Gratitude, Updates, Plans
Alrighty, welcome back! If you’re back for round two, thanks for being a repeat customer. And if this is your first time dropping by my new little project, welcome. Great to have you here.
Before I get stuck into the focus of today’s feature, I just wanted to take a couple of minutes to address the response to my previous video as well as offer some clarity as to my plans for this channel. If that’s not something you’re interested in, just scrub forward to the next section.
So firstly, let me express my gratitude to everyone who took the time out to watch my first video on The Melancholy of Resistance. The response I got to it was incredibly supportive and gracious and it really meant the world to me that so many of you took the time out to watch, comment, message me and share it. If you haven’t seen it yet, I’ll pop a link right here. Give it a look – it’s 45 minutes but I promise at least five of them are good.
Taking into account the feedback I got in response to the Melancholy video, I’ve got a few ideas as to how I plan to refine the content on this channel for a more accommodating experience. For starters, I’ve pulled the audio from that episode and uploaded it to Anchor FM, where you’ll be able to find it along with the audio for all future WASTE Mailing List episodes (including this one) on your favourite PodCatcher. If you’re the type of person who’d rather listen on the go rather than watch, I’ve got you, there’s a link to it in the description box below. You’ll just have to forgive the lapel-mic quality buzzing through your AirPods. At least for the time being.
On the flip side, if you’re a reader rather than a watcher or listener, I’ll also be uploading all the text transcripts to SubStack, where you can read them along with all the references I cite throughout the videos. This should be self-evident as you’re reading it right now.
It’s very early days, so my plans for the project are still in the, shall we say… “gestational” stage. Here’s what I can say with a reasonable degree of confidence: BookTube is a very crowded community, and as a result, I want to fill a particular gap I’ve seen so far. There just aren’t enough people in this space doing deep dives, and that’s where I want to focus my energy. I’m talking thirty, sixty, ninety-minute, exhaustive analyses of novels with strong conceptual or literary merit. I may choose to break each book into several shorter segments but I’m still working on what the delivery of that will look like. You may also notice I use the word review when I refer to this episode, but I don’t really want to position these episodes as reviews as I think of them more as analyses, reactions, and personal interpretations. In saying that, I’m also acutely aware that the YouTube algorithm needs to be fed, so who am I to deny it?
I’m also going to do my best to focus on works that haven’t already been beaten to death by the social media hordes, so you can expect reasonably fringe titles to be the rule rather than the exception here.
In terms of posting frequency, it does take a little while for me to read a strong novel, formulate my thoughts, write, record, and edit this sort of content. So, I’m going to keep the bar for output fairly low at this stage and aim for about… one episode a month. As I get smoother with the whole process, I would like to put out content more regularly, but I don’t want it to become laborious to the point where I lose passion for the project. So, in the meantime, I’m just asking for you to be patient.
Finding Animal Money
Alright, let’s get into why we’re all here: Animal Money by Michael Cisco.
If I may be candid, I actually almost didn’t go through with recording this video, purely due to my lack of confidence that a single reading would be enough to extract a clear sense of meaning and analysis out of it. Although I don’t consider myself an authority on literature, I do want my content to offer some insight into the books I cover for prospective readers. I think, I know I’m going to need two or three more readings before I fully wrap my head around this one. But it says a lot that I already want to reread. Animal Money is, for lack of more eloquent phrasing, batshit insane. I haven’t felt this out of my depth since reading The Tunnel by William Gass. So, let’s start with a little background as I edge my way into trying to decipher this doorstopper.
As I’m sure my channel name and constant references to the author make abundantly clear, I’m something of a Pynchon fanatic. Pynchon readers in my personal life are few and far between, so I often find myself posting overwrought, paranoid word spirals on for the Pynchon Subreddit.
Last year, when I was feverishly coming down off the back of Gravity’s Rainbow, I went trawling through that subreddit for recommendations of other novels to scratch that same, genre-defying, high-density itch. Various members of the community had namedropped the usual authors who get compared to Pynchon: Wallace, McElroy, Barth, Gaddis, Gass, etc. Yet one name I kept seeing mentioned I had never heard of - let alone read - was Michael Cisco. With it, these people kept making the same recommendation; the same, simple evocative title: Animal Money.
A quick google search of the title returned this image:
My immediate, guttural response was “I have no idea what this is, but I must have it” (Oh, and don’t you worry, we’ll be getting back to that cover soon). While much of Cisco’s catalogue is not currently in print, Animal Money appears to still be in circulation. Sadly, the only way for me to get my hands on it in Australia was to feed the Amazon machine. Don’t worry, I’ll be saving my designated ten Hail Mary’s and self-flagellation for after I’m done recording.
Suffice it to say, after a week’s worth of shipping updates, this psychedelic doorstopper showed up on my welcome mat and I’ve spent the last fortnight almost exclusively immersed in it.
So, let’s start with the question I can imagine some of you are asking yourselves:
Who the Hell is Michael Cisco?
