the film is temporal. His rejuvenation is the hope, after the death of her mother, for the end of fragmentation, for a safe place: “Home is an instinct, a yearning that has never, ever been satisfied, that can never be eradicated, an itch we will scratch until the day E.T. comes to harvest our souls…”
Read the full review at The Rumpus.