Born a Glendale California denizen in the 1970s, Michael Cisco is one of the formative tastemakers of weird fiction. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Sarah Lawrence University, his master’s from Buffalo State, and then his PhD from NYU (Did you know I’m also his publicist?). If you’re looking for him now, you’ll find him instructing at the English department at CUNY (which, out of pure auto-fictional convenience, happens to be the Uni that one of his narrators, Ronald Crest, teaches at in Animal Money).
He burst onto the alternative American literary scene with his debut novel, The Divinity Student, which came to the attention of Ann Vandermeer (yes, as in Ann and Jeff Vandermeer) when he cold-called her with a manuscript and a referral letter from Thomas Ligotti. Trusting Ligotti’s taste, she gave it a read and was immediately compelled to publish it. She would later go on to write the introduction for the novel (which is, uncoincidentally, where I’m drawing all this information from).
Following his well-positioned cold call, Cisco would go on to publish 12 novels, including one due later this year. On top of that, he’s penned some stunning translations of Julio Cortázar and Marcel Bealu, a few collections of nonfiction, and a metric shitload of short stories. One piece of work of his I’d like to champion which doesn’t get nearly enough attention is his blow-by-blow commentary of Kafka’s Zurau Aphorisms. Kafka’s novels tend to get the most attention, but I truly believe his heart was in his short fiction, his letters, his aphorisms. The Zurau Aphorisms is a fairly abstract text to parse, but Cisco’s commentary offers a wonderfully human interpretation of the work, filled with pathos and wit. I’ve linked to it above (for the five of you who are actually interested in it).
Lazy Fascist Press
Animal Money was published under the now-defunct, niche imprint, Lazy Fascist Press, a subsidiary of the still active Eraserhead Press. LFP operated between 2010 and 2017 as a patron of weird and bizarre fiction. The press was founded, managed, and edited by the then 22-year-old Cameron Pierce, who oversaw the publication of over 60 books in its seven-year tenure. In 2015, LFP published Cisco’s longest and arguably most twisted work - you guessed it - Animal Money. Another one of the big names to springboard out of LFP into the broader publishing world is Stephen Graham Jones, who’s written a number of Bookstagram darlings in the past five years.
This is a digression if there ever was one, but I can’t help but chuckle every time I read that name. “Lazy Fascist Press” – how good is that? Pierce founded the press in Portland at a time when a particularly insufferable brand of armchair slacktivists and nationalistic ideologues began to gain traction in the Pacific Northwest. He named his creative project as a sort of… tongue-in-cheek jab at these people, but the humour behind the name was ultimately soured when a violent, threatening arm of the fascist ideology began to emerge under the administration that ran between 2016 and 2020. He considered changing that name several times, but in 2017… it became something of a moot point.
Pierce chose to close the imprint for a number of reasons, primarily due to the economic and practical challenges of scaling, a disillusionment toward Amazon’s stranglehold over the entire publishing industry, and a desire to commit himself more fully to his own writing. It’s a shame to see them go, as they were giving a voice to some of the most daring, experimental, and bold contemporary authors working in the Western Hemisphere, but I understand the decision to give the press a clean break. As for Pierce himself, his social media presence has been silent since late 2016 so it’s hard to say really. Last I heard, he was running a craft beer brewery up in Portland.
I hope he’s doing well for himself.
Outline and Structure
Let’s start with the epigraph. I’ve always been fascinated by writers’ use of epigraphs as a means to both telegraph where they draw influence from, and act as a sort of… Rosetta Stone to unlock a deeper meaning from their story.
The epigraph reads “That bird is free – you owe me a bird”.
Keep that line in mind as we move through the video. I’ll circle back to it near the end.
The 800-page novel is broken into thirteen, delirious, contradictory titled parts:
Black Albinos
In for Questioning
Nonsmoking Smokers
The Shituation (my personal favourite)
In for Questioning
Broke Bankers
They Beg for Mercy While They’re Killing You
Fond Memories of Terror
Drunk with Sobriety
None of This is Real
Discount Riches
Prison Roads
Living Skeletons, Elderly Drones
Following these thirteen parts, there are also two unnumbered sections titled “Myrtle” and “Pages of No Narration”, both of which occur in the last ten pages. Within these thirteen numbered sections, the narrative is broken into what I’d be tempted to call “vignettes”, each separated by a dinkus (yes, the word for the dot that denotes a page break is called a “dinkus”. I know, I’m not happy about it either). It actually reminded me a lot of the seven sprockets that separate the chapters in Gravity’s Rainbow. And if there was any doubt, I assure you that won’t be the last Gravity’s Rainbow comparison I make here.
Animal Money is written from an ever-changing perspective, which constantly shifts between first-, second-, and third-person narration, adding to the nauseating sense of disorientation. One moment you’ll be fed through the viewpoint of an unnamed narrator only to change perspectives at the next page break without warning. It becomes something of a puzzle to keep track of who’s speaking at any given movement, which is generally up to you as the reader to deduce based on who’s referenced and in which tense.
Now if that sounds complex, strap in: we’re about to get into the plot.
Plot…?
Okay, I guess I can’t avoid this section forever. I’m going to do my very best to trying nut out what the hell exactly happened in this book, as the plot is absolutely byzantine.
The story opens at an economics conference in the fictional Latin American city of San Toribio. We start with the first-person perspective of Professor Ronald Crest, an Economics instructor at CUNY, who while on his way to the conference, is struck unconscious by a blunt force trauma to the head and begins his story from the comfort of a hospital bed. While incapacitated, he learns of four other economists from various prestigious international universities who, while staying at his hotel, are also stricken with sudden injuries and ailments of the head.
We have Professor Long, who lacerates her ear while rolling over broken glass in bed; Professor Aughbui, who suffers from a sudden and intense attack of vertigo; Professor Budshah, who dislocated his jaw during a run-in with an Avocado stone; and finally, a second Professor Long (yes, another Professor Long. Really Michael? As if the book wasn’t complex enough) who goes into anaphylactic shock after a bee sting to the cheek. The circumstances behind their highly coincidental and synchronised head injuries are never fully explained, but it does provide a convenient opportunity for the five of them to cross paths.
Having missed the economics conference due to their injuries and maladies, the five scholars decide to share their respective presentations among themselves. In their exchange of ideas with one another, a new concept takes hold:
“In the criss-cross of our conversation the idea of animal money appears. None of us can account for it, none of us can take credit for it. The idea silences us for awhile, as we try to grasp it, each within ourselves. It really is only a chance coupling of two words, but they seem to call to each other. It is immediately obvious to us that animal money does not refer to the age-old practice of rating wealth in head of cattle or otherwise using livestock as money; there is something new in our minds.” – p.16
Here, we see the genesis of the idea that drives, obfuscates, and ultimately disintegrates the narrative. This concept is given additional weight when they realise they all share recent experiences of witnessing animals engaging in acts of barter, trade, and currency: Squirrels exchanging colourful sequins for acorns, cardinals paying crows for protection, chickens acting out their dead companion’s last will and testament. Each one of the economists has their own story.
“Perhaps these observations of ours subtly goaded us toward the chimerical portentous phrase: ‘animal money,’ but what really seems important in the concept itself, if it is a concept at all, is that animal money would be animal, not just money used by animals. Alive, to put it briefly.” – p. 20
The five then spend a prolonged period of time nutting out the specifics of how this new economy based upon the exchange of a living currency will function. Their discussion becomes highly theoretical and abstract, to the point where only thirty pages in, I started to lose my sense of control over what was going on. And you might be thinking, “how bad could it be?”. Let me give you an example:
“Animal money metabolism would be completely stable. It would not be completely stable, it would involve boom and bust, inflation, recession, like famines and epidemics in a population; the money might inbreed, and the various specie would vary in relation to each other, so that in the proximity of one specie another would physically diminish, either shrinking or losing tangible substance, becoming phantomlike.” – p. 27.
Picture that... for nearly eight hundred pages. Suffice it to say, these five economists become enamoured with the idea and begin work on establishing this new form of currency and releasing it into the global economic ecosystem. As is the case with any new radical idea, their creation – Animal Money – is met with intense opposition by the nebulous and shadowy power organisations overseeing life in San Toribio. These economists are members of a collective known as the IEI – The International Economics Institute – which effectively governs the activities, research, and dissemination of information across their academic community worldwide. A hazy conspiracy starts to take shape, and the five begin to suspect that they are being followed, undermined, and ultimately threatened for trying to instigate a change to the financial status quo. Their paranoia reaches a point of confirmation when one of them ends up dead. As a war begins to break out between these revolutionaries and their persecutors, the fabric of the natural world begins to fray, and reality becomes more and more fractured, surreal, fantastic. Any semblance of a conventional narrative is ultimately buried under dozens of psychedelic set pieces that range from secret zoos hidden under universities, to economic monasteries in the South American mountains, to interplanetary spacecraft.
Now I’m not going to give you a blow-by-blow of the plot, partly out of interest in preserving my own sanity, but also because that would make this episode upwards of four hours long. Suffice it to say, Animal Money doesn’t accommodate a passive reading experience. Between its polyphonic narrators, non-chronological timelines (yes, timelines plural), and increasingly entropic structure, I guarantee you will get lost if you’re not giving it your complete attention. Even if you are – I certainly tried – you’ll probably lose your grasp on it at some point or another anyway. But that’s okay, it’s not impossible to wrap your head around it. There’re really only a few things you need to understand the plot: a bit of patience, a highlighter, maybe some sticky tabs… and a dump truck of LSD.
(In)visible Hands
While the plot is a riot on its own merits, I think the real substance of the novel is found in its themes, as well as its subversions of conventional genre and structure.
I’m sure the concept of the Invisible Hand shouldn’t be too distant for most of you. As a brief recap, it’s attributed to 18th-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, who proposed this idea of the unseen mechanisms driving the movement of the free market economy; a complex interplay of individual economic pressures, all guided by – you guessed it – an invisible hand.
Cisco does something novel with this well-studied concept, by literalizing what is generally agreed to be a metaphorical term. When people communicate the idea of the invisible hand, they tend to do so in an abstract sense. There’re no physical hands feeding money through ATMs and into circulation… or are there? Here, Cisco employs repeated use of hand imagery which actually has measurable effects on the plot.
The second “In for Questioning” sequence opens with an ambient monologue from a character who I’ll get into shortly:
“Right here, you have my closed hand. Next trick – there. The pointer. Keep this hand like this, like wood, I bring it up and turn and swing my hand around and down to the end of my uplifted arm, where I point, a building appears like honeycomb in the night with a flick of the lights. Mmmmmmmturn now and point in the other direction and flick on another building.” – p. 171
Sequences like this recur throughout, almost as a sort of leitmotif. Another prominent one pops up in Part 11:
“Now we are sharp-edged shadows, towering over San Toribio. We squat or recline beside the city, combing its golden traffic streams, reaching out our void arms to make adjustments to the city like a luminous sand painting mixing in dully glowing ash and tiny vibrant embers. We aren’t controlling the city, we’re adjusting it.” – p. 635
As the novel progresses, we see a collapse of the metaphorical into the literal, as abstract economic concepts – like the invisible hand – become functional influences on the plot, environment, and characters. Economic forces may govern global exchange behaviour… but what if they started to impinge on the natural world, like weather or climate change. In my reading, Cisco is provoking a discussion on the limits of our collective agreements. Have we come to believe so strongly in an idea – say, the idea of a free market economy – that it ceased to be a conceptual construct and evolves into a physically effecting force? This is just scratching the surface of the largest force that governs San Toribio, and indeed the largest world within the book.
Economic Mysticism
The Invisible Hand is one of the earliest instances of what would later be termed “economic mysticism”, an idea which is taken to the nth degree in Animal Money. Think of it as a sort of belief structure, wherein we hope, pray, or at worst believe, that all the cheques and balances of the free market economy will square, and shared prosperity will come to us so long as we remain “fiscally responsible citizens” (in loud scare quotes). We place an unwavering faith – and yes, I use “faith” in the religious sense of the word – in a financial system that is flimsy, tenuous, and deeply corrupt; a system that allows economic catastrophe to occur due to widespread industry negligence.
I refer here, to the Global Financial Crisis in late 2007.
Cisco was writing this novel in the years directly following the GFC, during a time when the country was still reeling from its after-effects. I asked Michael on Twitter if the GFC played into his thinking when writing Animal Money, and he was kind enough to respond by saying:
“Most definitely. The crisis demonstrated that economics was a branch of fantasy.”
Fantasy, mysticism, financial voodoo – Cisco places these ideas centre-stage, by creating a literal characterisation of what is generally regarded as an abstract concept. You may recall those five economists with whom the story starts. They exist in a sort of alternate reality where the business of economic study isn’t the image you probably have in your head: crisply starched shirts, panelled cubicles, a daily 9-5 sitting at the desk. No, these people are more cult-like in their day to day lives. They speak to one another in coded phrases, “The Surfeit is One” being a commonly repeated line. They all dress in these featureless, colourless robes, adorned with facial markings in the shapes of mathematic symbols, and spend their mornings and evenings performing rituals like the separating of beads and marking answers in some sort of a test book.
Cisco never explicitly states the reason for these strange behaviours, nor do I think he needs to. He takes his readers’ intelligence seriously and provides us with the latitude to make our own interpretations. Let me offer one of my own: These character flourishes function simply as added texture to the idea that our convictions in the sturdiness of our economy are religious… almost cult-like; an unshakeable faith in these mystical 1s and 0s flying down fibre optic cabling. An on-the-nose criticism, but a biting criticism nonetheless. He doesn’t need to pen a 5000-word Harpers essay to get his point across, he just needs to dress the boring up in the absurd, in order to show us how absurd it was to begin with.
“You don't find reality by divesting yourself of fantasies, and that's not because that's a fantasy too […] it's because the fantasies are street level. A one-way street. You can't have just fantasy. It's not the ghoulish mirror,' it all begins under the street and goes all the way up to heaven like Roman title deeds. There’s a reason that money/power world is so grey and boring and replete with repellences, because it's advantageous to fantasisers of a certain class to promulgate that idea that there is a Walter Mitty gulf between that money world and the fantasy world. That money isn't fantasy. Fantasy is over there, not here. Never here. Take that barrier out, and you see the magic in the money.” – p. 536
This reminds me so closely of what Michael Lewis exposed in The Big Short. A system whose representatives dress their work up in a veneer of complexity and impenetrability so that you remain convinced that “you couldn’t possibly do that they do”. Which, if I may editorialise for a moment, is fucking ridiculous, as any old shmuck can understand how a collateralised debt obligation works so long as the person explaining it to you is decent enough to wipe away the codified language. It’s all buzzwords and inside jokes with these people; a cult of cuff-links and wingtip shoes. The economy is a fucking fantasy we all agreed to buy into, and whenever someone proposes a radical new model to supersede our capitalistic structure – say, for example, a new living form of currency – the powers that be will silence, oppress, and obfuscate it.
“The code of the economist is poetics, […] there's a magic world but you can't ever have it unless you buy an […] expensive approximation of it for your estate from participating retailers and if you can't manage to wangle that you're just stuck with the bad world where all the failures live, […].Their fantasy world song, they camouflage it treacherously, as the dullest, most boring fantasy of doldrum […] TV news, so ... people won't recognize it for what it is--a song -a lousy song -and start singing for themselves, sing a world for them. Because any asshole can sing.” – p. 537
Maybe our reality is starting to look like fantasy after all. Or rather, revealing the fantasy it was built upon all along. As far as I’m concerned, hysterical realism – the genre Animal Money treads in – is the perfect medium to convey this message. And look, even if you’re not interested in a deeper reading of it, it’s just a lot of fun to ride between one fantastical set piece to the next.
/r/Antiwork: A Novel Reading of Animal Money
Anyone whose had their ear to the ground over the past five years or so should be well aware of our culture’s changing attitudes toward work and career. I think this headspace provides an interesting framework to approach the book.
There’s a character who’s introduced fairly early on – an individual who’s never given a name and only goes by the moniker SuperAesop – who becomes progressively more central to the story as it carries forward. From where I’m sitting, SuperAesop is not only the most interesting in the book but also its clearest protagonist.
Our initial encounter with him is in a job interview at a zoo, in the first section titled “In for Questioning”. As a quick aside, how good is that title? The comparison between a job interview and an interrogation is just so spot on, and it only gets better from there. Cisco delivers this five-page sequence of rapid-fire, ridiculously pedantic corporate questions. Let me give you a feel for it:
“1.) Why did you leave your last job?
2.) Can you do this job?
3.) Why do you feel you’re qualified for this job?
4.) Will you be able to in a safe manner carry out all the job assignments associated with this position?
5.) Are you able to perform this job’s duties with reasonable accommodations of them (the duties)?
6.) Can you lift fifty pounds and carry it fifty yards?
7.) Can you lift seventy-five pounds and carry it fifty yards?
8. Can you lift fifty pounds and carry it seventy-five yards?” – p.105
And on and on for pages on end. They’re dozens of these pedantic, redundant and micromanagey questions. SuperAesop’s answers are just so deliciously satisfying.
“My chief qualification is a boundless confidence in my need for money, which is a need anyone can depend on me to have reliably and at all times.” – p. 110
“My ideal job is wandering at my own pace and with no set purpose through an evacuated landscape.” – p. 111
“My greatest failure is that I’m filling out your questionnaire.” – p. 114
“The qualities I look for in a boss are difficulty in keeping track of things, forgetfulness, indecision, leniency, generosity, having a benign awareness deficiency, gullibility, nonpunctuality.” – p. 114
“I feel most satisfied when I head home at the end of the day.” – p. 115
“You should hire me because it would mean you could stop looking for someone to hire.” – p. 115
I mean seriously, who hasn’t wanted to say these things at an interview before? If you haven’t felt this way at least once in your life, I’d encourage you to take a look at your reflection in that silver spoon in your mouth.
All jokes aside, this interrogation sequence may seem like pure wish fulfilment, but I think it actually reflects the cultural temperature of today, with regards to how our generation views work and remuneration. There’s a growing movement online known as “Antiwork”, based primarily on Reddit, which acts as a sort of digital town square for people across the world to air their grievances with their job, their pay, their benefits (or lack thereof) and so on. If you spend a few minutes scrolling through [screen recording?], you’ll find a whole host of infuriating text message exchanges between workers and their ignorant bosses, as well as horror stories of the way people are treated as early as their first interview.
When reading this first “In for Questioning” section and as I watched this hazy character SuperAesop develop, I was drawn again and again back to the discussions I’ve seen on the Antiwork forum. As a movement, I think it’s poorly named. They’re less concerned about abolishing work entirely so much as they are with bringing the unsustainable conditions of employment to the public eye. This concern about unsustainability in the status quo is reflected all throughout the novel. Michael agreed with this reading, saying “the movement [Antiwork] is pretty much just good old proletarian class consciousness in a new iteration”.
The Preterite vs the Elect, a culture war that has never been resolved, just changed shape over time. Our current anxieties about the diseased state of Capitalism is baked into the surreal absurdity of Animal Money. It’s that fantastic element that makes it something you actually want to read. If Cisco had chosen to approach criticism of our economy through a straightforward social revolt story, it would’ve looked like so many of the novels that proceeded it. But that’s not his MO. He’s said the theme and atmosphere he’s interested in using are:
“Decay, delirium, some kind of altered monasticism […]. I’m looking for ways to invert what seem to me to be common sense notions about things, so I would be looking for a way to make decay or delirium affirmative.”
And damn right he made it affirmative. The sheer depth of Animal Money’s surrealism and descent into narrative chaos makes it unlike anything else I’ve read. That being said, that’s not gonna stop me from trying to draw comparisons.
Genre & Influence
Cisco is something of a convenient pivot from my last episode, as he and Krasznahorkai share a lot of the same influences. In an interview with Adam Mills from the Weird Fiction Review, Cisco cites Kafka and Beckett as formative influences as well as unreservedly claiming “Burroughs taught me how to write”. If I were to editorialise on that a bit, I’d say he’s talking about The Soft Machine Burroughs more than Naked Lunch Burroughs. But I digress. He’s described his creativity philosophy as “an intent to create living monsters that will go out into the world and wreak havoc on readers.”. Well, Michael, you can consider your mission accomplished because this book has lost me more than a few nights’ worth of sleep.
Animal Money, along with pretty much the entirety of his work, has been consigned to the category of “weird fiction”. I’m guilty of doing so myself in the front half of this episode. In reflecting on that, I think it’s wrong of me to feed into what I ultimately believe to be a false dichotomy: the separation between “literary fiction” and “genre fiction”. I think the further we progress as a culture into a nuanced understanding of art, philosophy, sociology, and identity, the more comfortable we become with discarding binaries in favour of spectrums. Literature is no exception to this. When grappling with a medium as complex and versatile as fiction, it seems to be a pointless exercise to try and constantly fit novels into neat little boxes (or, to borrow James Woods words, “approved units and packets”).
In a 2015 interview with Word Horde, Cisco was asked “what do you think the role of genre is in regard to fiction?”. I found his answer to be really quite compelling.
“Genre is a memory image that gathers together a local micro-canon around a given piece of writing. Reading just about anything, you will see how it repeats settings, phrasings, movement through plot points, and so on, from other writings. This isn’t necessarily copying, though. Where there’s just copying, there really isn’t any new writing there, just another older story poorly recollected. The writing is new not just in what influences it combines, but in that it connects with ideas and impulses from earlier works and extends them. So genre is the landscape a piece of writing uses, but it’s also an orientation.”
I think this answer is a good entry point if you’re going to make comparisons between Cisco to other authors. If I were to be foolish enough to draw such connections, here are two I think I’d have the best chance at doing so: Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, and 2666 by Roberto Bolaño.
I’ve mentioned Gravity’s Rainbow a few times now, unsurprisingly given that it was in searching for other books like it that I found this one. It’s possible this comparison is coloured by the avenue in which I came to the book, but I still think there’s a case to be made for it.
Even the most disoriented reader will come out of Gravity’s Rainbow with a few clear takeaways. It’s exceedingly complex, it’s narrated by a wide variety of different characters, its timeline is frustratingly non-chronological, it’s structurally circular, and most importantly, the story completely collapses into itself as the novel progresses. Every single one of these features can be applied to Animal Money, which is part of why I responded to it so strongly. Although I find narrative entropy to be deeply frustrating when it’s used for its own sake, here I think it serves a larger thematic function, just as it did in Gravity’s Rainbow. I don’t see Cisco as having used this technique purely out of admiration or some kind of nod to Pynchon, but for the exact reasons he said before:
“The writing is new not just in what influences it combines, but in that it connects with ideas and impulses from earlier works and extends them. So genre is the landscape a piece of writing uses, but it’s also an orientation.”
A fractured, dissolving plot structure is used, in part, to reflect the devastation the post-war period raked upon the European psyche as a whole. I see Cisco as taking that concept and drawing it forward by a generation in reflecting what the GFC did to the American mind. It’s not pastiche, it’s the next stage in an idea’s evolution.
So, what about Bolaño, our favourite infrarealist? I mean, that one’s easy to pick up on from the jump. Latin American setting, five academics coming together over a shared interest? Sounds an awful lot like the opening to “2666”. I prodded Michael about this, and he did say Bolaño was one of many Latin American influences, as well as his desire to write a door-stopper.
The similarities go deeper than just the set-up, mind you. 2666 is really the omnibus of five separate novels, all of which are connected through various characters and plot threads, each of which could easily stand on its own as an isolated story. While Animal Money isn’t separated into neat episodes – The Part about the Crimes, The Part about Fate, etc – but it does contain several interwoven stories which could be unspooled and written into, like 2666, their own standalone novels.
As previously mentioned, the book opens with five economists creating animal money and releasing it into the global markets… but that’s really just the set-up. There’s an entirely different story running through it about a physicist named Asseyeh Malachos who’s discovered a form of propulsion that allows for the development of interstellar travel, and her journey to other planets as a result. There’s also the arc of SuperAesop as he tries to smuggle a traumatised journalist over the border, a thread about a writer who plays host to a parasitic louse that whispers in the ears of the politicians he associates with; the list goes on. Stories nested within stories nested within stories. This feeds into the complexity that challenged me both in terms of simple orientation as well as the limits of my frustration. The story you start with in 2666 is not the story you end with, and the same goes for Animal Money.
In saying that, this book isn’t just a mind-meld between the two books I mention here, they just happened to be the two I had in front of mind while reading it. You can see the confluence of so many different voices here: Burroughs, Kafka, Borges, Ligotti, Vandermeer. What makes this such a fresh read is that it doesn’t clearly resemble anything else; it’s a melting pot of various genres and narrative concerns. Given the many ideas he’s playing with, I find this cross-pollination of different voices and themes to be incredibly effective.
Cover Art
I had to dig into the bowels of some WeirdLit message boards for this one. At BizarroCon in 2015, Cisco shared the story of how the absolutely batshit insane cover for Animal Money came about. He was struggling to communicate to Cameron Pierce, who was meant to make the cover art for the novel, what he had in mind. Through the weird and wonderful rabbit holes of the internet, Cisco had come across the Canadian artist Mat Brown, and found his piece titled “Our Anthropic History” which conveyed the atmosphere he was going for, perfectly. “Perversity, surrealism, weird beauty and the sense of a world like ours but not quite”. He sent that image to Cameron with the note, "Something like this”. Rather than try to produce an original image in pastiche of Brown’s work, Pierce managed to obtain the rights to “Our Anthropic History” itself, which became the stunning wraparound cover that I get the pleasure of looking at every day.
This, along with the entirety of Brown’s portfolio, is an incredible work of art. While physical dinosaurs and dissociated central nervous systems aren’t literal presences in the novel, this cover so perfectly captures the disorienting, overstimulating, psychedelic spirit that suffuses every page. I love the bold decision to leave blurbs, plot summaries, and accolades off the cover, and just let the imagery speak for itself. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the cover was instrumental in drawing me to the novel. For my money (pun intended), it’s one of the best I’ve come across. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t give Mat himself a quick thanks for allowing me to use his work in this episode, as we as correcting me on a few factual errors.
The Human Cost
For all its conceptual high-mindedness and concerns with abstract concepts, I see Animal Money as an intrinsically human story. If there was one character who I was truly wired into while reading this fractured, multilayered story, it was undoubtedly SuperAesop. Although the leading third of the book is almost exclusively centred around the five economists who precipitate the creation of animal money, the closing third is focalised through the eyes of SuperAesop as he feels its effects. They instigate the inciting action of the book, but after that point, they do little more than observe and study the outcome. These five professors fade into obscurity and the consequences of their actions begin to take shape.
Aesop is something of a labour revolutionary, constantly fighting for better working conditions and entry-level workers. But the capitalistic status quote is a very slow-moving machine. This is the outcome of some of his efforts, as quoted on page 483:
“a) an attempt to form a pizza delivery person’s union – FAILED.
b) an attempt to form a motor pool for pizza delivery persons – FAILED.
c) two attempts to require pizzerias to cover fuel expenses for pizza delivery persons – FAILED.
d) an attempt to prevent dismissal of a pizza delivery person who was murderously assaulted and hospitalized by a mentally disturbed customer – FAILED.” – p. 483
…and so on. An object at rest stays at rest; capitalistic power structures make sure of that. He fails because he’s operating on their terms, under their conditions. But he also realises the necessity of his position as a ground-level worker:
“Under that smooth sneering finish, they’re afraid of us. Not of me or you, but of a nebulous people they have spent their life escaping from, pretending not to belong to. They can’t stand on the balcony gazing out at a silent, whipped nation with TV lights in all the windows, sigh with satisfaction and say – “they bought it.” From out of the dark comes a sound of sirens, breaking glass, a plume of smoke, a lot of angry voices shouting. There’s trouble. There’s lying to be done, and that takes time and money. Those flavourless, tranquilising TV haircuts don’t cut themselves. So it was worth it, after all, like before – not worth everything, no worth nothing. We set the value, not them.” – p. 502
Again, this was written in 2015 but this is what I mean when I say it reflects a contemporary mindset. The members of the Antiwork movement are waking up to the realisation that ground-level workers actually wield a significant amount of power if they choose to coordinate it. With us, deliveries don’t get made, factories don’t run, roads don’t get repaired. So why is it, the (allegedly) most “essential” among us, are paid the least and treated the worst? If I may wax lyrical for a moment, as someone who worked as a quote-unquote “essential” worker through the entirety of this pandemic, I could not give less of a shit about your clapping or your thanks. Pay me, insure me, give me PPE - these are the only things I’m interested in.
Aesop is the viewpoint through which these frustrations and anxieties are focalised: a pizza delivery driver who, in ways I won’t spoil, ends up having a massive impact on how the story concludes.
There’s another factor to consider here. I mentioned at the top that the story opens in the city of San Toribio. This is an interesting – and, in my mind, intentional – choice for a name. Toribio Romo Gonzalez, also known as “Saint Toribio”, was a canonized Mexican priest who was martyred in the Cristero War of the late 1920s for his clerical beliefs. He is also the patron saint of immigrants, which is principally why Michael chose him as the city’s namesake.
It’s no accident that this story is set in a city populated largely by migrants and refugees… and it’s definitely no accident that Aesop identifies as a black man. When a major societal upheaval takes place – whether it be fantastic like the invention of a living currency, or grounded like an international housing crisis – who bears the brunt of it? Immigrants, people of colour, and poor people. We saw it during the recession, we saw it during the GFC, and we’re seeing it now during the Pandemic. The cyclical nature of poverty and social disenfranchisement. This is why I suspect Cisco chose to structure Animal Money in a circular fashion.*
*Quick note, I’m going to get into spoilers here, so if you want to fly in blind, just jump ahead to the next section.
SuperAesop’s story opens with the first In for Questioning sequence where he is asked “why did you leave your last job?” In the closing pages, Aesop is shot and killed in the crossfire of an attempted political assassination. As he’s passing away, this is the passage that unfolds:
“You cannot take refuge in God. We can and we will drag you back from God’s protecting embrace and put you to the question. Death will not save you from interrogations anymore.” Screams of the dead, faint in the night. They have your dead mother, your dead friend, in there. You’ll talk. Now then… Why did you leave your last job?” – p. 770
The cycles of economic impoverishment and corporate exploitation continue over and over again. I mean seriously, just two months ago a group of Amazon workers were killed in a warehouse before their supervisors refused to let them head home for safety during a fucking tornado. Don’t sit there and tell me those essential workers aren’t just a number and a dollar sign to you. This? This is the human cost of constant economic growth.
Is it worth it?
You Owe Me a Bird
Near the beginning of this episode, I mentioned the epigraph, which reads “That bird is free – you owe me a bird”. I sat on this for ages and tried to wrap my head around why of all things it was used. I even tried probing Michael about it, but he gave me nothing. So I’m truly flying blind here.
The epigraph is a line attributed to the Zen Buddhist Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, who was instrumental in popularising Zen Buddhism in the United States in the 1960s. Interestingly, of the four prominent Buddhist teachers who brought the practice to the US, Suzuki Roshi was the only one not to be embroiled in a public sex scandal. Does that have any relevance to this episode? Probably not, but I thought it was an interesting little tidbit.
After some digging, I came to learn that this is actually the “punchline” (for lack of a better word) to a longer proverb, which reads as follows:
“A student confronted his master in his study and asked him, "How can you teach people to speak spiritual freedom when you keep your pet bird in a cage?" The master opened the cage door and the bird flew out the window, never to be seen again. The master turned to the student and said, "That bird is now free. You owe me a bird."
This is what’s known in Zen Buddhism as a kōan: a story, dialogue, or question used to provoke doubt in the one who hears it, in order to assess that individual’s progress on their journey toward Enlightenment. A koan doesn’t have a clear answer, only a wide expanse of possible interpretations… and I think this gets to the heart of what Cisco aimed to do in Animal Money: create a space for a conversation about what the intrinsic value of currency truly is and how our relationship to it is changing, for better and for worse.
There’s a scene in the closing moments in the novel, where SuperAesop is no longer interacting with other characters but speaking outwardly at the reader in a direct dialogue:
“What is money? Social human power made numb and separate. Amputated under anaesthesia. You’ll feel all that pain later, though. Without knowing what it is. End money. Why let others decide how your social power, your time, your work will be unitized and stored up? Why not make your own money? Why not make your own society? What choice do you really have? A bank is a symbol of fear. End money. End it by making it. It's all counterfeit, that stuff you use. End money. It didn't come from you. It is you taken away from you by somebody else. Fed back to you in dribs and drabs and drabber every day. Money is not a means of exchange. Money is a means of preventing exchange. Look at the countries where there is the greatest volume of money circulating: those societies are frozen. There is relentless change but there is no difference. Everyone is bound by the enchantment of the money spell, cast by the most pedestrian magicians the world has ever seen.” – p. 765
What is freedom, and what are its limits? What confines it, what confines us? By defining freedom, we restrict it to the borders of its own definition; we lock it in a cage. Money is a defining, limiting force in our lives, one we may feel both can lead to, and yet paradoxically restrict our freedom.
Much like money, words are treacherous. If you remove the boundaries to a word – the constraints that give it a definition – you lose the meaning of the word. The bird is free, but it’s gone. Bars of a cage, definitions of words, the value of currency…constructs, every one of them. Money is, at its most foundational level, a collective agreement that only functions so long as everyone buys into it (pun intended). This thing that traps so many of us in debt, poverty, and social repression – we’re only trapped as long as we allow ourselves to be. Let me say it again: Money, work, capitalism – they’re all constructs, not forces of nature.
I’m not suggesting we up-end the entire economic structure upon which our countries are built. I’m simply saying that we need the space to host a discussion – much like Cisco is doing here – that what we’ve invested ourselves so heavily in, is not sustainable. At some point, whether it be five years, or fifty, or five hundred from now, we will have to re-examine our economic systems and determine a new way to operate. I don’t know if that will look like. Maybe the abolishment of currency altogether, maybe the creation of a new, living form of currency? But until then, I don’t think we can be entirely free.
The silver lining in the meantime is that there are bold, provocative writers like Michael Cisco who take the time to really probe these ideas to fascinating, and above all, entertaining effect. So if you want a book that is toying with some big questions but still gives you a riotous narrative to examine them in, then look no further than Animal Money.
End Notes
Alright, we made it. As always, if you made it this far, I am incredibly grateful to you for sticking around. Now seriously, go for a walk or something. This has been much longer than it has any business being.
All the secondary resources – which were frustratingly few I might add – can be found in both the description box below as well as the text version of today’s episode on SubStack. If you want to buy Animal Money for yourself, there’s pretty much only one place you can get it online which is Amazon. So, if you are planning on picking it up, feel free to use the link below, as you’ll be supporting the show in the process.
I’ve got a few review copies I need to get through which I’ll just be posting about on Instagram and whatnot but I’m aiming to get my third video out in the next few weeks. I’ve already picked the book for it (wink wink). In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to reach out, I’d love to hear from you.
See you next month, Paranoids.
- W.A.S.T.E. Only